Shakespeare Seen: Image, Performance and Society 1107193249, 9781107193246

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Frontispiece
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of colour plates
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Frames and circumstances
Part One Structures and concepts in Shakespeare imaging
Chapter 2 Mechanism and meaning in illustrated editions
Chapter 3 Performance reading in practice
Chapter 4 Shakespeare painting and aesthetic identity
Part Two Image, stage and beyond; instances and movement
Chapter 5 The visual identities of The Comedy of Errors
Chapter 6 Text, image and temper in King Lear
Chapter 7 Rhythms of action and feeling: the Roman plays
Plates
Chapter 8 Rank and race in Othello
Chapter 9 The Merchant of Venice and English visual culture
Chapter 10 Shakespeare painting 1800–1848
Chapter 11 Conclusions and departures
Notes
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare Seen This wide-ranging study traces the forces that drove the production and interpretation of visual images of Shakespeare’s plays. Covering a rich chronological terrain, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the midpoint of the nineteenth, Stuart Sillars offers a multidisciplinary, nuanced approach to reading Shakespeare in relation to image, history, text, book history, print culture and performance. The volume begins by relating the production imagery of Shakespeare’s plays to other visual forms and their social frames, before discussing the design and operation of illustrated editions and the ‘performance readings’ they offer, and analysing the practical and theoretical foundations of easel paintings. Close readings of The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, the Roman plays, The Merchant of Venice and Othello provide detailed insight into how the plays have been represented visually, and are accompanied by numerous illustrations and a beautiful colour plate section. Stuart Sillars is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the author of several books and many articles on the relations between word and image, including four previous volumes on Shakespeare and visual art published by Cambridge University Press. He now lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and Bergen, Norway.

Frontispiece: Unidentified artist: untitled illustration showing Coriolanus with Volumnia and Valeria, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. The depiction of the scene is the first image fully to reflect the scene’s importance, as most likely performed in Shakespeare’s time and in production from the mid-eighteenth century. See pages 161–2.

SHAKESPEARE SEEN IMAGE, PERFORMANCE AND SOCIETY

STUART SILLARS University of Bergen, Emeritus

University Printing House, Cambridge CB 2 8BS , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107193246 DOI : 10.1017/9781108147705 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN

978-1-107-19324-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my friends pictured without

CONTENTS

List of colour plates List of illustrations Acknowledgments 1

Frames and circumstances

page ix xii xviii 1

Part One: Structures and concepts in Shakespeare imaging

19

2

Mechanism and meaning in illustrated editions

21

3

Performance reading in practice

48

4

Shakespeare painting and aesthetic identity

67

Part Two: Image, stage and beyond; instances and movement

87

5

The visual identities of The Comedy of Errors

89

6

Text, image and temper in King Lear

117

7

Rhythms of action and feeling: the Roman plays

137

8

Rank and race in Othello

171

9

The Merchant of Venice and English visual culture

197

vii

contents

10 Shakespeare painting 1800–1848

217

11 Conclusions and departures

234

Notes Select bibliography Index

239 258 264

The plate section can be found between pp 148 and 149

viii

COLOUR PLATES

Unless otherwise stated, images are from the author’s collection. Images from the Folger Shakespeare Library are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). 1 John Gillray: Wierd-Sisters; Minister’s of Darkness; ‘Minions of the Moon’, published 25 December 1791. Yale Center for British Art. 2 John Gillray: Very Slippy Weather. Hand-coloured etching and engraving, published 10 February 1808. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 3 Johann Zoffany: David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth, c. 1768. Reproduced by courtesy of the Garrick Club, London. 4 Unidentified artist: Macbeth at Drury Lane, 1760s. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 5 W. R. Pyne, hand-coloured aquatint after John Wright: A Performance at a Country Barn Theatre, 1788. Author’s collection. 6 Benjamin Wilson: David Garrick and George Anne Bellamy in Romeo and Juliet, Act V, Scene iii, 1757. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 7 Philip James de Loutherbourg: first set model for Omai, by John O’Keefe, Covent Garden, 1785. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 8 Philip James de Loutherbourg: second set model for Omai, by John O’Keefe, Covent Garden, 1785. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 9 Pieter van Bleeck: Mrs Cibber as Cordelia, 1755. Yale Center for British Art. 10 Benjamin West, engraved by William Sharpe: King Lear Act III Scene IV, published 25 March 1793. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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list of colour plates

11 Henry Fuseli: Edgar, Feigning Madness, Approaches King Lear Supported by Kent and the Fool on the Heath, 1772. Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust. 12 William Etty: The Arrival of Cleopatra, 1821. National Museums Liverpool. 13 Unidentified artist: Mr Quin in the Character of Coriolanus, after 1749. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 14 Richard Earlom, after Francis Bourgeois: A Scene in Coriolanus – with a Portrait of the late J. P. Kemble as Coriolanus, 1790. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 15 Thomas Lawrence: John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus, 1798. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 16 George Cruikshank: Coriolanus, published 29 February 1820. Folger Shakespeare Library ART FileS582c2 no 56 (size XS). 17 John Lewis Marks: ‘Coriolanus’, Duncombe’s Miniature Caricature Magazine, date unknown. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 18 Colour mezzotint by John Raphael Smith, after George Morland: The Slave Trade, 1791. Yale Center for British Art. 19 W. Sheldricks, hand-coloured engraving after W. Lambert: Edmund Kean as Othello (early nineteenth century). Gabrielle Enthoven Collection. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 20 John Lewis Marks: Othello (early nineteenth century). Harry R. Beard Collection, given by Isobel Beard. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 21 George Hollis, after J. M. W. Turner: St. Mark’s Place, Venice: Juliet and her Nurse, 1842. © Tate, London, 2018. 22 J. M. W. Turner: The Grand Canal, Venice, exhibited 1837. Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 23 Henry Woods: ‘Portia’, The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 1888. Folger Shakespeare Library, ART Flat a 24. 24 C. R. Leslie: The Principal Characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1838. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 25 Thomas Stothard: Shakespearean Characters, 1817. © Tate, London, 2018. 26 George Dawe: Imogen Found in the Cave of Belarius, 1809. © Tate, London, 2018. 27 C. R. Leslie: Sketch for Twelfth Night Act 1 Scene 3, 1841. © Tate, London, 2018. 28 C. R. Leslie: Queen Katharine and Patience, 1842. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 29 George Clint: Falstaff’s Assignation with Mistress Ford, 1830–31. © Tate, London, 2018.

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list of colour plates

30 Henry Peronnet Briggs: Romeo and Juliet – Act II Scene V, 1837. © Tate, London, 2018. 31 Francis Danby: Scene from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice Belmont – in the Garden of Portia’s House, Lorenzo and Jessica, 1827–8. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 32 John Opie: Portrait of A Lady in the Character of Cressida, 1800. © Tate, London, 2018.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Unidentified artist: untitled illustration showing Coriolanus with Volumnia and Valeria, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. 1 François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to The Winter’s Tale, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 2. page 26 2 Hubert Gravelot, engraved by Gerard Vandergucht: frontispiece to All’s Well that Ends Well, Theobald, 1740. Folger Shakespeare Library, PR2752 1740 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 3. 28 3 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Richard III, Rowe, 1714. Folger Shakespeare Library, PR2752 1714a copy 3 Sh Col, v. 5. 31 4 Edward Burney, engraved by J. Thornthwaite; and Philip James de Loutherbourg, engraved by J. Roberts: dual frontispiece to Henry V, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 12. 33 5 Edward Burney, engraved by Goldar: page opening with death of Antony, Bellamy and Robarts, 1788–91. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1791a copy 1 Sh Col, v. 5. 35 6 Edward Burney, engraved by Springsguth: page opening with death of Cleopatra, Bellamy and Robarts, 1788–91. 36 7 Edward Burney, engraved by Springsguth: page opening with death of Cleopatra, Bellamy and Robarts, 1788–91, second version. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1791a copy 1 Sh Col, v. 5. 37 8 Adrian Ludwig Richter, engraved by Hankins: ‘Shakespeare Holding up the Mirror to Dignified Guilt’, Bellamy and Robarts, 1788–91. 38 xii

list of illustrations

9 W. Archer, engraved by J. Jackson: ‘Notice on the Authority of Pericles’, Knight, 1838–43. 10 W. Archer, engraved by J. Jackson: ‘Gower’s Monument’, Bell’s London, 1841–4. 11 J. Jackson: title-page illustration to Pericles, Knight, 1838–43. 12 Unidentified artist: illustration to ‘Persons Represented’, Pericles, Knight, 1838–43. 13 John Gilbert: untitled illustration showing the garden scene from Richard II, Staunton’s Library Shakespeare, 1865. 14 Title page to Volume 1, Bell’s Shakespeare, 1774. 15 Edward Edwards, engraved by W. Byrne: frontispiece to Macbeth, Bell, 1774. 16 Gordon Browne: headpiece to Romeo and Juliet Act 1. Henry Irving Shakespeare, 1888–92. 17 Gordon Browne: illustration to Act 5 Scene 3, Romeo and Juliet, Henry Irving Shakespeare, 1888–92. 18 Gordon Browne: final illustration to Romeo and Juliet, Henry Irving Shakespeare, 1888–92. 19 Valentine Green, mezzotint after Johann Zoffany: David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth, published 30 March 1776. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 20 François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 1. 21 Hubert Gravelot, engraved by Gerard Vandergucht: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, Theobald, 1740. Folger Shakespeare Library, PR2752 1740 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 3. 22 Edward Edwards, engraved by Charles Grignion; and T. Parkinson, engraved by Charles Grignion: dual frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, Bell, 1775. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1774 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 8. 23 Charles Gauthier Playter, engraving after John Francis Rigaud: The Comedy of Errors, John Boydell, published 4 June 1800. Folger Shakespeare Library ART File S528c1 no 47 (size XL). 24 Henry Fuseli, engraved by Thomas Milton: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, Chalmers, 1803. Folger Shakespeare Library ART File S528c1 no.5.

41 42 43 44 45 51 56 62 64 65

68

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list of illustrations

25 Frank Howard: first illustration to The Comedy of Errors, The Spirit of the Plays of Shakespeare, 1833. Folger Shakespeare Library ART Vol. f15. 26 John Thompson, after John Thurston: The Comedy of Errors, Illustrations of Shakespeare, 1825. 27 John Gilbert, engraved by the brothers Dalziel: illustrated title page to The Comedy of Errors, Staunton, 1856–60. 28 John Gilbert, engraved by the brothers Dalziel: illustration to The Comedy of Errors, Staunton, 1856–60. 29 Kenny Meadows: illustration to The Comedy of Errors, Cornwall, 1838–43. 30 Henry Courtney Selous, engraved by T. Cobb: title page to The Comedy of Errors, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 31 Henry Courtney Selous, engraved by R. S. Marriott: The Comedy of Errors 2.2, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 32 Henry Courtney Selous, engraved by R. S. Marriott: The Comedy of Errors 5.1, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 33 Henry Courtney Selous, engraved by R. S. Marriott: final illustration to The Comedy of Errors, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 34 Adrian Ludwig Richter: ‘The two Dromios’, The Comedy of Errors, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 35 Henry Courtney Selous, engraved by R. S. Marriott: tailpiece to Act V, The Comedy of Errors, Cowden Clarkes, 1864. 36 John Gilbert, engraved by the brothers Dalziel: final illustration to The Comedy of Errors, Staunton, 1856–60. 37 François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to King Lear, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 5. 38 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to King Lear, Rowe, 1714. Folger Shakespeare Library, PR2752 1714a copy 3 Sh Col, v. 7. 39 Francis Hayman, engraved by Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to King Lear, Hanmer, 1740–44. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1744 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 3. 40 Francis Hayman, engraved by Simon François Ravenet: frontispiece to King Lear, Jennens, 1770. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1770–74 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 1. 41 Edward Edwards, engraved by John Hall; and T. Parkinson, engraved by Charles Grignion: double frontispiece to King Lear, xiv

103 104 106 107 108 110 111 112 113 114 115 115

119 122

123

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list of illustrations

42

43

44 45

46 47

48

49

50

51 52 53 54

Bell, 1773. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1774b copy 1 Sh Col, v. 2. Edward Burney, engraved by Thornthwaite and Hall: double frontispiece to King Lear, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 17. Philip James de Loutherbourg, engraved by J. B. Tilliard: second image for King Lear, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 17. George Scharf: ‘Macready as King Lear’, Recollections, 1839. Folger Shakespeare Library ART Vol. e44 copy 3. François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to Julius Caesar, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 5. Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Julius Caesar, Rowe, 1714. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1714a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 6. Ramberg, engraved by C. Sherwin: first illustration to Julius Caesar, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 16. Rhamberg [sic], engraved by S. Sharp: second illustration to Julius Caesar, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 16. Hubert Gravelot, engraved by G. Vandergucht: frontispiece to Antony and Cleopatra, Theobald 1740. PR2752 1740 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 7. Edward Burney, engraved by Thornthwaite; and Moreau le Jeune, engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi: double frontispiece to Antony and Cleopatra, Bell, 1788. Unsigned engraving after John William Waterhouse: ‘Cleopatra’ from The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 1888. Unsigned engraving after Lawrence Alma-Tadema: The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, Collier, c. 1883. J. C. Armytage, after Jean Leon Gérôme: Cleopatra and Caesar, Knight, 1873–6. François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to Coriolanus, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 4.

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148 150 152 154

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list of illustrations

55 Unidentified artist: ‘The Scene of the Tragedy of Coriolanus’, Universal Magazine, 1749. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 56 Edward Edwards, engraved by Matthew Liart: frontispiece to Coriolanus, Bell, 1774. 57 Anne Damer, engraved by William Leney: bas relief of Coriolanus,1803. Folger Shakespeare Library ART Flat b2 copy 1. 58 John Gilbert: title page to Coriolanus, Staunton, 1856–60. 59 Unidentified artist: untitled illustration showing Menenius and the Plebeians, Coriolanus, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. 60 Gordon Browne: headpiece to Coriolanus Act 1, Henry Irving Shakespeare, 1888–92. 61 Unidentified artist: ‘The Fight between Marcius and Aufidius’, Coriolanus, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. 62 Unidentified artist: ‘The Return of Volumnia’, Act 5 Scene 5, Coriolanus, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. 63 Unidentified artist: ‘Welcome of Volumnia’, Act 5 Scene 2, Coriolanus, The Leopold Shakespeare, 1880. 64 François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to Othello, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 5. 65 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Othello, Rowe, 1714. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1714a copy 3 Sh Col, v. 7. 66 Hubert Gravelot, engraved by Gerard Vandergucht: frontispiece to Othello, Theobald, 1740. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1740 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 8. 67 Francis Hayman, engraved by Charles Grignion: frontispiece to Othello, Jennens, 1770. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1770–74 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 2. 68 Francis Hayman, engraved by Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to Othello, Hanmer, 1740–44. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1744 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 6. 69 Isaac Taylor: frontispiece to Othello, Bell, 1773. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1774 copy 1 Sh Col, v. 1. 70 Johann Jacobé, mezzotint after Joshua Reynolds: Omai, a native of Ulaietea, 1780. National Portrait Gallery, London. 71 Louis Phillipe Boitard: broadsheet showing 1763 riots. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. xvi

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 166 167

175 178

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181 184 189 190

list of illustrations

72 Philip James de Loutherbourg, engraved by Dambrusi: illustration to Othello, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 19. 73 François Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, Rowe, 1709. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1709c copy 1 Sh Col, v. 2. 74 Edward Edwards, engraved by W. Byrne; and T. Parkinson, engraved by Charles Grignion: double frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, Bell, 1773. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1774b copy 2 Sh Col, v. 2. 75 J. H. Ramberg, engraved by T. Cook; and de Loutherbourg, engraved by T. B. Simonet: double frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, Bell, 1788. Folger Shakespeare Library PR2752 1788a copy 2 Sh Col, v. 7. 76 Unidentified artist: title page to The Merchant of Venice, Knight, 1838–43. 77 Unidentified artist: headpiece to Act 1, The Merchant of Venice, Knight, 1838–43. 78 John Browne, after William Hodges: The Merchant of Venice, Act V Scene I. Boydell, published 1 December 1795. Folger Shakespeare Library ART File S528m3 no 97 copy 1(size XL). 79 ‘Jessica’, from Charles Heath’s Shakespeare Gallery, 1837. 80 ‘Portia’, from Charles Heath’s Shakespeare Gallery, 1837.

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xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like any work of its kind, this book has benefited greatly from the kindness and help of many people, and it is a pleasure to record this and offer my thanks. The Meltzer Fund of the University of Bergen, and the Department of Foreign Languages, both made substantial contributions to the costs of production and copyright. I am grateful to Arve Kjell Uthaug and Åse Johnsen of the Department for their kindness and endeavours in the process. As ever, it was a delight to work closely with librarians. In Bergen, JohnWilhelm Flattun of the University Library showed great patience and kindness in retrieving material of many kinds; in Cambridge, Rosalind Esche and Colin Clarkson of the University Library were helpful beyond measure in identifying and obtaining obscure periodicals. Melanie Leung and William Davis of the Folger Shakespeare Library were efficient and most considerate in providing a large number of images for the book. Professor Goran Stanivukovic and Dr Christina Luckyj generously shared material from their own work then in manuscript form; Professor Kent Cartwright read some of the text in preparation and gave thoughtful and reassuring advice; Professor Edward J. Esche showed his customary fortitude and enthusiasm in discussions of eighteenth-century subscription lists. Many members of audiences for lectures in Norway, Cambridge, New Delhi, Montpellier, Venice and elsewhere assisted in formulation of ideas through their questions and responses, both vocal and silent. Members of the Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network, now the Bergen Volda Shakespeare Network, were similarly generous with time and ideas. My former doctoral students, now colleagues in the field, showed patience and understanding in exchanges about their work and my own.

xviii

acknowledgments

This book began with the suggestion and support of Sarah Stanton, who also saw it through its early stages. Like so many, I have benefited greatly from her enthusiasm, professionalism and kindness; it has been a pleasure and a privilege to work alongside her in this and many other projects. Emily Hockley took over the editorial work more recently, and working with her has been equally pleasurable, equally productive. Sarah Lambert managed the book’s production with care, efficiency and patience, and Lydia Wanstall copyedited the text with precision, understanding and tact. To all, my sincere thanks, and my apologies to them for the instances where, despite their aid, my persistent obduracy has produced errors and omission for which I claim sole responsibility. The largest debt is the most immediate, most personal: beyond words. Passages in this book have appeared in the following, and appear by kind permissions of their editors and publishers. ‘King Lear: Toward a Visual History’, Lear from Study to Stage, edited by Arthur Scouten and James Ogden. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ‘Seeing, Studying, Performing: Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare and Performative Reading’, Performance Research, Special Number 10:3: On Shakespeare (September 2005), edited by Peter Holland and William Sherman, www .tandfonline.com. ‘Image, Genre, Interpretation: the Visual Identities of The Comedy of Errors’, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Langage 25 (January 2007). ‘Reading Illustrated Editions: Methodology and the Limits of Interpretation’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009). ‘Merchant of Where? The Venetian Plays in English Visual Culture’, Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi. Aldershot and Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2011, www.tandfonline.com. ‘Thoughts on the Illustrated Edition: Henry Irving’s Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 21: Shakespearean Configurations (Spring 2013). ‘Shakespeare rémájú festmények és az esztétikai identitás’ [‘Shakespeare Painting and Aesthetic Identity’], translated by Ambrus Nagy. Ki Merre Tart? Shakespeare Szegeden 2007–2013, edited by Attila Kiss and Ágnes Matuska. Szeged, Hungary: JATEPress, 2013.

xix

CHAPTER 1

FRAMES AND CIRCUMSTANCES

Just before Christmas 1791, James Gillray published a print headed WierdSisters; Minister’s of Darkness; ‘Minions of the Moon’ (Plate 1).1 The text is supported by a further inscription: To H: Fuzelli Esqr this attempt in the Caricatura-Sublime, is respectfully dedicated. Pubd Decr 23, 1791 by H. Humphrey No18 Old Bond Street They should be Women! and yet their beards forbid us to interpret, that they are so

The image’s main element parodies Henry Fuseli’s painting The Weird Sisters. The witches are transformed into likenesses of Lord Dundas, Pitt the Younger and Lord Thurlow: respectively Home Secretary, First Lord of the Treasury (equivalent to Prime Minister) and Lord Advocate. Date and publisher are given according to legal necessity, but are useful in locating the image in contemporary politics. The two phases of the moon show Queen Charlotte and George III, the suggestion being that the queen is taking authority during the king’s mental instability in the ‘Regency Crisis’, a parallel with concepts of power in Shakespeare’s play. That the politicians are ‘minions of the moon’ suggests their powerlessness to act in response to the shifting authority and consequent uncertainty of the time, instead following alternately the king and queen; but the quotation from 1 Henry IV adds further incisiveness, especially when it is recalled in the context of Falstaff’s conversation with Hal: Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. (1.2.25–9)

1

frames and circumstances

As so often, it is the words after those quoted that are revealing. To call the three politicians ‘men of good government’ is a satiric comment of great force, given that the administration was renowned for its inadequacy, reflecting what one respected historian has called ‘a cabinet of nonentities’.2 The allusion to the changing phases of the moon underscores the vacillation, word and image working together to hammer home the satiric point. Since Queen Caroline was reluctant to become regent, as legally bound, should the king be judged incapable, the idea of the ministers serving her adds further confusion. The satiric tone continues in the final line, spoken by Banquo in the first encounter with the witches (1.3.43–5), ‘You should be women’: a further suggestion of the politicians’ weakness. All these allusions are accessible to anyone knowing the political circumstances of the time. Image works with caption to present a savage criticism of the state of the nation; had its suggestions been made openly, it seems not unlikely that a charge of sedition would have ensued. Allusion is also present, aimed at a different target, in the composition of the three figures. This alludes to Henry Fuseli’s 1783 painting of the three witches, existing in three separate forms, showing the witches in an exaggerated form of their contemporary stage portrayal as bearded men.3 With the sham dedication, sheltered under the misspelled name, the reference reveals itself as a satire on the fashionable taste for the grotesque and sensational, of which Fuseli was an extreme example. Yet Fuseli was also one of the most astute visual interpreters of Shakespeare. Fully to grasp the print’s satiric force, its readers and intended purchasers would have to be aware of the two Shakespearean quotations in the print’s text and Fuseli’s painting or engraving of the three witches, itself a comic allusion to the profiled heads on classical medals, and to have related this to the succession crisis – a remarkable breadth of knowledge. In this, the caricature offers an immediate statement of the pervasiveness of Shakespeare’s plays in plot, language and idea within the social and political forms of the period. Equally significant is that all these levels of interrelation are presented through the medium of a visual image: it thus provides a forceful concentration of the fundamental concerns of this book.

II Yet the caricature also poses questions basic to this enquiry. While it demonstrates remarkable skills in its creator, the extent and nature of its readership is less clear, raising an issue insistent in the discussion of visual treatments of the plays. A possible answer may lie in its means of sale. Like most of Gillray’s 2

frames and circumstances

prints, it would have been displayed in the windows of print sellers, most notably that of Hannah Humphrey who, from 1791, had the exclusive right to sell his work, at the same time moving from Bond Street to St James’s. Another etching by Gillray shows a group of people studying the prints in Humphrey’s shop window, ignoring an unfortunate man who has slipped over on an icy pavement (Plate 2).4 The window-gazers come from diverse social groups, including a connoisseur holding an eyeglass, a soldier with sword, a tricorn hatwearing gentleman, what appears to be a shepherd or rustic of some kind bearing a staff and, at the right, a street urchin with hands in pockets. The range is striking, supporting the frequent claim that the shop windows were, as often suggested, the art galleries of the poor. As a German writer commented in 1798, a visitor to London ‘will always see dozens of people outside the shops that sell these caricatures’ and specified that they are ‘of high and low birth alike’.5 No parallel images survive of contemporary bookshops, then known as stationers; but it is well known that books were displayed in their windows, opened at the title page, which for illustrated editions appeared opposite the engraved frontispiece that showed a scene from the play. Where the caricatures present a self-contained satirical statement, the frontispieces present a moment of action, but both kinds of image will be seen by those familiar with their meanings and situations and those for whom the images are at best an attractive and inviting glimpse into events as yet not fully understood – something of continued importance in illustrated editions, as later chapters will confirm. The counter-argument to this is that Gillray’s caricatures were bought mainly by the moneyed, educated classes, paralleling those assumed to have constituted Shakespeare’s audiences of the same time. Presumably this is true in many individual cases. The interior of Hannah Humphrey’s shop was more in the nature of a club for the wealthy, who would gather to discuss the latest etchings and their satirical thrusts, mirroring one of the fashionable London coffeehouses at which business was conducted. In this it was similar to the shop of John Boydell, in mid-century the largest publisher of reproductive prints and at its close the architect of the Shakespeare Gallery. Many would be viewed in a portfolio, which might be purchased or hired, complete with prints, for an evening’s discussion.6 Humphrey’s shop also hosted exhibitions of the latest prints, charging an admission of one shilling – the same as that for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, its contemporary at the turn of the century. Fine copies of the prints, coloured by hand without the use of stencils, the practice for cheaper versions, could be bought for as much as a guinea (21 shillings), placing them 3

frames and circumstances

well beyond the means of the lowliest window-gazers. Such exhibitions were part of a larger choreography that might involve visiting a play and then discussing it in one of the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, which were adorned with Shakespeare paintings by Francis Hayman, who had designed and painted stage settings for Garrick. The apparent difference conceals a broader parallel. The prints were not only available in the expensive versions but could be bought uncoloured for a few pence. Similarly, the plays were not only seen by the affluent. For most of the eighteenth century, tickets were sold at half price before the evening’s second half; but the crucial point often overlooked is that the change occurred after the third act of the first play, often a Shakespeare. The recurrent riots of the period that greeted attempts to end this practice do not suggest any lack of interest in Shakespeare. The parallel also extends to the sale of images of actors and scenes from the play printed from the 1770s onwards, which were both bound into the editions they illustrated and sold individually. These cheaper versions, including the so-called ‘cards’ showing actors in character that John Bell included in both his editions, might be pasted on screens or tacked to interior walls, as shown in many of Hogarth’s engravings – but, again, there is no quantifiable evidence for the practice. It is perhaps not too much of a conjecture to consider among the viewers of both kinds of print those described in a parliamentary report of 1733 as ‘Prentices, and persons of the like Class’.7 It might also be appropriate to see within them many of those whom E. P. Thompson describes as coming from a ‘tradition of plebeian and tradesman Dissent’:8 those whom William Blake hoped would purchase his Songs of Innocence and so free him to work on his larger projects – and Blake himself, we should recall, was an artisan apprentice with no formal schooling in the 1770s. The circumstances suggest that these cultural objects were not merely available to all sorts and conditions of men and women but actively sought out by them, not simply grasping their Shakespearean references but relating their themes to issues of contemporary life. Assessing the figures for theatre attendance is a hazardous and conjectural undertaking but also an important one, especially in comparison with those for the plays’ readers. Records for London theatres show that the frequency with which Shakespeare was performed in the two London patent theatres at the end of the eighteenth century remained the same as in the preceding fifty years, at a mere one in six of every performance,9 and even this figure has been questioned.10 There were, of course, other performances in London and beyond; yet overall the picture emerges of a fairly limited availability for audiences of any 4

frames and circumstances

social group. But the plays were available in another form, as printed editions. The first after the four folios were those of Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and 1714;11 both contained frontispiece images. Many later editions, until recently overlooked in favour of the scholarly productions of Johnson and others, followed their lead. Prominent among this group were those with at least one illustration for each play; and from this it is a reasonable conclusion that for many the texts were first experienced not in the theatre or when simply read, but through a combination of text and illustration. Defining the readership of any edition is similarly perilous, even when accurate figures regarding print runs and sales are available, which is not the case for either of Rowe’s editions. Yet the figures for the first of John Bell’s two editions, appearing in various forms between 1773 and 1775, suggest that their readership was considerably larger than that of the contemporary scholarly versions.12 The first edition of Johnson’s Shakespeare sold 1,000 copies, and the second a further 750; that of Johnson and Steevens, appearing in 1773 just before Bell’s, sold approximately 1,200.13 Bell himself claimed of the weekly parts that ‘above 3,000 copies of the first number, The Tempest, had been taken up’.14 John Lowndes claimed for this that ‘no fewer than 8,000 copies were sold in one week’; quoting this, William St Clair gives 4,500, based on contemporary advertisements.15 Perhaps more revealing is the subscription list for the 1774 edition, printed as a preliminary to the first volume, which gives a total of 1,459 copies signed for, including multiple purchases, largely by booksellers. Of the total, 594 were for buyers in London and 865 – a little under 60% – beyond. The geographical distribution is remarkable, as are the multiple purchases. Four separate subscribers in Edinburgh ordered fifty, twenty-five, sixteen and twelve copies; individual purchasers bought twenty-nine in Glasgow, twenty-five in Coventry and eighteen in Norwich. Others included thirteen in Tamworth, twelve in Ipswich and twelve in Margate.16 Subscription involved paying half the price on signature; there is no record of defaulters, but even the most cynical reading would suggest the considerable success of the venture at its inception – and this, of course, does not include sales for the later 1774 or the 1775 issues, or those bought from the publisher independent of the subscription list. The title page shown in Figure 14 (see p. 51) bears the signature of someone not named in the subscription list, which suggests it was purchased either from one of the booksellers named as subscribers or from another source after the list was closed. When Bell was declared bankrupt in 1793, James Barker bought the remaining copies and plates of all the editions and issued them in the following year with 5

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new title pages but otherwise unchanged, extending the life and the readership of the original editions, although no details survive.17 This means that, even at the most conservative estimate, the reading experiences offered by Bell’s so-called ‘Acting’ edition were available to a very significant proportion of the Shakespeare-reading public of the fourth quarter of the century, revealing its importance in the cultural mediation and assimilation of the plays. It suggests a readership far different from that expected by David Gentlemen, the de facto editor, when he claimed that the volumes would be read during theatrical performances. Nearly a century later, Charles Knight boasted sales of 700,000 for the various serial forms of his own complete edition, extending the figure to one million when a later printing, selling for two shillings, was included.18 Contrast these figures with those given for Johnson at 1,750 (both editions), Capell (1,500), and Malone’s two editions of 1790 (2,400).19 Numbers sold do not, of course, mean numbers read; but here those sold only as furniture books must be offset by the practice of many owners as sharing the volumes with others, or reading them in groups with families or friends, as often recorded for those purchasing Dickens’ serial works that began to appear at the same time as Knight’s Shakespeare. Statistics are, of course, deeply untrustworthy; but even if these contain a modicum of truth, and taking the subscription lists as the more reliable since they include actual names, three principles emerge that are fundamental to the argument of this book. One: Bell’s edition seriously outsold the scholarly ones of around the same date; two, it sold largely outside London and so was less likely to be read at performances; three, and most important, the editions contained illustrative frontispieces, continuing the practice of Rowe and others. These factors lead to the conclusion that, for a very large proportion of the public, Shakespeare’s plays were experienced in print, and with illustrations. The illustrated edition thus becomes a source of considerable importance in the reception history and in consequence the interpretive practice of the plays. Comparing these figures to those assembled in relation to performance by Harry William Pedicord – still the most complete – offers at least the possibility of balancing readers against playgoers. Working from records of attendance and receipts at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn in the 1758–60 season he calculates an average combined daily attendance of 1,979, or 11,874 a week. This he supports by quoting the claim, probably advanced by Samuel Foote, that ‘the number of those called Play-Followers cannot be rated at less than twelve thousand in this metropolis’.20 The problem here is that the figures do not discriminate between those who attended Shakespeare performances from viewers of other 6

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playwrights’ work, or those who attended for only the second half of the evening’s entertainment. Nor does it – nor could it – record those who attended more than once in weeks when different plays were staged. One does not have to be a statistical genius to realise that these comparisons are, well, odorous; but the overall scale of figures of both print runs and theatre attendance suggests at the very least some kind of parity between those reading illustrated editions and those attending the theatres. Add to this the imponderables in each – the numbers attending both Shakespeare and other plays, the extra readers of illustrated editions, and the unrecorded figures for others with images, encountered in later chapters – and the notion that at least as many encountered the plays in this medium as in the theatre becomes at the least a teasing probability. And, since almost all at this time contained only a single image, presented as the frontispiece, the visual element would have offered an immediate guide to the events and ideas of the play, whether absorbed individually or through discussion. While this expansion of print was taking place, a parallel tradition was emerging of independent images, first as easel paintings and then in many cases as reproductive engravings. Such works share some of the features of illustrated editions but differ at root in many ways. As later chapters will make clear, an easel painting operates at a wholly different rhetorical level from an original engraving, and one further still from an image designed for a book. The commission and ownership of paintings make them much more restricted in circulation. Reproductive engravings extend this franchise to some degree, but it remains restricted because of the images’ size and cost, and also because in many cases they retain the more distanced rhetoric of a larger image – distanced both in viewing situation and in many cases in the systems of depiction and allusion each form employed. Easel paintings and associated engravings that took the plays’ events outside the theatre belonged to the highest genre of painting, the history, and so were placed within a series of conventions shared between painter and patron. Those that related more fully to the theatre relied on balancing conventions of group portraiture; and images of actors in character struck a balance between formal portraiture and ideas of performance related to ‘points’ – features by which the individual actors had become known – or more general conventions of displaying mood or feeling through gesture or expression. Some original engravings and frontispieces may reflect performance, either explicitly or by implied resemblance, but again their approaches are quite different from those on canvas. True, paintings share the essential foundation of any frontispiece design: the 7

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selection of moment from the play and the consequent act of interpretation this presents. Further, the orders listed here are not rigidly separate. That Fuseli’s painting of the witches made reference to a theatrical trope, was popular enough to be produced three times and was then the subject of a political caricature, reveals again the threads that may unite apparently disparate forms, returning to the circle of knowledge and application inhabited by some, at least, of those for whom Shakespeare was a major component of intellectual and emotional activity.

III That the assertion about Shakespeare being known by every English man comes from a German publication offers another insight into the circularity of forces within which the plays and their visual forms should be seen. That it appeared in a periodical published in Weimar, home of Goethe and Schiller, two of the earliest translators, is one element of this, as one aspect of the exchanges between the two nations at the time; but it also introduces another circumstance too often forgotten. The export of prints would soon be curtailed by a trade embargo, a consequence of the French Revolutionary War in which England was then involved, and which would soon explode into the Napoleonic War. This was the latest and most catastrophic military engagement of the long eighteenth century, by the end of which, according to some estimates, one in every six or perhaps five men served in the army or navy. Recruitment would now take place through the militia system in cities as well as rural areas, and press gangs become more pervasive and much feared. In the navy, deaths through disease outnumbered by far those from enemy action: doubly shocking since lacking the consolation of heroic sacrifice.21 It is also salutary to remember that Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems, mourning the treatment of wounded soldiers and sailors, began to appear in the 1790s. The constitutional crisis mocked by Gillray was thus only one part of national turmoil. Military engagements, fear of invasion and the larger economic consequences of war would surely have influenced the lives of those attending performances or reading the plays in popular or scholarly editions. The degree and manner in which they influenced performance, in terms of which plays were presented as well as how they were treated, is far harder to measure at this period than in mid-Victorian Britain.22 The effect might have been felt more strongly on the musical entertainments and farces presented as the second half of theatrical performances, attended as they were by the lower paid, whose members were 8

frames and circumstances

numerically more likely to suffer the bereavements and other privations of war than the officer classes and their dependents. These factors demand some consideration to achieve a more complete awareness of the larger frames surrounding Shakespeare activity not only in the Napoleonic period but throughout the century. Consequences of warfare were increasingly apparent in other ways. Overseas involvement had a reciprocal relation with growing imperialism and the burgeoning ideas of national identity, as examined by Linda Colley.23 The extent to which these are mirrored in performance and image is hard to calculate although, as will later become evident, there are some examples, albeit tantalisingly incomplete. Woven into these strands of social and political change are issues of race and social rank, as campaigns for the abolition of the slave trade became insistent and action against employment and trade legislation through public demonstrations grew more frequent and more violent.24 One other force is fundamental to all those discussed above: the pervasive pressures of economics as they affect all those involved in the production and dissemination and consumption of the plays. Not only the theatre managers, print sellers and stationer-publishers were driven by financial survival. Painters had tables of fees for paintings of different size and style; printmakers matched techniques to the extent of an edition and speed of production; artists in turn adopted styles best suited to particular reproductive processes. Especially popular images might be reproduced several times, often changed in size and medium to match intended uses and markets. An economic motive is similarly apparent in Garrick’s retention of much of Tate’s version of King Lear, and his careful judgement in restoring some of Shakespeare’s lines but stopping short of including the Fool or restoring Shakespeare’s ending. Audience comprehension and taste were together a major economic, and hence aesthetic, determinant in the widening circumstances of stage performance and commercial publishing of the times. Gillray’s caricature of the Boydell Gallery25 was not only a satire of its treatment of the plays; he also attacked the Gallery as an ‘Offering to Avarice’. Yet his exclusion from those who contributed to its images was surely as much a financial hardship as a blow to his professional pride.

IV Earlier studies of Shakespeare and the visual arts – there are many, and many celebrated figures among their authorship – have engaged with these issues or focused on detailed areas within them, with different aims, to 9

frames and circumstances

produce different results. Theatre historians have seized on the evidential potential in paintings and prints, understandably so for a subject often lacking detailed description or formal review. Art historians have until the last few decades worked within a hierarchy that overlooked theatre painting; the study of illustration has either been absorbed into stage history or treated with academic and professional disdain. Others have treated paintings largely as instruments of textual criticism, arguing that they performed this function through iconographic allusion or selection of moment to change the ways in which the plays were interpreted at a time when written criticism was as yet limited. The emergence of book history has aided greatly in the study of illustrated editions, not only of Shakespeare but of literary texts in general. All of these, however, have in the main existed in separate compartments, or suffered from the understandable and well-intentioned tunnel vision of separate academic pursuits, each with its own methods and categories. My argument here is that all these elements need to be considered before anything like an awareness of the identity and working of paintings, reproductive prints and perhaps especially illustrations within editions, may be seen as a single perceptual and conceptual entity. Such an integrated method assumes a different kind of value in illustrations for later eighteenth-century editions aimed not at scholars but at the increasing numbers for whom a knowledge of Shakespeare was a mark of cultural maturity. As patterns of editing and performance develop from the 1740s onwards, the approaches evident in illustrations and the cultural frames within which they appear also change radically. Narrative representation displaces emblematic encryption as the primary modality, and simplicity and immediacy in general characterise the main effects achieved – effects not inferior to the earlier complexity, but different in process and result. The change is first shown in more naturalistic frontispiece images of individual episodes and then in the sequences of engravings interspersed with the text itself, culminating in the throughillustrated editions of the mid-nineteenth century. All these shifts reflect larger cultural and material changes, as the expensive processes of engraving on copper are displaced by cheaper processes using wood and steel. This altered encounter with Shakespeare occurs in parallel with a larger cultural change, to which it in itself contributes. Increasingly, the plays came to be seen as modes of psychological and human interaction which the reader experiences vicariously through their central characters, first through changes in writing about the plays and progressively under the shadow of the novel as the dominant cultural form. At a time when self-advancement was a major concern, the ownership of the 10

frames and circumstances

plays, and to some degree an awareness of their workings, became increasingly essential. Common to all the images discussed here is a shift of syntax that underlies any move from theatre or dramatic text to individual print: the larger exigencies and limitations of translating the dynamic medium of theatre into the apparently static form of an image. Essential in works conceived as independent paintings, this assumes a different importance in illustrated editions. A frontispiece immediately marks off the scene it shows as the most significant part of the play, simply because it is the first to be seen when opening the volume. But the physical nature of book production for most of the eighteenth century makes this less certain. The full publisher’s name given on the title page of Theophilus Cibber’s Two Dissertations is unusual, but very helpful in summarising how books were sold at this time: London: Printed for the author, and are to be had of Mr. Griffiths (the publisher) in Paternoster Row. The subscription bound books may be had of Mr. Marks, Stationer, in St. Martin’s Lane, to which place the Subscribers are requested to send their receipts. Also to be had of Mr. Cibber, in Great Newport Street, St. Martin’s Lane. [Price stitch’d Three Shillings.]

Every part of this statement is revealing about contemporary publishing. That the book is available from ‘Mr Griffiths’ reveals the comparatively informal state of much publishing at this time; its location in Pater-noster Row, within the area known in Shakespeare’s day as St Paul’s Churchyard, shows it as still the main centre for booksellers, still known as stationers, in contemporary London. The reference to subscribers invites those who had subscribed to the book before its publication to take the receipts they were given, on payment of all or part of the price before it was printed: a common and very effective way of financing the printing in advance – and also, where the list of subscribers survives, an important source of information for the researcher. That it was also available from the author shows that the sale of books was not wholly the responsibility of the publisher, some authors wishing to sell directly themselves – another instance of the sometimes precarious existence of those involved in writing.26 The final, parenthetical, sentence is the most revealing of all. ‘Stitch’d’ refers to the practice of selling books not fully bound but with the separate fascicles sewn together, generally enclosed in boards of grey card. The purchaser would then take them to a binder and have them enclosed in whatever design she or he wished, often full or half calf, morocco, or more elaborate designs such as the 11

frames and circumstances

finely matched hide of the Roxburgh club, and embellished with blind or gilt tooling. This made them more serviceable, as well as more attractive on the library shelf; but it also made possible the insertions of illustrations at various points within the text, with considerable effects on the reading experience thus produced, as Chapter 2 will show. The much larger prints, most famously those of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, addressed different purchasers and were differently displayed, with the space demanded by elephant folio sheets, either framed or in a portfolio.27 Their sale in two massive volumes as well as individually suggests the habit of groups discussing them together, a process described by Leigh Hunt as ‘reading’ a portfolio, while Keats refers to the pleasures of conversation arising from such activity.28 The process is one of analytical exchange, which embraces exploration of narrative, character and presumably the image as textual interpretation. Boydell’s subscription list, assembled before the end of the century, is revealing, with signatories from as far away as America (Richmond, Virginia) and India (Bengal).29 Both reflect a move to international trade, but also draw a curious parallel between the birth of one colony and the loss of another. Trade continued, aided by technical advance so that, by the 1840s, Charles Knight could ship stereo plates of a later version of his illustrated edition across the Atlantic, avoiding import duties by having the books printed in America. All these are major forces that determine Shakespeare imaging, which Shakespeare imaging influences and develops in turn, and which are explored in the chapters to follow.

V While the main thrust of the book is conceptual rather than chronological, it will be of value here to sketch briefly the sequence of illustrated editions, to suggest some of the changes in approach of different artists and periods that underlie the discussions of subsequent chapters, and also some of the circumstances acting around and upon them. The editions of John Bell, discussed above, marked a pivotal stage in the illustration of Shakespeare, but they built on a tradition beginning with Nicholas Rowe’s editions of 1709 and 1714.30 The first had frontispieces engraved by Elisha Kirkall after designs by François Boitard, a French painter who brought with him techniques of composition and allusion resting heavily on Catholic iconography – important in terms of detail and narrative concentration. Their sometimes awkward engraving has caused them to be neglected as serious interpretive documents; their resemblance in 12

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some cases to stage practice has suggested to many that they depicted actual productions. The former is a consequence of the short time available for their execution; the latter is revealed as unlikely by the limited opportunity Boitard had of seeing the plays on stage in the short time he was in London before making the illustrations. Rowe’s second edition was illustrated by Louis du Guernier in a manner more skilful, sometimes resembling Boitard’s images and sometimes not: both actions make them of interest, for different reasons, about the forms they impose on the plays and hence of the readers’ perceptions. Two illustrated editions appeared in the 1740s, the earlier the second edition of Lewis Theobald, with frontispieces designed by Hubert Gravelot, with some engraved by the artist and some by Gerard Vandergucht.31 That the first edition lacked illustration suggests that images were then seen as and intended for a wider, more popular market. The second edition had a larger sale than its costlier predecessor, widening the accessibility of illustrated editions as an initial experience of the plays. The other edition of the decade, edited by Sir Thomas Hanmer, had illustrations by Francis Hayman engraved, and some also designed, by Gravelot – both celebrated artists in their own right.32 This is the only edition for which detailed instructions remain from the editor to the illustrators, providing important insights into critical readings of the plays. Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition, discussed above, was followed in 1788 by his ‘Literary’ version, competing with Johnson and others by including copious annotation, but also presenting illustrations, for the first time drawing together the two streams.33 It contained scenes from the play showing action beyond the theatre and line engravings of actors in character. In this way it presented three major thrusts of Shakespeare activity: performance, visual interpretation as actual event and critical commentary. The edition of Bellamy and Robarts of the 1790s34 included two images for each play, again showing actions beyond the stage, but importantly including them within the text – sometimes but not always the case with Bell’s treatments, depending on how they were bound. These changes are important in the textual experiences presented to readers, as will become clear. The Shakespeare Gallery, a collection of 167 expansive paintings, each later issued as an elephant folio engraving, coupled with an edition of the plays with smaller, though still large, engravings, began in the 1790s and was only completed in the first decade of the new century, when all the paintings were sold at auction after the bankruptcy of the scheme’s founder, Alderman John Boydell. Intended to be the foundation of a national school of painting, instead it produced canvases widely varied in style, and might be seen as the pivot between 13

frames and circumstances

two contrasted approaches to Shakespearean painting and the design of illustrated editions. The former was the result of shifts in taste discussed in Chapter 10, the latter by new approaches to the plays but just as forcefully by new methods of printing and binding from which the plays were among the first to benefit. All images for eighteenth-century illustrated editions were produced as copper engravings, limiting the number of copies that could be reproduced without serious deterioration of detail. The next generation of illustrated editions, in the 1830s, used the far more durable technique of wood engraving. Images could now be placed within the text, and produced in even larger runs after the invention of the stereo plate, which allowed the production of multiple copies of the complete typeset pages and illustrations. The editions of Charles Knight and Barry Cornwell, both from 1838–42, exploited these developments, appearing as weekly numbers as well as sets of volumes.35 Their approaches were quite different. Whereas Cornwall’s editions used images designed by Kenny Meadows, emphasising the emotional and sensational aspects of the plays, Knight’s images showed historical and geographical elements from the time and place in which the plays were set. A generation later, the edition using a text by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke included images by Henry Courtney Selous. Contemporary with it was a version of Howard Staunton’s edition with designs by Sir John Gilbert, which also appeared in anthologies and other works related to Shakespeare.36 Later illustrated editions included The Leopold Shakespeare, illustrated by an anonymous artist, and what became known as the Henry Irving Shakespeare with images by Gordon Browne, son of Dickens’ early illustrator Hablôt Knight Browne.37 Together, the volumes provide in some cases a tradition and in some cases radical innovation in treatment of the plays.38 Changes in theatre design and acting styles are also of major significance, but since these relate to particular images and individual plays they are best left for subsequent discussion. One larger circumstance, however, merits address here: the changing approach to the plays in regard to a shift from ‘roles’ to ‘characters’, and the consequent ideas of feeling and empathy to which these are related. William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays was first published in 181639 and is often seen as the beginning of an approach that treats the characters as actual people instead of aesthetic constructs. While responses of this kind had long been part of the audience’s reaction, as will become clear in the discussion of Garrick’s King Lear, in the nineteenth century it changed subtly but significantly, not as an immediate result of Hazlitt’s writing but as a consequence of how the critic was read. Hazlitt’s argument stresses the unique 14

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breadth of Shakespeare’s human understanding as the basis of his construction of dramatic identities. This was popularly transformed into the discussion of the roles as real people – figures seen as having a continuous existence between their presences and speeches on stage. Put in the simplest terms, the difference lay between an acceptance of separate moments of feeling within an acting role and the idea of an actual person with an unbroken existence through the constructed time of the play. The shift did not, of course, occur overnight, and was a gradual movement intersecting with other forces, to which later chapters will return.40 This larger movement is also related to methods of acting and visual representation. In theoretical writings from the seventeenth century, the various moods, then referred to as ‘passions’, were shown through specific facial expressions and hand movements. The former were given explicit statement by Charles Le Brun, translated into English in 1734,41 and the writings of John Caspar Lavater.42 The degree to which these affected performance is hard to ascertain, but the frequent comments about Garrick’s ability to shift rapidly from one passion to another suggests that, at the very least, the idea of facial equivalence to feeling was shared between performer and audience. The writings of John Bulwer concerning hand gestures were adopted by many Restoration actors and may help in understanding the referential elements of some visual treatments of the plays; but the movements so often replicate those familiar from everyday converse that they become less a code than a likeness. These writings, and their impact, will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4, and elsewhere as necessary. Although they share aspects of concept and approach, the chapters that follow fall conveniently into two parts. Part One discusses the ways in which illustrated editions and paintings of the plays operate, through examinations of techniques and styles of various periods. It begins by examining the variety of forms assumed by illustrated editions, and the implications these have on their interpretation today. Chapter 3 explores the reading experiences offered by illustrated editions that avowedly relate closely to performance, in the attempt to identify a particular order of performative reading. From there the focus moves in Chapter 4 to the practical, ideological and theoretical circumstances surrounding easel painting, exploring its relations to performance, intersection with other styles and theories of painterly practice, and its identities as critical and aesthetic responses to larger statements of interpretation. Part Two builds on these conceptual foundations to discuss the visual histories of some individual plays, each addressing a different aspect of their part in 15

frames and circumstances

the plays’ reception and moving increasingly outwards towards their larger social and political treatment. The first explores The Comedy of Errors, a play absent from the stage during the production of most illustrated editions, and thus encountered through printed visual forms, to explore ways in which its complex of genres is engaged with and resolved by the use of images. Its treatment through the whole period also exemplifies in more detail the changes of approach discussed more generally in Part One. This is balanced in the next chapter’s discussion of the visual history of King Lear, a play where imaging is constructed in negotiation with its changing texts in performance, retaining some elements of eighteenth-century adaptation while modifying others to return to a notion of authenticity and revealing their emphasis on the play’s effect on audience emotions and the practical, and economic, demands of staging. Chapter 7, on the Roman plays, looks at ways in which visual treatments have addressed the new rhythms of action they develop, partly in consequence of the individual conflicts that are among their main themes, that arguably define them as a separate group. Othello is then placed within changing attitudes to black African and other minority presences within England as reflected in performance and image in the age of slavery and beyond, assessing the relation between present-day attitudes to race and rank and those from earlier periods. The focus becomes broader in the discussion of The Merchant of Venice, which is seen increasingly in illustration through the lens of ideas of Venice in relation to English identities and the wider experience of the city through varieties of the Grand Tour. This prepares for a discussion in Chapter 10 of paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century which shift to a more immediate and often domestic approach, resting heavily on presentations of character. The overall movement is from considerations of the plays’ visual histories, first in isolation from the stage and then in negotiation with it, through a concern with changing structural trajectories, towards broadening social currents moving from the placement of Othello to the vision of Venice heavily influenced by aesthetic tourism, and presaging the more domestic familiarisation of the later period. A brief conclusion returns to some of the questions raised earlier and touches briefly on the short history of writing about Shakespeare illustration. This book had its origin in the idea of reprinting articles published and lectures given in other places and earlier times, so making available their ideas to a wider readership. It soon became apparent that very considerable change and development were needed to make them into a more coherent whole and to bind them together by exploring avenues they left untravelled. The central texts 16

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discussed remain the same, and the acknowledgments page makes clear the earlier forms in which they appear, but the discussion is now much changed and enlarged to make a fuller and more questioning enquiry into the issues raised there, and earlier in this chapter. Only where essential have I made reference to ideas or works covered in my earlier books on the subject, and then only to clarify issues for readers unfamiliar with them. Wherever possible I have introduced new examples for those concepts and works discussed in those books. To readers who find such repetitions intrusive I offer my apologies, and also my thanks for their determination in following these earlier writings.

17

part one Structures and concepts in Shakespeare imaging

CHAPTER 2

MECHANISM AND MEANING IN ILLUSTRATED EDITIONS

On 18 August 1746, David Garrick wrote a long letter to Francis Hayman. After praising the artist’s work, he offered suggestions about a print to illustrate Othello. The Scene wch in my Opinion will make the best Picture, is that point of Time in the last Act, when Emilia discovers to Othello his Error about the Handkerchief E MIL — Oh thou dull Moor! That Handkerchief &c– Here at once the Whole Catastrophe of the play is unravell’d & the Groupe of Figures in this Scene, with their different Expressions Will produce a finer Effect in painting, than perhaps Any other in all Shakespear, tho as yet never thought of by any of the Designers who have published their Several Prints from ye same author. The back Ground you know must be Desdemona murder’d in her bed; the Characters upon the Stage are Othello, Montano, Gratiano & Iago: Othello (ye Principal upon ye right hand I believe) must be Thunderstruck with Horror, his whole figure extended, wth his Eyes Turn’d up to Heav’n and his frame sinking, as it were at Emilia’s Discovery. I shall better make you conceive My Notion of this Attitude & Expression when I see You; Emilia must appear in the utmost Vehemence, with a mixture of Sorrow on Account of her Mistress & (I think) should be in ye Middle: Iago on ye left hand should express the greatest perturbation of Mind, & should Shrink up his body, at ye opening of his Villany, with his Eyes looking askance (as Milton terms it) on Othello, & gnawing his Lip in anger at his Wife; but this likewise will be describ’d better by giving you the Expression when I see You; the other less capital Characters must be affected according to ye Circumstances of the Scene, & as they are more or less concern’d in ye Catastrophe: I could say a great deal upon the Choice of this Scene, but I hate writing, & if the little I have said does not Strike you, pray don’t fix upon it out of Complaisance to Me. I am in some doubt whether You should not have Shakespear’s Words engrav’d at ye bottom of Each Print, that have reference to It; the

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part one: structures and concepts in shakespeare imaging Objection of writing ye Name of ye Sign under it, does not hold good in this; for it will be necessary by ye Speech, to Mark the Exact point of Time, You have chose to represent.1

The letter demands extensive quotation for several reasons. It is rare in specifying subject and treatment, unusual from any source but without parallel from a major actor. It raises issues fundamental to the initiation and identity of print images of Shakespeare’s works, when they are beginning to assume major significance as a Shakespearean activity, in bringing together elements often held apart. And, as will later emerge, it is as important in what it does not say as in what it does. Almost at its start, the letter stresses that this one scene is when ‘the whole Catastrophe’ occurs. The stress on moment reveals one of the key decisions of the illustrating process: the choice of scene. In calling it a ‘point in time’ Garrick is making clear by implication the impact gained by freezing the play’s action, while also maintaining its power in the play’s progress by calling it the moment of ‘Catastrophe’, here used, as again several lines later, in the technical sense of resolution or denouement. In so doing, it epitomises both the difference between image and theatre and the ways in which the two can function together; the old claim that images work in space and literature in time is seized and turned into an assertion of value in mutual enrichment. The selection says much about how the play itself is read: it is to this moment that the whole action drives, not Othello’s monologue before the sleeping Desdemona, nor even his suicide. We may argue about this, but that isn’t the point. This is the first statement, by implication but still strong, that the choice of an image determines the overall movement of a play – something inherent in all images designed as single prints or, more particularly, for those intended as frontispieces seen before the playtext. It is a decision to which later pages will return, in discussions of how different artists have imagined different plays throughout the canon, and what this may suggest about individual trajectories constructed in performance and in editing. In its accounts of placement, posture and expression, the account mingles stage with studio. The placing of Othello on the right and Iago on the left assumes greater significance if these are read as stage right and stage left. The consequence is moral as well as spatial, since stage left is the traditional position for evildoers, following medieval moralities in which it is the site of hell mouth and, by extension, the devil. Apart from instantly defining both characters, not least Othello’s implied righteousness, this echoes his earlier ejaculation ‘Oh devil’ (4.1.41). The expressions and postures specified reveal something 22

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more of stage practice, their exaggeration necessary for the sheer size of Drury Lane; yet more revealing is Garrick’s offer to explain more fully ‘my Notion of this Attitude and Expression’. This surely relates to the actor’s famed ability rapidly to change expression; that this can be made clear to the artist by ‘giving you the Expression when I see You’ offers a more direct parallel between stage and image by functioning above words. The use of the word ‘passions’ is typical of the time, when acting was seen more as a process of presenting moments of feeling, perhaps in the patterns laid down by Le Brun and Lavater, than with the later portrayal of characters through a sense of continuous psychological realism. What might seem in these last passages to be a reticence over language is also apparent in Garrick’s uncertainty about placing ‘Shakespeare’s words’ at the base of the print. His reluctance, and the assumption of an argument against ‘writing ye name of ye Sign under it’, suggest that words block the immediacy of the image and weaken its status as an aesthetic object. After all, it implies, serious paintings do not have captions, and rarely even titles, the subjects being obvious to the connoisseurs who see them. These doubts are immediately overruled by the need to fix the exact moment, which will clarify rather than obfuscate the detail of the expressions and the purity with which they translate word and action into image. The shift is important, too, in the historical growth of the Shakespeare print. The frontispieces to both of Rowe’s editions and Theobald’s second, and Hayman’s designs for Hanmer’s, all lack captions, and only after those of John Bell in the 1770s were they adopted. A resonant silence surrounds the costume worn by Othello. Is this because Garrick thought Hayman would know of this, having seen the actor in the role? Or would he assume that Othello would wear the usual court dress in which he is depicted, like Macbeth and other major characters, in the Rowe images, which reflect this as a common convention of early seventeenth-century costume? The absence seemingly rejects any concern for his ethnic identity, something of major concern in present-day performances and, as Chapter 8 will suggest, a topic approached rather differently in the later eighteenth century. A broader topic, present by implication, is Garrick’s awareness of earlier designs for this play and others in the canon, in the statement that this is ‘as yet never thought of’ by those who have produced ‘their Several Prints’. If we take ‘several’ to mean separate, the usage then common, Garrick is revealing a knowledge of the tradition of frontispiece prints. It is a tantalising glimpse of the actor’s awareness of print culture, hinting at another order of intersection between performance and imaging. Finally, the use of the word ‘painting’ in the seventh 23

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line again reflects contemporary usage in embracing forms of depiction other than in pigment, suggesting that the older hierarchies of aesthetic production are being challenged and prints are achieving a more elevated status. All these elements reveal the letter as a remarkable statement of relations and approaches, a microscope slide through the living tissue of theatre, text and image. It shows a grasp of the frontispiece as a marker of the key moment of the play, defining its trajectory for the reader, aided by a short quotation as caption; the ways in which event is disclosed through facial expression and bodily posture; the absorption of earlier staging traditions; and other aspects of static design and circumstance. One element remains. Towards the end of the letter, Garrick moves to larger considerations: You are now at ye Time of Life, You should employ almost every Moment of it in Yr Business, & in the next ten Years, make yrself Easy in Fame & Fortune: Yr Strength of Body & Mind is now at the heigth, & Every Avocation from yr Business, is so much Money & Immortality lost.

For Garrick, only a few years after his first performance, as Richard III at Goodman’s Fields, making the most of the middle years to attain ‘Fame & Fortune’ is an essential driving force, and he urges Hayman to take the same view. It is a reminder of an impetus within all artistic achievement of the time: the material forces on which actor and artist both depend, and the need to follow public tastes they demand. There are other forces, other concepts, that contribute to the textual fabric of visual Shakespeare; but it would be hard to find a better contemporary account than this letter that, in the friendship and concern that it shows from one artist to another as much its detailed advice, suggests the depth and variety of significances within and around visual Shakespeare at one of its most vigorous periods. Along with the larger, and in some ways rather different, circumstances of easel paintings, the aesthetic, intellectual, social and commercial circumstances that surround then and to which they contribute, these will receive attention later. For the moment, my concern is with the variety of ways in which illustrations operate within editions of the plays – the special identity of the illustrated edition in itself, for which the letter provides fine summary.

II That Shakespeare’s plays were published in his lifetime to a degree almost unparalleled in the works of other dramatists may or may not reflect their 24

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construction, at least in part, for reading rather than performance; this debate will long continue. But one implication of the publication statistics, as revealed and analysed by Lukas Erne,2 is irrefutable: there was a large and continuing market for these volumes, implying an eagerness to consume the plays through reading. The work of Andrew Murphy3 has stressed the continuing force and extent of this eagerness and its satisfaction through publication, doing much to adjust the focus of literary history to encompass popular as well as scholarly editions. The wide currency of the illustrated editions, and their function as the first experience of the plays for many readers, cannot be doubted; but what of its value within the complex exchange system of performance, reading and critical study? This chapter begins to explore some issues of this kind, before their later discussion in specific plays. Its address is inevitably a dual one. It is concerned both with attempting to recover something of the variety of approaches to the plays these editions offered, and the larger frames by which both texts and readers were surrounded; and with exploring, defining and delimiting appropriate critical approaches to be adopted by readers today. The two are, of course, deeply entwined: any insights into earlier readings will emerge only through the lens of later practices. Yet, following the not inconsiderable precedent of Erwin Panofsky, the task can be approached with sympathetic and at times creative violence. A key aspect of the process is identifying the range of critical disciplines enmeshed in these endeavours of recovery and reframing. What is involved is far more than an isolated act of textual close reading or performance history, whatever those terms may be taken to mean, although both have their functions in the process. The same is true of art-historical issues of medium, style and tradition, most particularly in terms of what might be conveyed through systems of reference known to contemporary artists and their audiences. Set within and around all these are concerns of theatre history. While illustrations may or may not offer evidence of individual performances, they may well allude to stage business, set design or larger conventions of design or action. At a more complex level, there is the difference between dynamic representation on stage and the static medium of print, which will involve the reader in further acts of negotiative interpretation. These must be carried on with an awareness that it is the illustrated edition, and not merely the illustration, that is the object of concern, intertwined with the effort to recover models of the reading experience that it offers. Beyond all of these concerns, yet implicit within them, are the larger assumptions of aesthetic style; the relation between textual editing practices in theatre and library, both scholarly and popular; the mechanics of book 25

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1 François Boitard: frontispiece to The Winter’s Tale, 1709.

production and sale; and the economic, social and in some cases political actualities of the time of publication and distribution. These concepts and problems are implicit within a notional first encounter with an image in an illustrated edition. Here, for purposes of comparison, are François Boitard’s design for Rowe’s 1709 Winter’s Tale (Figure 1), and Hubert Gravelot’s for Theobald’s All’s Well that Ends Well in 1740. Boitard’s image has clear implications of theatre in the curtain, forestage and what might well be a painted drop, with perhaps the shadow of a curtain before it, at the rear. But since the play was not performed between 1700 and 1709, when Boitard was in England, these elements must at most reflect a generalised theatricality, not a specific staging. Further, the design derives equally from a tradition of painting – the curtained throne at the right appearing in many earlier ceremonial images that reflect state visits or encounters between captives and victors. Subtle forces complicate these formal allusions. The sculptures in the niches to the rear 26

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play against the figure on the dais to the right, exploiting the ambiguity of the moment when Hermione apparently moves from sculpted likeness to human body. The poses of the two female figures at the wall on the left suggest the intense concentration of Paulina, who stands nearest the viewer, while she commands, ‘Music, awake her, strike!’ (5.3.98).4 The presentation of Leontes, hands open in amazement, deepens the mood. His placement at some distance from the figure, and on a physically lower plane, suggests to an audience trained to recognise symbols of rank that the returned Hermione is of far higher moral stature than he, reinforcing the longer truth of the play’s movement. To be fully effective, the engraving depends on the reader’s skill in decoding this breadth of reference and teasing manipulation of form. Allusion to text and performance merges with negotiation of artistic style and construction of meaning, the whole validated by the reader’s awareness and analytical skill. Contrast this with Gravelot’s All’s Well (Figure 2). Here the effect is made through a more immediate stylistic vocabulary, presenting in naturalistic manner an encounter in a street. Again, it cannot record a performance, the play receiving its first post-Restoration staging by Henry Gifford in 1741, the year after the engraving was published. The setting might be feasible in continental European theatre, but its deep recession is unlikely on the English stage of the time. Although some stage drops feature a perspectival recession showing a street scene, it is again unlikely that something of this kind would have appeared so early, given the continuing importance of a forestage and the period’s conventions of lighting. More important, perhaps, is the carefully developed chiaroscuro – impossible in any theatre of the period – that ensures that Helena and the Widow are in deep shadow before Bertram, Roussillon and a passable suggestion of the stage direction’s ‘whole army’. The gestures, too, are less reminiscent of the codes developed by Le Brun and others for stage and canvas, in which each separate passion has its own distinct facial countenance, instead reflecting the careful anatomical drawing skills that Gravelot developed during his stay in London. The use of attributes is carefully controlled, restricted to those that are instantly recognisable: the colours of the army are selfexplanatory, and the staff carried by Helena conveys the meaning of a traveller without demanding to be read as a pilgrim’s staff. The fall of drapery has a rococo elegance that moves the image towards the immediately fashionable, suggesting that the onlooker has encountered the scene on turning a street corner. In short, the stress is far more on a moment of action, presented with a vocabulary and technique wholly print-based, than on the larger conceptual thrust achieved in the composition and allusiveness of the Boitard, or the greater 27

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2 Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to All’s Well that Ends Well, 1740.

accumulation of detail or compositional rhythm necessitated in a contemporary easel painting. The scene invites the reader to respond emotionally rather than intellectually, experiencing a momentary encounter rather than speculating on an implied, though unspecified, consequence. The task presented is one of emotional contemplation of a moment, not conceptual decryption of larger movement and theme. This discussion suggests many of the approaches necessary to absorb the effect of these two representative images, and also raises questions that underlie the process. Fundamental is the sorting-out of the relations of each image with contemporary theatre, artistic style and reading practice. Another dimension, already encountered in Garrick’s letter to Hayman, is the selection of moment for illustration, with its consequent implications about the play itself. These lines of interpretive practice raise another question: to what kinds of reader are the images addressed, and how should we, in turn, define the experience they 28

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offer? It’s impossible, of course, to define all kinds of original readers, but certain principles can I think be established. One is the implicit consequence of style and the construction of idea within the images themselves. As E. H. Gombrich demonstrated in Art and Illusion,5 and Erwin Panofsky explored throughout his art-historical writing, structures of representation and methods of reader assimilation are matters of convention and consensus that change with systems of belief, philosophy and society. The present-day critic’s act of involvement must, then, to some degree, attempt to recover systems of meaning and construction at the basis of the reading experience offered. Not all contemporary readers, of course, will have been skilled in these techniques, but many would have gained them without conscious effort. They are part of the visual culture developed for and by any group with shared interests and habits, reading practices as various and complex today as in any earlier period or group. When we turn to relating the image to the play, the effect upon the reader is infinitely various, but we can and must distinguish between two major groups: those who have read the play before and those who come to it afresh. Elsewhere, I have called these the qualified reader and the new reader, the former used to denote limitation as much as preparation, by previous experience, not the successful negotiation of a contemporary examination.6 For the new reader, both images will be generally suggestive of concerns or event; for the qualified, they will reinforce or challenge earlier ideas of the play. Any present-day stance towards these images, and the others of which they are representative, should at least show an awareness of this duality, as well as of the skills of image assimilation in each period or generation. The question of reader response brings with it an issue fundamental to the working of a frontispiece, as stated in Garrick’s letter. By its placing, the frontispiece acts to define, in a variety of degrees and emphases, a key concept or key moment within the play before the verbal text is provided, in consequence suggesting the trajectory of action or an essential of argument or idea that will inevitably colour the reading experience to come. It is worth pausing for a moment here to recall that the word frontispiece comes originally from architecture, where it refers to the main frontage of a building, designed to reveal its purpose and character. Later, it was employed to describe what is now known as the title page, which often provided a visual, emblematic synopsis of the contents of the book – the series of diagnostic portraits clustering around the title in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1632) for example, or the complex iconography of the Folio of Ben Jonson’s Works (1616).7 When painted 29

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proscenium arches were introduced in the theatre in the mid-eighteenth century, they were described with the same word;8 but the fact that they were in place during all kinds of performances limited their conceptual and referential content, often to the presentation of classical figures of tragedy and comedy that had earlier frequently appeared in sculpted form to flank the acting area. From these earlier structures, the power of the frontispiece over the reader becomes clear: it will have a major influence on the experience that follows. For Shakespeare’s plays, this will most likely mean establishing the scene presented as a moment of climax in event or idea, stressing the nature of a role or relationship or, less frequently, revealing a particular issue as a major focus. Identifying precisely how this act of visual privileging functions, in itself and as part of the longer sequence of reading, must surely be a key component of any subsequent critical analysis, and a valuable part of any attempt to recover earlier interpretation. The earliest frontispiece engravings, along with the typographic title page, had another important function. Placed in the window of a stationer’s shop each drew attention to the volume’s contents, acting as an advertisement and, especially for the new reader, as what advertisers call a ‘tease’ by hinting at the action it contains. The practice is not confined to visual frontispieces. The early Quartos have title pages that declare in larger font the plays’ genres, performance history (‘As acted by . . . ’) and in some cases a climactic or celebrated event. Illustrated editions complement, supplement or in some cases conflict with similar titles if they include such references, as Figure 3 shows. Where for the editor or publisher (given Tonson’s business acumen it seems as likely to be his work as Rowe’s) the main events of Richard III are Richmond’s return to England and the battle that ends the play, for the illustrator it is the ghosts appearing to Richard in his dream – and interestingly this is the scene depicted in many subsequent editions, raising the question of the transmission of images in frontispiece treatment, something to which later chapters will return. As well as registering the insistence of commerce in driving the production of illustrated editions, the issue of selection raises another question. Do the images reflect prevalent stances to the plays themselves, and their moments of climax or resolution, or help generate them? The question suggests that a grasp of other interpretations, performed or written, should be at least part of the analytic process of reading these editions today. This in turn takes us back to the earlier question concerning the relations between images and performance, revealing the innate connections between all of the questions posed in the interpretation of illustrated editions, and the techniques they demand of the scholar. 30

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3 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Richard III, 1714.

The reading experience offered by the contribution of an illustrative frontispiece is a very specific one, but some of its elements are shared with the placing of images elsewhere in a printed edition of a play. A special caution must be applied to many eighteenth-century editions with pictorial frontispieces, which brings with it further implications about how the visual and verbal texts these combine were read then and should be approached today. The various ways in which editions could be bound, and often the sale of their illustrations as separate items, meant that individual copies contained engravings showing scenes in naturalistic settings or individual actors in character, the latter available separately. Many surviving copies include both kinds, bound in different locations according to the owner’s preference. This is especially true of Bell’s editions, which contain both portraits of actors in character and scenes from the plays set in naturalistic, not theatrical, surroundings. Some volumes bind the 31

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naturalistic scenes into the body of the play, placing them opposite the lines they illustrate. Others put the actors’ portraits in this position. The forms respectively present an imagined, non-theatrical visualisation of event, and a stylised account of an individual performance which may function as a recollection of one witnessed by the reader-purchaser-binder. To some extent, one privileges the play as a performative entity, the other as something constructed imaginatively through reading. But another physical form – in my experience the most common of those surviving – binds both images at the opening of each play, facing each other in a page opening as a new kind of double frontispiece. Such formal variation suggests that, just as each copy of the First Folio must be seen as an individual bibliographic statement, so bound copies of these illustrated editions must be seen as individual reflections of reader preference. The double frontispiece is unusual in other printed books of the time, separate plates usually being inserted as right-hand, or recto, pages, to avoid ‘offset’ – the imprinting of one image against the surface of the other. Their opposed placing is clearly the result of a conscious decision to make both simultaneously visible. This may be evidence of a specific dimension of reading, extending the practice of shared reading aloud to the discussion of the engravings and the readings they present. In a culture where conversation is highly regarded as a mark of cultural discernment, this seems not at all unlikely, although there is no tangible evidence to record such events; but the results of such conjunctions can often be surprisingly effective as critical comments. Figure 4 shows such a combination from a copy of the 1788 Henry V in the Folger Shakespeare Library, pairing an image of Sarah Siddons as Princess Katherine with one showing Pistol’s capture of a French soldier. Each may be read separately, the former as one of many presentations of the leading woman actor of her generation, invariably seen in profile to reveal elegant, sweeping gestures, and appealing as much to a cult of celebrity as to an interest in performance. The engraving of Pistol presents a scene that might be read as either an instance of nationalist triumphalism or a darkly comic undermining of such values. The omission of this scene in production by Kemble, Macready and, later, Charles Kean implies more than the independence of the illustration from stage practice, hinting at the discomfort the event produced in performers and audiences. When seen together, the two images offer a different interpretation. At a simple narrative level, the two aspects of the play, defined through widely separated social gradations, may be the dominant impression. Other readers might extend this to see a sharp, and ironic, contrast between the refined grace of Siddons as Katherine and the clumsy vigour of Pistol. But the juxtaposition 32

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4 Edward Burney and Philip James de Loutherbourg, frontispiece to Henry V, 1788.

invites more. The resemblance between the figures of Katherine and the French soldier, both presented in profile and in postures suggesting supplication, draws a visual parallel between the two engagements, bringing them together as variants of a single trope of conquest, in both cases linked with financial expediency. This acts as a counter to the more insistently heroic reading of the kind that would be expected from a presentation of the play at the end of the eighteenth century, made topical through current military engagements, opening a series of questions about contemporary political, as well as performative and critical, approaches.9 The argument against this reading is that it results from a binding process that does not necessarily rest on an interpretive decision by binder or purchaser. But no matter: the convergence is shown every time the reader opens the physical book, the visual pairing insistent even if subconsciously perceived. For the new reader, all kinds of links will be possible between the two images, which will in some measure define key elements of the action, much as the image on the cover of a present-day magazine privileges the article it illustrates. For the reader who knows the play, the references and the link may contradict or 33

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reinforce earlier assumptions – in parallel, perhaps, to the responses of a theatregoer seeing a new production of a play seen many times before. But in all these circumstances the encounter with the images affects the reader’s perception at a level that makes an early critical insinuation about the play’s structure and ideas. Further, the dual visualisation in itself makes a strong conceptual point about the twin identities of the plays themselves, as both entities realised in performance and patterns of events outside the theatre. The nature of the reading experience assumes a somewhat different identity for engravings placed within the body of the play, as practised for the first time in the Bellamy and Robarts edition. This material doubling, word and image together, makes possible the visual linking of events in the play that are individually of considerable, though not necessarily connected, importance in theme or narrative growth, affecting the reader’s construction of the play’s trajectory and ideas. The effects are immediately clear in Antony and Cleopatra, where the two engravings show Antony’s attempted suicide and Cleopatra’s death. The dual imaging redefines the effect of a frontispiece engraving with the result that the play’s structure of double tragedic climax is emphasised, showing Shakespeare’s formal innovation while also revealing the comparative failure of Antony’s effort, important at the level of plot and character. Another significance is shown by the physical placement of the engravings. A rare sheet of instructions to the printer, bound in error with one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies, reveals that precise instructions were given on where to place the prints. Again, however, editions exist in different forms – whether through error or personal preference it is impossible to say. My own copy places both images on right-hand pages (see Figures 5 and 6). Each event is given equal status, and the engagement with the death of Antony must, to a reader encountering the text for the first time in reading or simply leafing through the volume, have seemed at first sight to suggest a more usual tragedic progression; but this would surely have been displaced when the death of Cleopatra is revealed, in both word and image, as something of far greater consequence. The visual pairing thus becomes an important interpretive statement on a larger scale than the momentary, drawing attention to the play’s extension of tragedic structure. But this may not always be the case, especially when the different forms in which the edition survive are considered. In my copy the image of Cleopatra faces a page of text beginning with her final words:

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5 Edward Burney: death of Antony, 1788–91.

As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle – O Antony! – Nay, I will take thee too: – [Applying another asp to her arm]. What, should I stay, – [Dies. (5.2.35–7)

The page continues with the entry of the Guard, the death of Charmian, the entries of Dolabella and, finally, of Caesar. All occur opposite the engraving, effectively maintaining the view of the dead Cleopatra alongside them, intensifying both their importance and that of the death itself, which becomes a mute presence analogous with that on stage, where the body remains during the subsequent exchanges. One of the more complex tasks for the reader of a play is to remain aware of the presence of non-speaking characters: the visual 35

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6 Edward Burney: death of Cleopatra, 1788–91.

statement here makes this powerfully apparent, reinforcing the pathos of the death itself through its continuing force on the action. In this presentation, the current of the play is driven forwards; but a copy in the Folger collection invites a quite different response by the image being placed on a left-hand page (Figure 7). It faces Cleopatra’s speech beginning ‘Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have / Immortal longings in me’ (5.2.274–5). The engraving, showing Charmian lying dead beside Cleopatra and Dolabella leaning over her shoulder, anticipates events that will follow from Cleopatra’s speech on the facing page. This advances the action by showing events to come, but its larger effect is to slow, if not suspend, the reader’s progress through the play. Making the outcome inevitable, it adds to the pathos of the final speech, creating a narrative caesura or meditative suspension. Fundamental to this is the physical placement of the engraving, which forces the eye back, breaking the habitual left-right reading process. Image, word and 36

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7 Edward Burney: 1788–91, death of Cleopatra, second version.

the book’s physical making combine to produce a specific response to this climactic moment, the halt increasing its intensity in a manner that depends on the interaction of the two elements to generate a greater emotional involvement. This is matched by the general tenor of the image, which reflects contemporary sensibilité in selecting moments of feeling rather than rapid action. The placing recommended by the binding instructions produces an experience parallel to that of a stage performance; the earlier location offers something closer to the technique more frequent in a novel, holding back a moment of climax for maximal effect. Neither is preferable: each simply works in a different way. To the range of other aesthetic categories that must be considered when exploring the readings offered by the illustrated edition, then, must be added two more: the history of emotional presentation in visual texts, and the 37

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8 Adrian Ludwig Richter: ‘Shakespeare Holding up the Mirror to Dignified Guilt’, 1788–91.

engagement between the illustrated drama and the illustrated novel. Since the 1740s, when Hubert Gravelot provided engravings for Fielding and Richardson, images associated with prose narrative had reflected the growth of emotional engagement with action and character, and as the novel became the major literary form in subsequent decades it exerted an increasing force on the illustration of the plays of Shakespeare. A further reflection of contemporary affekt is revealed elsewhere in the Bellamy and Robarts edition: the allegorical frontispieces included in each volume. That for the Antony and Cleopatra volume is named, on the title page, ‘Shakespeare Holding up the Mirror to Dignified Guilt’ (Figure 8). The play is placed within this moral and emotional shadow, at the same time revealing something of a contemporary approach to tragedy and its protagonists. For the present-day reader this is something of a challenge, demanding a mindset that can accept both the emotional involvement of the death scene and the narrative statement 38

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of a moral criticism, and a visual treatment suggestive more of the Gothic novel than Shakespeare’s play. These structural variations reveal the need to see many eighteenth-century editions as individual acts of construction, or perhaps even as acts of adaptation – or, to use Garrick’s subtler term, ‘arrangement’ – which parallel those of production. When read, they are events that have their own performative actuality, both when absorbed by individual readers of different levels of experience and when rendered in a shared reading undertaken within small groups and the discussion which must, we may assume, have followed. Just as the adaptations and burlesques of the eighteenth-century stage are now seen as negotiations between a notional authentic text and a series of ideological, theatric, aesthetic and social currents, so the individual illustrated editions should be placed within these larger frames, and valued as individual presentations of the plays. All these elements must form part of any present-day attempt to explore, and clarify or, perhaps better, creatively confuse, the nature of these editions and the reading experiences they originally generated. Changes in the physical processes of book production in the first third of the nineteenth century, in particular due to the use of mechanical case-binding, render irrelevant some of, though by no means all, the practices discussed above, but they also introduce important new elements. Charles Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere reveals a wholly new method of play reading that does much to displace the reductive representation of the gulf between scholarly and popular editions of the plays. Knight’s approach rests on a clearly stated, though never fully argued, assumption of the importance of historical accuracy – that is, the presentation of the plays in a manner authoritatively showing the period in which their action occurs – which rested on genuine and extensive historical research. Knight breaks the plays by introducing at the end of each act a section of ‘Illustrations’, which contains visual depictions of specific places, costumes, customs or other elements as well as illustrations in the earlier sense of the word, exemplary and clarifying footnotes. The play is thus punctuated by visual and verbal annotations that contribute to a particular order of scholarly reading, one that focuses on then-fashionable antiquarianism rather than the apparatus criticus of scholarly editions. The result is to fracture reader involvement, working against the assumption that, since the plays have pictures, they are read in the same way as the illustrated serial novels which are their contemporaries, and denying the involvement offered by Bellamy and Robarts. Further, as the sections contain visual material to extend the commentary on the plays, so the use of images moves towards a similarly explanatory function: they clarify referential 39

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elements such as setting, costume or accoutrement, moving away from earlier images’ depiction of action or setting. Alongside his edition of Shakespeare, Knight produced a breath-taking array of educative publications, almost in personal embodiment of the Victorian work ethic.10 Two of the most widely disseminated were his Penny Magazine, which appeared between 1832 and 1846,11 and his history of London, published from 1841 to 1846.12 That the plays are being approached from a material, antiquarian basis, essentially the same as the stance adopted in these publications, is shown by the use of the same woodblocks in both. Thus, an image of the Bloody Tower occurs in both London and Richard III, and one of the Holbein Gate in both the former and Henry VIII. This use may perhaps be explained as a specific kind of textual annotation, but the sharing of material sometimes occurs within the plays’ text as a dramatic illustration, with, for example, the same woodblock used to show the banquet scene in Henry VIII and to support the discussion of Westminster Hall in London. But Knight’s edition is not wholly concerned with visualising material circumstance. The illustrated title pages – frontispieces in the older sense of the word – are generally what Knight referred to as ‘Imaginative embellishment’ to balance the ‘realities’ that were the basis of the plays.13 The result presents the reader with a complex of intellectual and imaginative involvement of a level perhaps greater than that of the frontispiece and textual engravings of Bellamy and Robarts. The intellectual gymnastics demanded for the comprehension of these visual and conceptual ranges reach their climax with Pericles,14 where the treatment of Gower suggests that original readers were capable of supple shifts of approach while turning the volume’s pages. The simple, materialist approach is taken in the presentation of the same wood engraving of Gower’s tomb as headpiece to the ‘Notice on the Authenticity of Pericles’ (Figure 9) that is used in the discussion of St Mary Overies in Knight’s London (Figure 10). That this occurs at the end of the play adds to the complexities established at its outset. The frontispiece title shows Gower in the foreground, and behind him what seems to be a representation of the play’s conclusion, suggesting his function as narrator (Figure 11). The ‘Persons Represented’ page which follows (Figure 12) shows Gower above the list of characters with, beneath, a storm-tossed ship. The visual suggestion in both complements the character’s liminal function, as presenterchronicler held between action and audience. The placing above the character list constructs this distance in a manner peculiar to the medium of the play in print, separating the reader even from the distanced involvement that Gower has on stage. Yet opposite this image there is a comparatively naturalistic engraving 40

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9 W. Archer: ‘Notice on the Authority of Pericles’, 1838–43.

of the play’s opening, with Pericles received by Antiochus and his daughter in a formal, classical setting appropriate to the play’s notional setting of Antioch. Knight’s authenticity is asserted at the end of Act 1, where the port of Tyre is shown as a small tailpiece in the style of a contemporary topographical engraving. In total the reader is presented a printed version of the distanced narrator, visually introducing characters to balance his theatrical function of introducing events; the events themselves; and an image of the geographical setting, a combination that suggests considerable sophistication in the assimilative and ordering skills demanded of the reader. At one level, in the storm and the image of Antioch, there is novelistic involvement; at another, in the presence of Gower, there is performative narration; and at yet another there is antiquarian visualisation of the play’s setting. To this must be added the quotations from Gower’s Confessio Amantis that are presented as verbal ‘Illustrations’ after each act, and the engraving of the Gower monument. All this suggests a skilled 41

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10 W. Archer: ‘Gower’s Monument’, Bell’s London, 1841–4.

control of a readerly engagement that has no difficulty in code-switching between an academic awareness of source and allusion, a grasp of the difference between the stage and print functions of Gower, and a novelistic immersion in character and event. And, of course, the sophistication is not only the reader’s, but also the text’s, in the transmediation of the play’s complicated structures into the form of a printed edition, which is itself presented at the intersection of scholarly and popular states. This response should not be taken to typify the processes followed by readers of all popular Victorian editions of the plays. While Knight’s volumes, and those of the other Victorian editors, lack the degree of variation in individual binding and location of engravings found in those of Bell, Bellamy and Robarts and others from the preceding century, they still exist in enough different material forms to instil caution in the critic attempting to recover their effect on the reader. Some later editions of Knight’s plays – those issued in bound volumes after the original serial issue and some of those issued in the USA – place the ‘Illustration’ sections together at the end of each play, and add engravings of 42

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11 J. Jackson: title-page illustration to Pericles, 1838–43.

different kinds, to offer the reader a more continuous text and a more immediate imaginative engagement. The most forceful example of variation in progressive versions of Victorian editions is shown in Howard Staunton’s Shakespeare, which went through a large number of subsequent printings in many different physical forms. Only in the Library Shakespeare of 1873–515 did it achieve its most complete integration between word and image, a relation allowed by the use of the original woodblocks within a much larger page and two-column setting of the text. The increased space makes possible the use of subtly paired images that anticipate action, draw out parallels, move the reader onward to new action, or control and define the reading experience in other ways. An image of Bolingbroke before Richard II appears opposite an image of the gardener being overheard by the Queen and her ladies, the symbolic link tightened by the gardener’s gesture (Figure 13). Earlier serial issues, and the three–volume 43

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12 Unidentified artist: illustration to ‘Persons Represented’, Pericles, Knight 1838–43.

edition, place the images further apart, so that their resonance is much diminished. So, too, is the contrast of the play’s modalities, the performative iconography of ritual statecraft in Richard and the symbolic realism of the gardener both revealed in visual conflict by the images’ opposition. At the time of this edition, the nature of the reading experience is made complex by its apparent similarity to that offered by the illustrated novel, which by this time has moved from the emotional and conceptual identity suggested in the Bellamy and Robarts edition towards something of larger currency and greater complexity. Yet, just as it is too easy either to dismiss or to venerate Boitard’s designs for Rowe as records of contemporary performance, it is misleading to see Gilbert’s edition as the consummation of the visual novelisation of the plays. As in the earlier medial relation, there is much value; again, as in the earlier relation, it is not what it seems. The diversity of the illustrations in their viewpoint and 44

13 John Gilbert: untitled illustration showing the garden scene from Richard II, 1865.

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location has taken over the function of the omniscient narrator – literally, in a sense, because all-seeing; but not all-depicting, since withholding of visual information is an important tool in the continuously illustrated edition’s equipment. It offers a control of progression, involvement and distance that parallels that of a narratorial presence, but the result is a performative reading of a rather different kind, since the detailed textual operations of dialogue and event are primarily – and, in most cases, initially – set by the play-text itself. Negotiation with the theatre, then, has been displaced by negotiation with other orders, not only the novel but the multiple forms of illustrated journalism that proliferated from the founding of the Illustrated London News in 1841, many of which employed the same artist-engravers who worked on illustrated Shakespeares. These intersections demand another relational awareness in any sustained critical address. What, then, does all this suggest for a critical approach to editions with illustrations, and the interpretations that may be deduced from them, for contemporary readers and for later scholars? One is that a range of disciplines needs to be brought together in any initial effort at understanding. Essential is a grasp of the larger aesthetic frames of the period of their production. The theatre is one, but only one: important also are contemporary artistic styles and methods of representation, and specific methods of reading associated with systems of belief or the organisation of knowledge. The physical processes of book production are also essential, as the earlier examples of the variety of bound forms have shown. There are other suggestive areas. Perceptual psychologists point out the importance in the Western tradition of elements on the right rather than the left: academics who lecture about images will generally stand on the side that is the audience’s left of the images they are discussing, to give greater impact to image than performer. Those responsible for the design of books or magazines know the value of a ‘tease’ image on the cover. Discussion of such aspects in the illustration of a play must also take into account the valid reading of the printed text, so that we are in a sense moving into the territory of classical reader response criticism, modified by the physicality of the textual object. Whether or not the structure offered to the reader is the product of an accident of binding is immaterial: it is still a powerful determinant of the reading. To them should be added elements such as the subscription lists, print runs and publication details mentioned in Chapter 1, along with further material such as advertising sheets bound with many later editions. There are also larger implications about the detail of critical practice. The fragmentation of literary studies has tended towards a separation of the multiple identities of textuality, isolating visual, literary, social, bibliographical 46

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and other forms. A more valuable approach would be quite the reverse, merging these and other aspects – resting on the etymology of the word (texere, to weave) – to use ‘text’ about the whole fabric of the individual illustrated edition: the material broadcloth from which the reading experience is sewn. In the creative confusion that it generates, this is a metaphor of, if not quite a parallel to, the earlier experience in its relation to the construction of the play in the mind of the reader. Construction – or, perhaps, production: it is, this chapter has argued, equivalent to a performance, and one in which the reader has a more active involvement in decoding, interpreting and bringing together the currency of the play through the unified fabric of word and image. These are issues as variable as they are insistent, acting in different ways on the reading of individual plays, as later chapters will demonstrate; but before them, the practical nature of the reading experience, in relation to that of witnessing a play in performance, must be addressed.

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CHAPTER 3

PERFORMANCE READING IN PRACTICE

The preceding chapter discussed the ways in which an individual image concerned with one of the plays may have its origin, and how the processes of printmaking and book design and manufacture act to determine the reader’s assimilation of the play. These elements are not dissimilar to the production and reading of an illustrated novel, but there is an essential difference, another force operating in the process of reading an illustrated play-text: its relation to seeing a performance in the theatre. Exactly what this is, how close and how distant, and in what directions the parallels move, demand careful consideration, given the importance of such editions as a primary contact with the plays. The process of reading itself, the interaction between physiology, acquired skill, convention and the individual, remains as mysterious as ever. Complex even in its everyday applications, like reading a newspaper or magazine, it assumes greater breadth in the approach to a literary structure that is intended for performance, has illustrations and is designed in the first instance for individual perusal. Beyond the design of individual illustrations, their possible relations to stage blocking or costume, the range of approaches these volumes may adopt to a play, and the ways in which they may aid in its construction by the reader, a larger question remains: what overall experience results from the process of reading a single play in an illustrated edition? How does the reading experience it provides resemble stage production, and how far does it constitute a new order of performance, constructed by the reader from the new material conditions of the publication? The questions are particularly insistent when editions set out purposely to reflect individual performances, and so offer what might be called an experience of performative reading – a term which, as will later emerge, may be defined in two quite separate ways. For this purpose, two editions are 48

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immediately relevant, and especially valuable in coming from different periods: Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition and the Henry Irving Shakespeare from the end of the nineteenth century. Bell’s edition proclaims its theatrical provenance from each volume’s title page, claiming that its text is ‘Regulated’ by the prompt-books of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. While important in claiming, if not always quite legitimately, to record the actual words used on stage, Bell’s volumes have much more, as well as much less, to offer. In them, a combination of features work to cede control over the plays to the reader, facilitating an experience that constitutes a new kind of performativity quite distinct from that of the theatre. Fundamental to the process are aspects of the material structure of the volumes: the illustrations to the plays, the notes on staging and character provided by Francis Gentleman, and the various forms the books assume when bound by the individual purchaser-reader. Until recently – and, as later chapters will show, reductively – conventional views of Shakespeare activity in the eighteenth century have drawn a rigid line between performance and scholarly editing: the former modifying the texts to suit contemporary canons of taste, the latter pursuing the illusory holy grail of a single authorial text by triangulating from Folio and Quarto to arrive at Shakespeare’s foul papers. It is in relation to this tradition of scholarship that Bell’s volumes appeared, claiming that – directed towards a different readership in some cases, particularly those based on Garrick’s performances – they reflect careful negotiation with their more celebrated equivalents in the construction of the plays as presented on stage. Perhaps because of their self-declared position outside the scholarly tradition, Bell’s editions have attracted little serious attention. Julie Stone Peters’ authoritative account of the relation between stage and published drama1 mentions them only in passing, and in general says little on the notion of performative reading. Laurie Osborne2 considers their treatment of Twelfth Night largely in terms of textual editing and rearrangement; Moelwyn Merchant3 unfavourably compares their frontispiece engravings with those in the editions of Rowe and Hanmer; and Jonathan Bate4 explores their use of illustrations as frontispieces in a discussion continued and in part contested by Peter Holland.5 The most extensive study, John Bell by Burnim and Highfill Jr., while including a thorough bibliographical account of the volumes, is concerned primarily with the images of actors they contain and does not address the larger experience generated for readers. I have discussed the editions in an earlier book,6 but mainly in terms of their readings of the plays as documents of interpretation; the larger reading 49

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experience, uniting image with text, was not my concern there, except insofar as it offered readings in the critical sense. Such absence of critical analysis is matched by a lack of concern with playtexts in theoretical reflections about dramatic forms. The work of Patrice Pavis7 focuses on the semiotics of performance, not its textual formulations; a similar reluctance is apparent in explorations of the reading process, perhaps because much of the language of narratology is inappropriate, resting as it does on the conventions of the novel. In one key sense, however, the discussion of reading suggests how the issue might be addressed. Tzvetan Todorov speaks of the reader’s ‘construction’ of the text and uses the word ‘audience’ almost interchangeably with ‘reader’.8 These terms hint at the special kind of performativity in Bell’s edition; yet the theoretical stress on the experience of novel reading, and the material forms that the genre was developing in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century, provide one of the firmest foundations for the textual construction. The various physical forms of Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition have been discussed in the foregoing chapters and need no restatement here, but one further point is important. The dual approach present in the issue of both scenes for the plays and portraits of actors in character demonstrates Bell’s commercial acumen in appealing to theatregoers as well as novel readers, but it also suggests a more complicated relationship with the stage, as will later become clear. That said, the declaration on the title page of each volume (Figure 14) claims the primary intent: Bell’s Edition of SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS, As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London; Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House BY PERMISSION; with Notes Critical and Illustrative; By the Authors of the Dramatic Censor

The opening words declare the work’s ownership of the texts in confrontation with earlier editions, known colloquially as ‘Theobald’s Shakespeare’ or ‘Johnson’s Shakespeare’. Its authority lies in the relation to performance asserted in the term ‘regulated’, suggesting a desire for authenticity deriving from the stage, validating performance practice above what would later be called the continuous copy of scholarly versions. Yet the opposition is not total. A different kind of parity is implied in the reference to ‘Notes Critical and Illustrative’. Johnson’s Shakespeare makes similar claims for ‘Illustrations’,9 both usages referring to critical explication rather than visual treatment. The immediate impression is that Bell’s volumes are competing with scholarly editions on equal terms, but primarily basing their authority on the theatre, not 50

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14 Title page to Volume 1, Bell’s Shakespeare,1774.

the archive. This is confirmed in the title pages of the individual plays, which assert publication ‘With permission of the Managers’ – either ‘Mr. Hopkins, Prompter’ from Drury Lane or ‘Mr. Younger, Prompter’ from Covent Garden. In this regard the texts are certainly performance-based editions, and a closeness to the theatre is maintained in the ‘Advertisement’ appearing in Volume 1. Here, Gentleman makes clear their intended readership and reading situation: as the theatres, especially of late, have been generally right in their omissions, of this author particularly, we have printed our text after their regulations; and from this part of our design, an evident use will arise; that those who take books to the Theatre, will not be so puzzled themselves to accompany the Speaker; nor so apt to condemn performers of being imperfect, when they pass over what is designedly omitted. (I.7)

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On the surface this would seem a reasonable justification. Certainly, the confusion felt by readers trying to follow stage action in any of the eighteenth-century editions would have been immense, with parts of the printed text cut or replaced by new material. Gentleman goes on to support the proposed use by claiming that the edition is not ‘meant for the profoundly learned, nor the deeply studious’ (I.10), again stressing an identity distinct from scholarly versions. Again, though, the opposition may not be as complete as Gentleman suggests. Following the script at a performance in itself seems an odd practice, albeit one more possible in the lighted auditoria of the time. It implies a particular kind of textual veneration in which live action requires validation in print, privileging a notional authenticity above involvement in performance. The degree to which the printed versions presented the actual texts performed may also be open to question. Garrick’s revisions of the text in King Lear, for example, may or may not be fully presented by Bell, as discussed more fully in Chapter 6. Elsewhere in his ‘Advertisement’, Gentleman describes the edition as a ‘Companion to the theatre’ (I.8). This suggests that it might have been used as a way of memorialising a performance, so that the play-text becomes inseparable from one specific theatrical event in something approaching the manner of present-day published screenplays. But comparison to such a volume, William Shakespeare’s Richard III, produced by Ian McKellen to record the 1996 film, reveals many differences.10 This contains the shooting script with full directions, copious illustrations and notes exploring and explaining facets of the production and how its staging was determined. As well as the ‘regulated’ texts, Bell’s volumes contain a cast list and stage directions taken from the earlier editions of Rowe or Pope; but they make no specific references to the productions whose texts they print. Perhaps more strikingly, they make no allusion to stage settings – a remarkable omission, given the employment of Philip James de Loutherbourg at Drury Lane since 1772 and the innovative nature of his designs for sets and lighting, although these were only fully evident a little later than the edition’s appearance. In all, the visual dynamic of the individual performance – its most immediately theatrical identity – is almost completely neglected. In one important way, however, the Bell and Loncraine volumes are similar: both stress the work of the editor or adaptor in their titles. The former is the first to adopt in print what had become the standard way of referring to an edition by its editor’s name, whereas the latter contains McKellen’s name three times on the title page and Shakespeare’s only once. In this both editions continue the approach implicit in the 1709 edition, where Rowe was selected as a successful playwright of the age to give greater force to Shakespeare, then seen as only one of many older dramatists. 52

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The move away from specific production continues in the short introductions to each play and many of the footnotes that refer to the theatre, but as general reflections on the play rather than performance records. One of the few exceptions is a short passage praising Garrick’s Macbeth, but even this is introduced by a qualifying statement that ‘it is not strictly within our design to speak of Performers’ (I.3). Larger judgements offered in the introductions are similarly revealing. Some refract views typical of the age: Timon of Athens ‘can never be interesting on the stage’ (I.79); Titus Andronicus ‘must be horrid in representation, and is disgustful in perusal’ (VII.3). Others are more idiosyncratic. ‘Whether this play, tho’ excellently wrote, has any chance for long existence on the stage, is very doubtful’ is the concluding assessment of Antony and Cleopatra (VI.261). The Winter’s Tale is similarly dismissed, with doubts that it ‘will ever do great matters on the stage’ (V.151). Other plays are discussed through comparisons between various adaptations. Two Gentlemen is cautiously lauded as ‘very adaptable for the theatre’ (VI.3); Shakespeare’s Lear is ranked above those of Tate and Colman, and Garrick’s Romeo and Juliet presented as ‘the best’ of the ‘many alterations of this play’ (II.85). These references to performance are in themselves infrequent, since most of the introductions discuss the credibility of plot, adherence to the unities and to decorum rather than theatrical effect and power, and in this they reflect in diluted form many of the critical preoccupations of the age – or, at least, Gentleman’s idea of them as something the readers wished to acknowledge. More suggestive are comments on Richard III and Twelfth Night. Of the former, Gentleman writes ‘Upon the whole it must always read well, but act better’ (II.3); of the latter, ‘Action must render it more pleasing than perusal’ (V.315). In any edition of dramatic texts, such claims read strangely, since they assume reading as the natural first approach to the plays. Here, they reveal a direction clearly at odds with the apparent concern to record staging. From all of this, it might appear that the editions occupy an uncertain territory between performance records and critical commentaries. Yet this is too simple a judgement. Two fundamental elements of the volumes allow the reader to construct a new order of performance: their general comments about the plays in the theatre and their frontispiece engravings, and it is the latter that most immediately provide both a link with the theatre and a move away from it. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. While the images do not in the main reflect performance traditions, either in general or for individual plays, they offer a visual construction which is absorbed by the reader as the first encounter with the play. Gentleman’s concern in his annotations is not with textual variants, and only rarely with glosses; instead, it is with suggestions about character and situation. From 53

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these, and from the frontispieces, the reader constructs an imagined performance, a performative reading in which verbal description matches visual suggestion. How this works in practice may be shown by looking in more detail at Macbeth. A note to the first page of the text offers general advice about setting: ‘Theatrical managers are highly culpable when they do not dress this play in the material, striking habits of the time and country’ (I.4). Another on the same page prescribes the treatment of the witches: ‘their expression should be outré, their appearance, as far as decorum will admit, haggard and rustic’ (I.3). A little further on, the main characters’ features are described: Macbeth requires a bold, graceful, soldier-like figure; strong marking features; a firm, deep, extensive voice. Banquo, being confined to level speaking, demands little more than a good external appearance. (I.8)

General character sketches, anticipating those of Hazlitt and others, are matched by advice on individual passages. A note to Act 1 Scene 7 gives this advice: Through this Soliloquy, and the following scene, Macbeth should have a dubious, hesitative [sic] cast of countenance, with full, solemn tones of voice; his Lady we expect to have a confirmed countenance, with spirited tones. (I.18)

The murder of Duncan ‘should be played in a tremulous under tone of voice, with a strong exertion of horror struck features, on the part of Macbeth; his lady’s countenance should express an eager firmness, touch’d with apprehension’ (I.23). These annotations move the text out of the province of recording actual performance into less clearly defined territory. In a sense they offer advice about performance, but since the editions are not intended for the use of actors their function is less clear. The concern for historical accuracy of setting, the physical attributes of characters and the delivery of individual passages all point in one direction: the texts are being annotated in terms of the descriptive vocabulary of the novel. The readers are being invited to imagine the performance with the psychological involvement produced in the process of reading what was rapidly becoming the dominant literary form. This kind of reading experience is further directed by the frontispiece illustrations designed by Edward Edwards. Owing nothing to the performances the edition claims to record, these instead belong to a different tradition in which the events are related to contemporary tastes for grandiose scenery or loosely historicised interiors, as reflected in fashionable painting styles that embody contemporary aesthetic and emotional concerns. Many present scenes that are 54

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briefly annotated by Gentleman, who praises their ‘picturesque’ or ‘Sublime’ quality, borrowing the terms from contemporary ideas of landscape and its emotional and, in the latter, physiological effects, as Chapter 4 will discuss further. Those that offer scenes not so described often feature moments of intense emotion, presenting them for the reader’s contemplation in the manner of the day. This is not to suggest that similar acts of cultural mediation did not occur on the stage; but the focus on such moments in engravings changes their meanings, offers them through a different set of conventions, and above all returns the control over the progression of the play – in choosing how long to examine the image before moving on through the text – to the individual reader. Edwards’ frontispiece designs explore the texts through a particular kind of mediated naturalism drawing upon conventions increasingly familiar in the novel. Hogarth had produced frontispieces to Butler’s Hudibras in 1721, but it was the influence of French designers, especially Hubert Gravelot, that decided the form’s main stylistic direction. Gravelot had produced images for Gay’s Fables in 1738 and Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1750, as well as engraving Francis Hayman’s designs for Pamela (1742) and Don Quixote (1755). Once more the newly negotiated space occupied by these editions is apparent in their response to pervasive and insistent cultural forms and the material and aesthetic forces that drive them. Gravelot’s work for the second Theobald edition is the crucial link between the two forms, to be strengthened in the majority of subsequent illustrative treatments of the plays. As well as lacking a close relation to performance, the images owe little to the specific identity of Bell’s edition. In accord with legislation, all the plates bear the dates when they were issued; most are from 1773, probably before the texts were published at the beginning of the following year. The suspicion that they were not produced from a reading of Bell’s texts is confirmed by the act and scene citations given beneath them, which in many cases refer to those established by Pope or Johnson rather than Bell. There is no record of how the scenes were selected for illustration. Perhaps they were chosen by Bell or Gentleman, who then gave instructions to the designer, which might account for the number that refer to moments praised in notes. It is just as likely that Edwards himself chose the scenes on the basis of the popular taste that was also the foundation of Gentleman’s comments, in which case the images may or may not relate to the high points of the productions whose prompt-books they reproduce. The distance between performance and frontispiece is confirmed by the further volumes of the plays, the ‘Continuation’ issued in 1775. Although containing the plays excluded from the current London repertoire, they adopt an identical form 55

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15 Edward Edwards: frontispiece to Macbeth, 1774.

in terms of introduction, notes and use of engravings: it is only their texts that reveal these later plays as not resting on contemporary performance. Whatever their origins, the images have a major impact on the reader’s experience of the text. Occurring opposite the title pages, their particular brand of fashionably stylised naturalism is consequently imprinted on the imagination at the outset; perhaps, as Derrida puts it, each image of this kind ‘restores in authoritarian silence an order of presence’.11 Like the notes to the play, the engraving to Macbeth (Figure 15) reveals the particular nature of the reading experience offered by Bell’s edition. It is clear immediately that the image cannot represent a stage production. However powerful de Loutherbourg’s stage effects, they could not reproduce the actuality of the boiling cauldron, the airborne snake or the naked child. To this should be added the other function of the image in determining the trajectory of action and idea. In the case of Macbeth, this privileging follows a contemporary reading, which sees the play as primarily concerned with the supernatural, 56

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and perhaps presenting the cauldron scene as the action’s turning point in showing Macbeth’s realisation of his seduction by the witches. Implicit in the act of selection is a critical reading, so that the frontispiece inevitably colours the reader’s approach from the initial encounter in a manner quite different from stage action, replacing its dynamic change with a moment of certainty. Presentations of a scene as climax or crisis occurs in many, but not all, of the plays. Illustrations of Isabella’s pleading with Angelo in Measure for Measure, or the encounter of Stephano and Trinculo with Caliban in The Tempest, for example, may be seen as similar critical readings of plot and theme. Elsewhere, the images work differently. The presentation of Malvolio cross-gartered before Olivia, and the appearance before the mechanicals of Bottom with the asshead, suggest themselves as moments of action not necessarily pivotal. Others are more complex. For Hamlet, Edwards shows Hamlet and Horatio before a reasonably naturalistic rendering of a Gothic church, Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull. The captioning text is brief: ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ The scene is not a turning point in the play’s action, but the engraving nonetheless significantly defines the ensuing reading experience by presenting a general meditation on mortality, suggesting in its sense of melancholy at the transience of life a mood that colours the reader’s encounter with the whole play. In moving the reader away from the forces of revenge that ostensibly direct the plot, it suggests a distance from contingency that makes visible the text’s larger reflections, and may also reflect the common contemporary attraction to this scene. In assimilating this mode, whether at a conscious or subconscious level, the reader constructs the play as a text concerned with the larger operations of time and morality, downgrading the activity of the first scenes and emphasising Hamlet’s concluding judgement that ‘the readiness is all’ (5.2.194–5). The result is a reading that moves above the vicissitudes of the action – a performance filtered through a tone of acceptance conveyed visually at the outset, something quite different from the dynamic shifts of a stage presentation. The reading is enhanced when the image is seen alongside Gentleman’s note to the first appearance of the gravediggers. Praising the ‘moral reflections occasioned by the grave’ (II.207), he sees these as compensation for their ‘quibbling humour’ and voices regret that Garrick has ‘too politely frenchified his alteration of this piece’. The notes serve morally to privilege the whole scene, intensifying the experience when the image was first read and reinforcing its moral rightness: image and annotation combine to facilitate a performance of reading. In perhaps revealing frequent contemporary responses to the plays, 57

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some of these images may augment our knowledge of late-eighteenth-century cultural preferences, but once more this occurs in a general way rather than by documenting a particular staging. The portraits of actors in character commissioned for the edition’s later printing work in a similarly compound way. While apparently pulling the volumes back into the conceptual arena of theatrical record, like so many other aspects of the Bell editions the portraits occupy their own perceptual territory. Showing only an individual actor against a plain white background, they make no pretence at revealing scenography or dramatic event. The figures are presented in histrionic postures placed within the play by the quotations as captions, which either present static ‘points’ familiar in individual performers or show the stereotypical ‘passions’. The effect is to freeze action into single declarative poses, throwing the interest onto the actors as performers rather than roles within a larger continuum. In short, while the engraved scenes drew away from the theatre towards the modified naturalism of novel illustration, the portraits move from dramatic continuity towards the cult of the individual actor, a sub-set of the fashion for collecting images of notable figures that was well established by the final quarter of the century, as Marcia Pointon has shown.12 They offer a parallel to the plays’ texts in the carefully circumscribed extent to which they record performance: like them they offer a restricted view of the stage, showing a single character with no larger representation of the play in the theatre. The accuracy with which they show individual actors may also be limited: as Burnim and Highfill suggest (27), the gestures are so stereotypical that they can hardly be restricted to single performers. As Bell’s play-texts purport to offer a record of the words, these images suggest little more than a documentary record of the costumes, with perhaps some hints at conventions of gesture and posture. The portrait engraving shown alongside the gravediggers’ scene, ‘Mrs Lessingham in the character of Ophelia’, presents the performer like almost all the actors in character in a left-hand profile. Its most immediate function is to place Ophelia at the centre of the action, significantly colouring the play in the reader’s mind. Wearing a dress covered in flowers, and with more in her hair as the conventional sign of madness, she extends her right hand in demonstration of the caption: ‘Here’s rue for you’. The result, even with the limitations of the image, is to suggest considerable distress: read as a frontispiece, it imbues the play with a mood of loss and distraction. The two notes that Gentleman provides for the scene reinforce this, but 58

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through their analytical tone they also inhibit the reader’s identification with performance: The transitions of Ophelia’s frenzy are extremely well conceived for representation, and render her a very interesting subject; too much extravagance, or a figure too much dishevelled, should be avoided. The author has fancied Ophelia’s madness well and affectingly, and furnished it with suitable expression; we like the object, are entertained with her flights, and commiserate the frenzy. (III.198 n)

Taken with the engraving’s near-diagrammatic presentation of the figure, the notes once again distance the reader from any individual production. If any reference to the theatre is made here, it is done in response to the suggestions of how the character should and should not be played. Yet instead of a novel, this allusion is a piece of elementary dramatic criticism resting on character, a further kind of reading experience. Bell’s inclusion of the characters reveals his awareness of changing fashions of thought, another instance of commercial and aesthetic forces coming together, making available images of actors in character, hitherto the preserve of the wealthy through commissioning paintings or buying larger engravings, to those who could afford a few pence for each paper-bound serial part or an individual print. In larger terms, the scenes and characters present two different forms of visualisation that are metaphors of performance: one moving dramatic interchange into an imaginative experience of event, the other offering formalised bodily presentations of feeling which allow a degree of emotional empathy between reader and role. Seen critically, neither is wholly theatrical in origin or form: both offer a metaphor of theatre that makes the reader aware of its artifice. It is not through actual performance records but through this essentially distancing effect, emphasised when the two kinds of image are bound facing each other, that the two reveal the articulations of theatre. Reading experiences are further determined by the circumstances in which the text is encountered. Using the volumes to follow the action in the theatre is only one of many such sites: others would include reading as a method of remembered construction after a performance or, in the case of the ‘Continuation’ volumes, as a way of exploring the reasons why certain of the plays never reached the stage. It is also reasonable to suppose that many of the plays were read by those with no experience of live theatre. Colin Franklin has suggested that their replication of texts more in accord with contemporary taste gave them a wider appeal – their omission of material deemed 59

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improper for the stage making them attractive to family audiences.13 But this does not convince. Many of the more controversial passages are not only included but emphasised. In the first volume, for example, Iago’s warning ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ is set in italic, with a note saying that the lines ‘for the sake of decency, should be omitted, though usually spoken’ (I.154). Another material circumstance is significant. As well as in duodecimo volumes, the plays were offered on ‘royal paper’, producing a much larger volume, but the subscription list shows that very few purchasers – almost exactly ten per cent – chose this format. This immediately reveals the volumes’ more widespread forms as an edition to be read privately, unlike the royal paper ones that were perhaps the focus of shared reading and discussion or were used as furniture books, unopened testimony to their purchasers’ sophistication. Taken with the aspects discussed above, this physical variation reveals Bell’s edition as a document of considerable flexibility that, both in its material structure and in the way it is read, allows the individual reader to control and define the plays’ unfolding and their larger significances. In this process the reader negotiates between stage and library through multiple relations of text, engraving and annotation to establish a dynamic experience of the plays that offers neither a record of production nor an object of scholarly analysis, but instead a new kind of exchange that might best be termed a performativity of reading. With what validity, then, may the term ‘performance edition’ be applied to Bell’s Shakespeare? The inclusion of cast lists and presentation of costumes are valuable records of contemporary productions; but we should be careful when seeing the texts as exactly those used in performance. As is now accepted, Garrick approached the texts very much as variable structures, implementing small changes in those with longer runs as he moved closer to Shakespeare, as the later discussion of his King Lear will make clear. The volumes do not, then, come close to recording actual individual productions. The features that most precisely define the editions’ individual nature in distinction from the scholarly editions of Johnson and Malone are their notes on character and situation, the former stressing physical attributes, the latter historical accuracy of setting; their frontispieces elevating individual moments within stylised naturalistic settings; and their depictions of individual actors. These offer the reader a serial experience that facilitates the development of a performance resting not on the theatre but on the imaginative reconstruction of action. In this they are indeed a performance edition; but the performance is that of the interior experience offered by the novel, not of the theatre. In this they mark an important departure in the assimilation of Shakespeare – the plays, the author60

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construct, the national cultural emblem – by an increasingly significant proportion of the reading public. What emerges from this field of conflicting forces is the underlying paradox of Bell’s editions. From their multiple material and experiential forms, the reading is constructed in a manner potentially as individual, various and carefully crafted as a performance, but unique to the individual reader: the performativity of reading is constructed from text, illustration and theatre practice and, for many, becomes the performance by which Shakespeare the text and Shakespeare the cultural phenomenon are assimilated.

II Circumstances in a much later period, dealt with in some very different ways, are evident in what might be termed an equivalent to Bell’s work, which allows comparison over an extensive period to broaden the concept of performative reading. Known familiarly as the Henry Irving Shakespeare, this edition reveals in its assumed title one of the grounds of its popularity in naming the most famous Shakespearean of the age, but also raises perplexities about the relation between text and production. Do the volumes present a record of the plays as performed at Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, or a series of quite separate suggestions for how they might be produced by subsequent companies? Are they instead designed for the private, individual reader, to be approached separately from any stage rendition? And, most insistently for the present concerns, how do Gordon Browne’s copious illustrations to the volumes reflect, record or depart from stage practices? Taking these and other complexities together, we are left with the familiar larger question: how do the volumes configure the plays for readers encountering the plays for the first time, those who know them from frequent performances or those who have read the texts in earlier editions? Some of these questions may be answered explicitly from the prefatory material with which the series was issued although, as always, this must be treated with caution. One of the most direct claims concerns the text itself. Passages from every play are enclosed between square brackets and framed by wavy lines, to suggest that they may be cut. Although not claimed to reflect Irving’s performances, in many cases they rest closely on his own practice, so that the volumes are often referred to as an ‘acting edition’. If they do reflect Lyceum staging, the cuts clearly make the edition valuable for readers anxious to recapture and prolong the experience in the theatre, and as a source for the theatre historian. But the preface claims instead that such passages are those that may be ‘easily or desirably omitted without breach of continuity, in reading 61

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16 Gordon Browne: headpiece to Romeo and Juliet Act 1, 1888–92.

the play to public or private audiences, and in representing it on the stage’ (‘Prospectus’, 2). Amateur producers and would-be thespians were a large and growing constituency at the end of the century, so this makes sense as a marketing ploy; but the material form of the volumes argues against it. The large quarto volumes, bound in gold-tooled boards and with text in double columns, do not lend themselves to use in rehearsal. Nor do the full contents of the volumes, embracing stage history, literary history, glossarial footnotes and several pages of appended longer notes. The presence of illustrations adds a more insistent complexity. Do they attempt to record the actuality of stage performance – Irving’s or some other’s – or do they locate the action within an imagined world closer to novel or art-engraving? The text of Romeo and Juliet, one of Irving’s most celebrated – yet much derided – productions, which engages most directly with the potential conflicts between stage, study and recreational reading, offers a point from which these concerns may be approached.14 The sixteen wood engravings after designs by Gordon Browne are listed in the volume’s preliminary pages as ‘Passages and Scenes Illustrated’, a heading that suggests their compound identity, existing across visual treatments of textual elements and records or projections of stage enactment. The images confirm this range. The very first, the headpiece to Act 1 (Figure 16), shows what is in 62

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many ways the central driving event of the play: Romeo in flight after killing Tybalt. This is a vivid presentation of action, but its importance goes further. Coming at the outset of the play, it suggests it to be a tragedy of action and dynastic conflict, not one of personal loss. This defines the play’s movement to a new reader, and suggests a new and perhaps unexpected force to a reader familiar with earlier Victorian productions. The new reader may also find it puzzling, since it relates to an event from the third act, not the first, and so does not offer an immediate involvement in the play. Its function is similar to earlier uses of a pictorial frontispiece as a pointer to future action and an implication of the play’s climax, teasing new readers as well as offering an interpretation to confirm or deny an earlier approach for those familiar with the text. It offers a reading of the play – an interpretation by the illustrator, as well as its experience by an onlooker – that, right at the start, moves away from most other configurations of the play, presenting it in a manner peculiar to the illustrated edition, and with a result attainable only within such a form. Images in the pages that follow adopt different stances, to produce different reading experiences. Some show individual characters at specific points; others show small groups in naturalistic settings beyond the stage. Some address textual passages more incisively. The largest of these is a fullpage image, interpolated in Act 1 Scene 4, with the caption ‘Mercutio. O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.’ What is striking here is not what is shown but what is omitted. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech is one of the play’s great set pieces, and one that seemingly cries out for treatment in its visual images of fairy possession. Henry Fuseli presented it, adding allusions to Milton’s L’Allegro, in Fairy Mab, a painting of 1815–20;15 Hector Berlioz transformed it into the ‘Queen Mab Scherzo’ of his Romeo and Juliet symphony of 1839. Browne’s image rejects any direct treatment, and instead presents a group of characters with Mercutio at their centre about to deliver the speech. It is almost perverse in its rejection of both the language of the speech and the nature of illustration and action, showing neither the grotesque fantastic of the text nor any episode of immediate, pure, theatrical action. Instead, it presents something close to the speech being delivered on stage, showing theatre at its most directly declamatory, complicating the ways in which the play’s visual stances operate on the reader in presenting performance. The aspect of Irving’s production that attracted most attention was the beginning of the tomb scene. Its effect rested on an extremely elaborate stage design by William Telbin, which made the actor descend an immense staircase 63

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17 Gordon Browne: illustration to Act 5 Scene 3, Romeo and Juliet, 1888–92.

of more than forty steps, a descensus averni which functioned as a powerful, undisclosed symbolic preparation for the play’s climax. The design was copied and reproduced in fashionable magazines, its visual force attributable to the fact that it did not in any sense illustrate an aspect of the play’s text but was as much an addition as the ‘Historical Episodes’ of Charles Kean’s Henry V and Richard II of the 1850s. The printed version rejects this completely, and the text gives no mention of the great descent in its stage direction or notes. Instead it offers, opposite his final words to Balthasar, an image of the Friar hurrying to the tomb (Figure 17). Beneath it appears the scene’s opening line, the Friar’s ‘Saint Francis be my Speed!’ The speech from which the words come appears on the verso page opposite the image, the distance between the two continuing the urgency across the intervening exchange with Balthasar, compressing rather than adding suspense as does Telbin’s design. Compared, the two versions represent quite different constructions of dramatic rhythm: one in the theatre working through scenographically driven action, the other functioning in the printed book through careful structuring of verbal and visual mise-en-page. 64

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18 Gordon Browne: final illustration to Romeo and Juliet, 1888–92.

The final image (Figure 18) further defines the relation between production and print. It shows the Prince standing behind the lovers’ bodies, flanked by the other characters. What seems a highly static, purely visual presentation of the play’s resolution is in fact something much more interdisciplinary. The image is a close copy of the very end of the play in Irving’s production, where the two lovers are held in a moment of stillness before the final curtain, a moment known as a ‘tableau’ in the terminology of the time. Its accuracy is suggested by its resemblance to written accounts of the scene, and to other visual records such as that in the Dramatic Notes of the following year.16 Such tableaux were often constructed to imitate famous paintings, often by Old Masters or, where this was not possible, to attempt the kind of composition and lighting found in them, dignifying the action through association with high art. The result in the printed edition is a bewildering fusion of genres and impulses: a wood engraving seeking to record a static moment in a dramatic current that is itself designed to mimic the design of a painting. Further complication is added by the text at this point. Irving’s production cut almost the entirety of the Friar’s explication of events. The printed text enfolds lines 222–308 within square brackets, a revision that moves directly from the Prince’s ‘meantime forbear, / And let mischance be slave to patience’ (220–21) to his, and the play’s, final couplet: ‘For never was 65

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a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (309–10). Silence; the tableau held; curtain. Clearly this is not simply an acting edition, either as a record of one performance or a preparation for another, although it certainly leans towards the latter. At the same time, it has the hallmarks of a scholarly edition, encased in the usual carapace of essays and annotations. But it is also an illustrated edition, offering a different reading experience from both the other kinds. The illustrations move in and out of allusive forms, shifting from novelistic action to character study, from the initial interpretive statement that suggests the volume’s main identity as an illustrated text as much as the play’s narrative fulcrum, to the final conversation piece that resonates with echoes of performance striving to imitate painting. The images construct a rhythm for the play and control the reader’s pace through it, leading onwards to some moments of action, glancing back at others, pausing to contemplate character, and forcing the reader to halt altogether to examine the Queen Mab speech by turning the book and lifting the interleaving tissue that protects it. All these mark it as a configuration that can only exist in print, as valid as any other version of the play, although more permanent because of its physical form. There is, though, something far more contingent, and ultimately transient, about the configuration that it offers. Every reader will bring to it her or his own experiences and assumptions, from earlier readings and viewings, perhaps, or in their total absence. Every reader, too, will take away a contribution to an individual construction of the play, a konkretisierung that will form whatever she or he understands by Romeo and Juliet as a term in recollection and conversation, be it scholarly, performative or emotional. Central to this process must be an awareness, at some level, of the unattainability of a single, original and unchallenged text to which all others are subordinate. In both these aspects lies the value, paradoxical as it may be, of such editions in general and this one in particular. The multiple nature of the edition reveals the complexity and fallibility of the concept of true Shakespeare. Further, as a direct consequence of this, the multiple intersections, allusions and practices of such an edition, and the rhythms and progresses they generate, take on a new function. They become the basis for what is the last act of configuration, that which we all construct in the reading and exploration of the plays and which, ultimately and paradoxically, gives them a value that is both immanent and fugitive.

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CHAPTER 4

SHAKESPEARE PAINTING AND AESTHETIC IDENTITY

Since they were much more widely available, images in printed form rather than easel paintings have been the concern of the preceding chapters, in an effort to relate their treatments of the plays to perceptions of theatre and play-text within a broader range of circumstance and direction. They did not, of course, exist independent of paintings. Many, most conspicuously the large Boydell prints, are reproductive engravings, but there are other ties that bind the forms together. Matters of technique – line engraving, stipple, mezzotint and combinations of these and others – are insistent and perhaps more immediately relevant in offering a variety of forms that influence the reader’s response in comparison to what might, with a few important exceptions, be seen as the more standard techniques of oil on canvas. Larger principles of the selection of moment and the design of composition are common to both. But there is much that keeps the forms apart. The scale of oil paintings allows more freedom than the design of a frontispiece engraving, and the variety of possible formats gives comparable scope. The production of images commissioned by connoisseurs familiar with traditions of technique tightens the link between painter and viewer; alternatively, those painted without a commission may free the artist from restrictions of accepted form. At one extreme, the production of oil paintings allows an intersection with traditions of depiction that elevate the works to the stature of Old Master works, increasingly the objective for some; at another, experimentation is made more possible without the restrictions of a print-buying market or demandingly conservative patrons. Economic factors are as strong with works on canvas as with those in print; relations with theatre become modified by intersections with actors and the traditions of portraits, of both individuals and groups on stage. Since these elements lie at the foundation 67

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19 Valentine Green, after Johann Zoffany: David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth, 1776.

of Shakespeare paintings, it is logical to begin with their discussion in relation to a single image, before progressing to broader issues of its design, critical relation to text and staging, and the theoretical concepts of its time. An image which well demonstrates these elements is a painting now known as David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth (c.1768).1 Like many images of the period it exists in two versions, the origin and provenance of both somewhat unclear. One is now in the Garrick Club, London (Plate 3); nothing is known of its ownership before its presentation to the Club by Charles Marshall in 1833.2 The other, almost certainly the earlier version, is now known largely as a mezzotint by Valentine Green, made while the painting was owned by the artist and man of letters George Keate, and published by John Boydell on 30 March 1776 (Figure 19).3 At some time in the later nineteenth century the 68

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painting was acquired by the Maharajah of Baroda (1863–1939), and then passed to the Museum of Baroda which opened in 1914, where it remains. The form in which the painting was reproduced is notable in itself. Mezzotint is one of the finest reproductive techniques but also one of the most fragile, depending on scraping down small points made on the copper plate by a toothed roller, to give a subtle range of tonal gradations in the finished print. The number of impressions is far lower than those for other printed forms using copper plates, and marginal in comparison with engraving on steel or wood, the usual practices from the 1830s. Mezzotint is again part of an economic as well as an aesthetic milieu, restricting the experience of the image to the relatively well off – perhaps the middling sort living in the newer circles and terraces in the courts and squares of London, Bath and other cities expanding after the sale of grand residences in town, whose names figure prominently in the subscription list for Boydell’s Shakespeare prints at the end of the century. Valentine Green was probably the most skilled mezzotint artist of his generation, but the technique itself imposes its own nature on any subject, largely in the deep, velvety blacks and subtleties of chiaroscuro of which it is capable, and which may draw attention away from detail. Mezzotint was, however, Zoffany’s favourite reproductive medium, no fewer than thirty-two of his paintings appearing in this form before the Macbeth print. It was, as Mary Webster remarks in the fullest and most recent discussion of the artist, ‘a welcome sideline’,4 and it is more than likely that the artist had this in mind while the canvas was completed. The exchange again reveals the intersections of forms and the commercial bases of artistic endeavours, but also one of their paradoxes. While reproduction made the image a little more widely available, and certainly increased the artist’s income, the chosen medium worked against the more complete representation of staging by its emphasis on extremes of chiaroscuro. The painting features in many discussions of Garrick’s performance, especially in relation to his use of facial expressions to suggest deep, and rapidly changeable, emotions. It may also convey important information about costume, Garrick’s court dress confirming written accounts of his preference for this and, as recently suggested, Mrs Pritchard’s dress reflecting the presence of King George more fully than the simpler costume of the earlier version.5 These claims need corroboration to be valid; paradoxically, the painting’s value as record thus depends on its validation from other sources, since the costumes themselves no longer survive. But there are times when written accounts work to enrich the image in ways that draw together individual performance and larger 69

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concepts of the play. When George Christoph Lichtenberg saw Garrick on stage he remarked that his wearing such a costume emphasised the strength of his movements through the strong diagonals it produced.6 In citing this, Allardyce Nicoll remarks that, while to some contemporary viewers, already accustomed to more authentic depictions of historical costume, the dress would have been incongruous, it would not have seemed so, ‘let us say, in 1710’.7 What for Lichtenberg was remarkable as acting technique is to later viewers forceful in another way, working much like a later modern dress production – Alec Guinness’ 1938 Hamlet, say, which shocked by suggesting the present-day relevance of the action. Nicoll’s reference to 1710 is suggestive in another direction. As Chapter 8 will show, the frontispiece to Rowe’s Othello shows the central figure wearing almost exactly the same costume as Garrick in Zoffany’s painting. To us, it is striking in what it suggests; to the audience of the time, it was routine. Just as these elements will vary between viewers of different periods and expectations, so will the image’s selection of moment. There is no surviving contract or letter of request, such as Garrick’s own advice to Hayman quoted earlier, although one might well have been given to the artist. Like the frontispiece images discussed elsewhere, as a frozen moment in the play’s continuum it suggests a trajectory for the play by privileging this event. It may thus suggest a number of readings, for example presenting Lady Macbeth as the principal instigator of the murder, although its aim to present two famous actors in character would have been the main concern, as much as the desire to show the relative importance of the two characters in the play’s action. The idea of its representing the experience of seeing the play in the theatre rather than recording figures and costumes is similarly fragile. The high viewpoint suggests a gallery seat, but the closeness to the stage precludes this; and the view from the very centre is similarly unlikely for all but a few spectators. As a box set of three sides, the scene depicts something not accomplished in the theatre until 1820s; and the lighting is more extensive and nuanced than anything provided by the central candelabra that was the main form of the time, hinting again at intended reproduction in mezzotint. In all, it is one artist’s configuration of a fragment of performance, seen through the filter of aesthetic style and individual reading; more a metaphor of the performance, we might say, than a precise archival record, which serves to suggest the idea of staging rather than either its actuality or the experience of an audience member. These discussions raise a question that is my main concern here, and has long been so elsewhere. How should we approach paintings of scenes from 70

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Shakespeare’s plays on the stage in a manner that validates their own identity as aesthetic objects? So often, they are seen as objective records of performance, scenography and costume, when there are so many other forces at work. Their intersection with the play as edited as well as performed is one, but others are the larger forces of style, production and display that direct visual forms of the period. Insistent in paintings that notionally present actual performances, the same questions arise in paintings of the plays which, for a number of reasons resting either on choice or circumstance, have no identifiable relation to staging. Even the most apparently straightforward images are to some degree conceptual readings of the texts, offering what one of the most important critical writers on the subject has called ‘visual criticism’.8 Yet they also exist within larger contemporary forces of style, medium, technique and contemporary theories of painting, and their discussion simply or largely as instruments of interpretation denies their individual aesthetic identity. Finding a balance between these forces must be added to explorations of value as theatric records, together guiding any sensitive and inclusive response that involves a series of academic disciplines and interpretive stances too often held apart. Zoffany’s painting exemplifies contemporary stylistic practice in many ways. In execution it follows standard patterns of composition, with a central pair of figures surrounded by details of setting, and in execution it is a highly finished, near-ceramic texture devoid of visible brush strokes. The figures are presented on a single datum line, resembling the design feature based on frieze-like compositions then thought to represent classical painting. In this it is closest to the genre of conversation painting: group portraits in which two or more figures are shown in settings representing their homes or other relevant places. Sometimes they are shown with emblematic or personal details, or aspects of setting that locate them precisely within family or social status. Zoffany was one of the most popular painters in this manner; many of his works remain in private hands having been passed down through the families whose ancestors they represent, as a glance through the catalogue of an exhibition held by the National Portrait Gallery in 1977 will quickly confirm.9 One aspect of stylistic interchange is apparent. Comparing the Macbeth image to one of the few conversation pieces in public ownership, George, Prince of Wales, and Frederick, later Duke of York (1764)10 reveals the likeness, with two figures in the central foreground and the setting essentially a box set. The similarity, and Zoffany’s success in both theatrical and social conversation pieces, makes clear that the two were by no means seen as aesthetically, or commercially, distinct. By the later stages of his career it is hard to say which influences the other, so closely 71

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entwined have they become. That the lighting of the Macbeth images is more extreme than that of the conversation paintings ironically confirms rather than denies the relationship, since it attempts to place the events within a setting naturalistic rather than theatric; and the inclusion of the Thane’s arms and image of the king, paralleling ancestral portraits in the background of aristocratic portraits, further mimics the familial details in the domestic interiors. Before expanding this discussion through some further examples, one further point remains about Zoffany’s Macbeth. The reproduction in these pages is of one version of the painting and one copy of a mezzotint, both reproduced at a much smaller scale in a medium that dilutes their original qualities. To the transmediation of painting into print, with all the consequences of the change from colour to monochrome, brushwork to scraped metal, anonymous presentation to caption and quotation, and not least a difference of viewing circumstance from private gallery to bourgeois interior, are added those of size and present-day printing. We should not, I think, be too concerned about the loss of the individual work’s ‘Aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s term;11 but we should certainly be aware of the social and material changes that drive the production. Certainly its accessibility is wider than that of the two painted versions, even though a mezzotint may only produce a small number of impressions, often less than one hundred, and its consequently higher cost limits its viewership still further. Another degree of transmediation in the image seen here is that of size and circumstance. The painting and the mezzotint have undergone a double change, both by being reproduced through a process of electronic scanning and letterpress printing or internet transmission, and by appearing within an academic analysis driven by imperatives far removed from those of their first viewers. Such shifts are inevitable, and valuable; but at every step something of the image’s meaning, as form, as reference, and in viewing situation, is redefined, and we must remain aware of this if the identity of each one is to remain in any degree, rather than their being regarded together as uncomplicated archival texts, invisible save for the theatric and aesthetic evidence they are assumed to provide.

II From this, it will be clear that any attempt to show a stage performance in painting is fraught with complexities, and reading it both as it would have been seen when produced and for its archival, interpretive and aesthetic valencies 72

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laden with contradiction and conjecture. Yet in one or two rare instances some move towards this irreconcilable achievement might be not totally impossible; and in one particular case, a painting by an unknown artist, dating from around 1765 (Plate 4),12 something of the experience of being in the theatre during the performance has been achieved. Identifiable as showing the interior of Covent Garden, it takes as its subject a performance close in date to that shown in Zoffany’s painting. In technique, style and treatment of subject it is hard to imagine greater difference between the two. Whereas Zoffany invents a stage setting, the unknown artist presents one strikingly in accord with written accounts and architectural drawings of the stage; whereas Zoffany shows nothing of the auditorium, the other painter shows the orchestra, and all the rows of stage boxes. The stage itself is presented far more precisely in the latter, with two uniformed guardsmen, sculptures of tragedy and comedy, and a proscenium before which hangs a swagged drop curtain. The action itself takes place on the capacious forestage then still in use, with the three candelabra directly above the action. Perhaps most important of all, the scene drop at the back of the inner stage is shown, but in comparative darkness; what might be the figures of the fighting armies from the play’s opening can just be discerned, beneath what might be trees and foliage. The action itself presents the first encounter between Macbeth, Banquo (again both in contemporary court dress) and the witches, who seem from their costumes to be male, following the practice of the day. These elements confirm other archival accounts of the stage and performance, and the image has been seen by many as valuable for this reason. Yet its significance as a painting lies in something rather larger. As Allardyce Nicoll remarks in the earliest written account, ‘it suggests, much more plainly than a master’s work might have done, what would have met our eyes had we been spectators of the performance’. He goes on to distinguish between the ‘visual values’13 of the foreground action and the painted cloth at rear. The suggestion that this act of selection reveals those elements on which the audience would most have concentrated is as perceptive as we would expect; but it may be taken a little further, to show the image’s essential importance. In the rapid draughtsmanship and free brushwork, it offers itself as a painterly metaphor of the immediacy and transience of experiencing the play in the theatre, seen from a seat in the steeply raked auditorium indicated by the viewpoint. These features place it at a far remove from the porcelain brushwork and architectural invention of the Zoffany, and the conventions of genre and presentation which that follows. 73

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Its place in theatre history is confirmed, at least in part – and a large part – by its distance from formal painting. The importance of this is considerable. It suggests that images of performance are less likely to be found in traditions of formal art, and more in less elevated genres. The unsigned engraving depicting the price riots of 1763, discussed in Chapter 8, (see Figure 71) gives a precise outline of the layout employed at the time, and remains one of the most valuable sources for its discussion – as well, incidentally, of confirming the wholly non-theatric setting of Zoffany’s Macbeth. The same is true of another image aimed at a wide readership: a hand-coloured aquatint by W. R. Pyne after John Wright, A Performance at a Country Barn Theatre (1788: Plate 5). Showing the witches’ scene from Macbeth, the print also depicts key elements of eighteenth-century staging, with wing flats and trapdoor behind a proscenium arch. There would presumably also have been a painted drop at the rear of the stage, from where the image is shown, and it is this viewpoint that makes the image so valuable, in revealing stage workings in practice while, rather like the broadsheet shown in Figure 71, having other events as its main concern. Whereas that image purportedly shows the riot, this seems as much aimed at showing the audience; in both areas they seemingly have much to reveal about contemporary theatregoing as well as contemporary stagings. As the century develops, both staging practice and Shakespeare painting undergo significant changes, the forces acting on each individually in some ways combining to drive developments in both. At the most extreme level, the two become quite separate so that the events presented on canvas are relocated to situations outside the theatre, instead developing aspects of contemporary landscape, genre or historical painting. Thus, a painting of Macbeth by Zuccarelli14 follows continental European practice, placing events within a landscape in which the eye is led through a series of diagonal directions that themselves construct a narrative sequence in the manner of Claude Lorraine. These are, however, less common. More frequent are those that move beyond this convention to construct their own compositional schemes, placing the figures of the play within naturalistic settings of a more freely composed nature or, as in John Wootton’s Macbeth discussed later in this chapter, following other painterly traditions of composition. Between the two are paintings that demonstrate subtler equations between stage and studio. Many of the paintings in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, for example, present characters before elements that might well be taken from contemporary stagings, mimicking the wings-and-drop formula of the first 74

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half of the eighteenth century, with the addition of single props such as trees or pieces of furniture in the middle ground. The major change from this comes when the apron stage and surrounding boxes are replaced by an increased acting area behind a proscenium. Increasingly thereafter, the wings become more irregular shapes, so that the acting area is made to reflect more naturalistically the setting of the action, which now takes place within rather than before the scenic elements. The result is that, in both physical and imaginative terms, play and spectators are now more completely distinct; the paradox of this is that the play becomes more physically real to the beholders, as a result of the greater illusive power that it has gained. In more practical terms, the greater naturalism draws staging closer to the perspectival and other effects of easel painting, with the result that each may draw upon the practices of the other the better to present its own identity, and its subject matter. Some idea of the effect of a larger acting area, as well as the move towards a naturalistic presentation of action, is evident in Benjamin Wilson’s David Garrick and George Anne Bellamy in Romeo and Juliet, Act V, Scene iii (1752: Plate 6).15 In theatrical conversation pieces the scene shown may be selected from a particular moment in performance, an actor’s ‘point’ or her or his most celebrated moment declamation, or its placement within a group of actors, as in Zoffany’s Macbeth, say. Wilson’s painting extends this by showing the celebrated scene in Garrick’s version of the play when Juliet briefly awakens to witness the death of her lover, by placing it within what seems a built-up scenic tomb placed within a naturalistic landscape setting. This effectively establishes a middle ground between theatrical conversation and peopled landscape, by showing what might well be a confined stage set in which the two figures are presented, within a nocturnal rural scene much in the style of contemporary landscape. That the painting exists in three versions testifies to its popularity, and perhaps also that of the move to more naturalistic staging. The key figure in the changes in scenography was Philip James de Loutherbourg, who worked with Garrick between 1772 and 1785. In 1781 he became a Royal Academician, then and later producing canvases extending his range of subjects within broader genres of history and landscape, often containing scenes of extreme colour and movement. Although his illustrations of the plays, as noted in earlier chapters, remain quite distinct from his stage designs, the latter clearly suggest a movement towards painting. The change may be seen as it occurs in the two surviving models designed for John O’Keefe’s musical play Omai – de Loutherbourg’s final work for Garrick, discussed in a different context in Chapter 10. The first of these (Plate 7), shows a wings-and-drop 75

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setting, much looser in design than usual by having the wings cut to the outline of the trees rather than having them painted on rectangular boards, giving a more complete illusion of setting. The second (Plate 8) moves further away from convention towards the composition of a painting. Here the wings are irregularly constructed so as to convey more fully an illusion of continuity; crucially, the boat to stage left and miscellaneous wreckage at stage right move directly in diagonal recess to suggest the continuous perspectival recession of an easel painting. The move in paintings from separate background to figures incorporated within a single perspective mirrors similar changes in the theatre. In this way, the two forms move closer, culminating in the architecturally massive, practicable stage designs of the mid-to-late Victorians and the more naturalistic canvases of the day; the box set becomes the domestic interior, the romantic landscape the basis of rural stages complete with grassy banks and live animals. At the end of the century, the whole range of English painting expanded greatly to explore new subjects and new approaches, some of which intersected with stage design. The advent of photography in the 1840s introduced a new order of naturalism to both theatre and painting, in which each vied with the other to present actuality, and stage settings were discussed in a pamphlet by The Architectural Review16 for their historical validity. In the 1890s, Henry Irving wrote a preface to a new translation of Diderot’s Paradox of Acting,17 the seminal work arguing that acting became more convincingly real when the performer concentrated not on a character’s feeling but the professional ways of conveying it. The same is true of staging: the greater the artifice, the greater the effect of actuality.

III While much Shakespeare painting was conceived in relation to the theatre or individual performers, it was also influenced by a substantial body of theoretical writing about its forms and the ways it should be evaluated. The duality is important, most writing of this kind being addressed both to painters and to their viewers, generating a commonality of outlook between artists and the connoisseurs who commissioned or bought their work, the galleries which exhibited it and the private dealers, auction houses or publishers who commissioned and sold reproductive prints. While the writings on which aesthetic practice and commercial decisions rested changed in style through the eighteenth century, certain elements recur. Similarly, while approaches to all aspects 76

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of art production and consumption changed, there was no uniform pattern to such shifts – no simple, direct march to the freer expression of feeling and idea, as some painters retained earlier stances while others moved towards styles quite new. At the end of the eighteenth century, as the range of technique and aim of the paintings in the Boydell Gallery demonstrate, the mirror and the lamp, to use M. H. Abrams’ famous phrase, were both luminous in presence. One of the earliest concepts, shared between acting and portraiture, concerns the depiction of the passions in facial expressions, hand gestures and bodily postures which, as suggested in Chapter 1, were of some relevance to performance and visual art. The key text here is Charles Le Brun’s Conférence de M. Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière,18 which became widely available in the English translation by John Williams in 1734. To these expressive practices should be added the traditions of acting employed in the Restoration theatre and laid down most precisely in the writings of John Bulwer. His Chirologia related hand gestures to individual expressions, and Pathomyotamia discussed the relations between body and the feeling.19 Both were closely related to performance practice: Charles Gildon records very similar approaches in the performance of Betterton: ‘Every Passion or emotion of the Mind has from nature its proper and peculiar Countenance, Sound, and Gesture.’20 A third expressive device was also important: the general posture of the body, increasingly necessary as the theatres were enlarged during the century so that facial features became less visible from a distance. Garrick himself developed these practices, remaining famous for the speed in which his passions could change, but also carefully developing bodily postures, the most frequent being one of exaggerated recoil or riposte to another character (see Plate 3). Linked to these works was the interest in physiognomy provoked by the writings of the Swiss medical theorist John Caspar Lavater. Henry Fuseli produced images for lavish English editions of his Physiognomy and the related volumes of Aphorisms at the end of the century.21 Both were important in showing larger elements of individual identity: the whole person rather than the changing passions. They should not, however, be confused with larger discussions of character; Hazlitt’s concern was to show Shakespeare’s skill in understanding the psychological nature of individuals, whereas Lavater was concerned with disclosing an identity through examining the shape of the head. While elements of some Shakespeare paintings seemingly resemble Lavater’s definitions, there is little sense of a rigid following of anything so schematic. Images of Lear with hair and full beard blown astray, for example, owe as much to the prototype of the Old Testament prophet and conventions of madness as to any more recent 77

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prescription, and other examples are few. The effect of the book may be seen at a different level, in the way that Fuseli uses distortions of anatomy to present states of mood and idea, offering a new order of interpretation in his Shakespeare paintings that is forceful, and at times teasingly distant. Some of these three forms feature in early paintings, both related and unrelated to the stage, but in general, and especially in later images, they became less important as their formulaic nature is replaced by approaches seemingly more lifelike. Such a distinction should, though, be treated with caution. Acting styles hailed as ‘natural’ even thirty or forty years ago today seem inaccessibly dated, reflecting as they do kinds of movement and especially speech and gesture peculiar to their own time. But in painting of the early eighteenth century that reflected performance, such armatures were important, although whether in reflection of manuals of various kinds and origins or as direct presentations of performance style is hard to determine. More specifically directed is the writing of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.22 His major concern is a compositional device that became known as the ‘Choice of Hercules’ trope, after its use in a long tradition of Renaissance paintings.23 The image shows Hercules standing between personifications of Pleasure and Virtue. Pleasure lies to the left of Hercules, while at his right stands Virtue, pointing allegorically into the recessive distance. The heroic central figure faces towards the rocky path to which Virtue points, his back turned on the seductively reclining Pleasure. Shaftesbury explains the reason for the selection of this event for visual treatment because it is the moment ‘when Virtue seems to gain her Cause . . . the Grand Event, or consequent Resolution of HERCULES’ (6). Earlier, he has asserted that a painting must have ‘one single Intelligence or Design’ (4), but later concedes ‘It may however be allowable, on some occasions, to make use of certain Enigmatical or Emblematical devices, to represent future Time’ (9). Shaftesbury’s writing has major implications for history painting in general, but specifically for the painting of Shakespeare’s plays in ways that go beyond this single compositional device: it suggests the selection of a key moment in the process of the action from a moral as well as a narrative standpoint, linking a single view to larger implications and concepts. This will increasingly become an essential feature of Shakespeare painting, allowing the artist greater insight into the play’s structure and idea, combined with the move away from theatrical representation to a fully painterly configuration of the text. By the middle years of the century, some artists had moved wholly beyond the theatre to follow Shaftesbury’s prescriptions. Notable here is John 78

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Wootton’s Macbeth and Banquo encountering the Witches (1750).24 Here, the trope is the central element of a large landscape, Macbeth standing between Banquo on his right and the witches on his left. But he turns away from Banquo and faces the witches, a direct iconographic allusion to the Shaftesbury trope which makes its effect through the reversal of the original. To a sophisticated reader of the time, the larger meaning would immediately have been clear, placing the whole of the play’s subsequent action and the central figure’s decline as implicit within this first encounter. Elsewhere, the painting contains what Shaftesbury terms ‘emblematical devices’ – references to the witches’ cavern, the mousing owl, the maggot pies and the brindled cat suggesting the play’s later sequence. In this and in presenting the witches as women and not men it moves away from theatrical depiction towards a more complex bringing together of the play’s action and ideas. Here and in many subsequent paintings, the role of the artist as critical interpreter of language and action becomes fundamental in a manner very rarely achieved in paintings aimed strictly to present stage events: the painting becomes an act of visual criticism of the play. Almost contemporary with Shaftesbury’s book is the work of Jonathan Richardson, important because directed at a wider range of readers – those intent on becoming connoisseurs of art – and thus broader in approach and more direct in style. His Essay on the Theory of Painting appeared in 1715, followed four years later by The Science of the Connoisseur; the two were reissued together in 1719 as Two Discourses, and the former was revised in 1725.25 Immediately striking in the first of the books is the emphasis on the relation between painting and literature, with the forthright claim ‘we PAINTERS are upon the same level with Writers, as being Poets, Historians, Philosophers and Divines, we Entertain, and In strict equally with them’ (42). This is more than an assertion of rank: earlier he has stressed the importance of ‘a fine Story artfully communicated to my Imagination, not by speech, nor Writing, but in a manner preferable to either of them’ (14). What emerges is the independent nature of painting as equivalent to but separate from literary works of all kinds. This he clarifies in a list of rules for judging a painting in his companion essay directed at the connoisseur or intelligent viewer, stressing that their conclusions should be reached after their own study. The list begins with the subject, which ‘must be finely imagined’, the painter having thought of it as ‘A Historian, Poet, Philosopher or Divine’ (27–8). Next, the expression must be appropriate, and all parts should contribute equally to the subject. Technically, there should be a single light source, the drawing properly proportioned, the colouring natural and applied with a ‘Light, and Accurate Hand’ (30). The final point is that ‘nature must be the 79

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Foundation, That must be seen at the Bottom; but Nature must be rais’d; and Improved’ (30). This combination of practical and conceptual points, stressing elements of composition as well as those of idea, relates to Shakespeare painting as much as any other, the stress on the painter’s breadth of understanding forming a key element; but a little later Richardson makes two claims that are more deeply relevant: ‘A History is preferable to a Landscape’ (44) and many other genres, and ‘A Portrait is a sort of general History of the Life of the person it represents’ (45). The word History is teasing, at the time referring both to events from the past and to most orders of narrative: Fielding played on this in titling his major work The True History of Tom Jones, and the range explains the easy inclusion of paintings of Shakespeare’s plays within this favoured category. Similarly, the idea of portraiture as containing the life of its subject suggests a parallel to dramatic characterisation. Put the two together and the idea of a Shakespeare painting as something of dignity, the highest of the genres, in which a pattern of events is implied through delineation of figures, is not far removed. A series of other writings in the century’s middle years were of various effects in their conceptual and practical influence, remaining current in many forms and for this reason defying discussion in purely chronological order, and demonstrating various degrees of relation to earlier or continental European ideas. Significant in moving away from Richardson are Henry Fuseli’s judgements in Instructions for the Connoisseur, published in the same volume as his translation of Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Paintings and Sculptures of the Greeks, another important influence in many of his figural paintings, not least those on Shakespearean themes.26 Gone are Richardson’s simple list of questions by which to judge a portrait and his idea that connoisseurship will improve the morals of the nation.27 For Fuseli it is ‘the idea, however, its grandeur or meanness, its dignity, fitness or unfitness, that ought first to have been examined’ (4); in this vein, an artist should not merely repeat tradition, but modify and depart from it. The essence of art is ‘the analysis of beauty, which no definition can explain’ but which, seen most fully in the human figure, ‘consists in the harmony of the various parts of an individual’ (8). In the years between Richardson’s advice and Fuseli’s a great distance has been travelled. Now there is a nearmystical approach to the human body, mingled with respect for classical sculpture as stressed by Winckelmann and, added to his sketches made while in Rome, this would be borne out in the idiosyncratic anatomical forms of Fuseli’s work, moving towards abstraction in the presentation of 80

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form and line, as much offering a metaphor of anatomy as its clinical presentation. More immediately accessible are some of Fuseli’s many other writings. While Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy (R. A.) he gave lectures that are probably the first to offer a full exploration in English of the aesthetic and conceptual workings of classical and Renaissance painting. All these inform and reflect his own work as a painter and illustrator, allowing him to infuse earlier conventions with new energy and meaning, especially in the imaginative use of iconography, as a later paragraph will discuss. Fuseli’s rejection of a simple idea of beauty seems clearly to reject the approach of William Hogarth’s earlier The Analysis of Beauty (1753), which had as its subtitle Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating I DEAS of TASTE . 28 Earlier, continental debates had questioned whether beauty was integral to a painting’s design or the emotions provoked in the beholder. Hogarth rejected such thoughts and defined it as resident in a single, complex serpentine line, found in the human body and many natural forms. That is, of course, radically to simplify; the work owes much to Addison in argument, and rejects Shaftesbury as much on political as aesthetic grounds. Yet within the emphasis on the power of familiar forms is a suggestion of something that will become increasingly forceful in definitions of history painting, and therefore Shakespeare painting. Hogarth refers to this as Il poco piu,29 ‘the little more’, explaining it as the idea that great art must contain something unexpected, going beyond tradition or copy. This concept recurs in much stronger terms in Joshua Reynolds’ series of addresses at the Royal Academy, delivered first at the opening ceremony in 1769 and then, until 1790, at the annual prizegivings, published separately and then collected as the Discourses on Art.30 Many of his pronouncements echoed earlier ideas, not least in stressing the primacy of history painting as the grandest and most intellectually valid genre.31 Reynolds’ comments about histories are, however, of much value in regard to paintings of Shakespeare. Many of the most relevant points are made in Discourse IV, delivered on 10 December 1771, which repeats and develops ideas from earlier sources as well as adding others of his own. There must be a single light source, perhaps with two or three subsidiary ones, and colour should be kept to a minimum so that ‘a quietness and simplicity must reign over the whole work’, approaching more ‘a play of chiaro oscuro’ (61). Drapery should not be given minute representation, and minor faults in appearance of great figures should be overlooked. There are frequent references to language throughout the Discourses. Since a painter cannot make a hero speak, he must show him as a figure of greatness; a history must delight 81

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the eye and move the mind through its own methods. Reynolds rejects the commonplace that painting has its own language, arguing instead that ‘Words should be employed as the means, not the end: language is the instrument, conviction the work’ (64). In a subsequent paragraph comes a key assertion: ‘perfect form is produced by leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas’ (57). This he develops to argue that within a well known subject, supplied by the ‘Poet or Historian’, there must be something of universal concern, which ‘powerfully strikes upon the publick sympathy’ (57). The statement echoes or anticipates other comments, to the effect that the grand sweep of imagination is the essence of true history painting, which moves towards a philosophical issue of concern at the time: ‘The Sublime impresses us at once with one great idea; it is a single blow: the elegant indeed may be produced by repetition, by an accumulation of many minute circumstances’ – but ‘the most Sublime ideas and the lowest sensuality should at the same time be united’ (65). The reference here seems quite clearly to the writing of a much earlier writer or group of writers then known as Dionysius Longinus. Fuseli knew of this from reading the work of Johann Jacob Bodmer,32 but the work itself had been translated into English in 1712.33 Generally known as Longinus on the Sublime it went through ten editions, including three in Dublin, before 1800 and in 1819 was issued in a special edition ‘For the use of schools and colleges’. In defining the Sublime Longinus stresses the importance, first, of a grand idea, given strength by its originality in going beyond the accepted or commonplace, balanced by control of rhetorical forms and images, and the whole folded within perfection of composition and overall design. Reynolds does not mention Longinus, but the general tenor of his writing suggests at least an awareness of his ideas and, by extension, again implies the importance of the book as fundamental to English aesthetics – the essential notion of the idea, for example, has already been seen in the work of Fuseli. Its specific address to literary texts, and its importance for painting, again discloses the relation between word and image at the time, and hence its importance in much Shakespeare painting. That this is most apparent at the beginning of the eighteenth century and again, with what is probably a final flourish, in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, reveals its impact. The idea of the Sublime and its implementation in visual forms was given new, and quite different, energy by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).34 The essence of Burke’s idea was to see the Sublime as physiological, in external forces that generate a response 82

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of terror in the onlooker manifested in bodily responses remarkably similar to rushes of adrenalin. Irregularity, massiveness and unexpectedness of form are its essence, in contrast to the symmetry of the Beautiful, which acts by confirming rather than radically rejecting expectations. Other philosophers, mainly those concerned with landscape painting and design, developed a third category, the Picturesque, and engendered its own school of painting and landscape design, the features of which were natural forms of more measurable irregularity, often with shaggy (a key term) textures of foliage and trees but without the initial shock effect of the Sublime. That one sense of the word picturesque related to landscapes suitable for treatment in pictures is revealing both of its own nature and that of the pictures involved. Both are on a lesser scale, physically and conceptually – and also in terms of the viewer’s response – than the full-blown Sublime as evidenced in paintings such as de Loutherbourg’s An Avalanche in the Alps (1803) or James Ward’s Gordale Scar (1812–14).35 Although important, the Burkean Sublime did not wholly displace the Longinian, which remained current alongside it in theory and aesthetic practice. Possibly the most important passage of Reynolds’ Discourses in its effect on Shakespeare painting in later years is the discussion of the value of copying for a young artist. This should be undertaken by ‘painting a similar subject, and making a companion to any picture that you consider as a model’.36 In such an approach an element of an earlier painting is not simply reproduced, but given a different narrative or descriptive setting, so that the allusion enriches the new work by deepening or changing its meanings. This may be seen in a practice evident in Reynolds’ own paintings which, in response to charges of plagiarism against the painter, Hugh Walpole described as the use of ‘borrowed attitudes’, seeing them as part of a tradition of employing ‘a quotation from a great author, with a novel application of sense’.37 The process is clarified in terms of iconographical reference by Edgar Wind, showing that it often has an ironic, comic or interpretive sense.38 Reynolds’ use of the device is limited but powerful, as in his Omai portrait discussed in Chapter 8. The fullest use of the approach comes in Fuseli’s Shakespeare paintings, which build on his extensive knowledge of Renaissance art, contemporary and earlier literature to make incisive critical points. In a sense, this recalls the Renaissance tradition of copia, where an earlier model is re-presented with innovative shifts of form and idea. The result is the ‘novelty’ or ‘shock’ praised by many writers as essential to the grand historical style, marking out the great from the competent; it also produces some of the finest paintings of the plays by offering powerfully new insights into form, theme and language. 83

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Some of Reynolds’ most revealing remarks come in an unpublished and incomplete essay on Shakespeare, which addresses what he values in the plays while suggesting principles in painting.39 On the imitation of classical models, he is aphoristic but representative of much advice of the time: it is ‘a very good principle to begin with, but a very bad one to finish with’, claiming ‘Art in the most perfect state is when it possesses those accidents which do not belong to the code of laws for art’ (109). He goes on to praise Shakespeare’s combination of tragedy and comedy, which he terms ‘grandeur of general ideas with the familiar pathetic’ (112). By the last term is meant feelings easily shared by all; the combination of the Sublime and the immediately human praised in Shakespeare is clearly what Reynolds values in the finest painting, and something arguably present in the most incisive Shakespeare paintings of the period. What emerges from these discussions of theory and practice might be simplified into a differentiation of two kinds of Shakespeare painting. At one level is that which develops the ideas of portraiture in presenting a likeness not only of the face but of the feeling, often in relation to a scene of a play. The other involves the manipulation of earlier iconographies to provide, in the equation thus postulated, readings of the plays that go beyond theatre but run parallel with it as textual statements and interpretations. The differences will become apparent in the later chapters, in relation principally to paintings but, less often, to illustrations within editions of the plays. This is not intended as a constant explication-throughtheory; rather, it aims to present some of the conceptual positions and painterly practices that were current in the great period of Shakespeare painting, and thus to some extent offer, through hypothetical readings, something of the ideas held in common between artists and their viewers. It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that seeing Shakespeare paintings as either simple performance records or textual studies is both reductive and unreliable. Some may offer evidence of some kind, in specific aspects, of which costume is perhaps the most apparent: some may shed new interpretive light on language or theme through subtlety of form or allusion. In all cases evidence is mediated and modified by the demands of medium, style and allusiveness outside the theatre. Leaving aside the need to see images as artefacts in their own right, the sheer complexity of establishing what is valid in representation of either order makes the task questionable and misleading. The results of such enquiry may offer a great deal about performance and text; but only when an address of greater breadth is adopted can these be apparent, as the chapters that follow, each with its own set of circumstances and the questions they raise, attempt to show. 84

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The formal readings were not, of course, representative of all approaches to painting: others were more forthright in their judgements, and one anonymous essay, appearing just after Boydell had announced his Shakespeare Gallery, is especially striking. It begins by hoping that the painters involved will be instructed to ‘forget, if possible, they had ever seen the plays of Shakespeare, as they are absurdly decorated in modern theatres’ with all their ‘meretricious foppery’ (778). It continues to discuss individual paintings, including that with which this chapter began, in terms worth remembering in any discussion of the relation between stage and canvas: The faithful pencil of Zoffany has perpetuated Garrick as he stood shuddering after the murther of Duncan. But was any correct eye ever satisfied by the twisted figure that presented itself on this occasion? By no means. Our theatre stars only glitter when they shoot; when fixed their brilliancy is gone.40

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CHAPTER 5

THE VISUAL IDENTITIES OF THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Apart from the celebrated account in the Gesta Grayorum of the play’s first performance, the frontispieces of 1709 and 1714 probably constitute the earliest direct responses to The Comedy of Errors, working through a number of material forms to direct the reader’s attention towards its central concerns and problems. Images produced in these years give readings in many ways more important than the better known visual treatments of Hamlet or some of the histories, which intersect with production practice and emerging criticism. The tradition of response for Errors of necessity moves away from performance practice, largely because its staging was then rare, whether in an avowedly authentic text or an adapted one. Further, until the mid-twentieth century the play attracted little critical attention. There is one further complexity: the genres on which it builds demand the treatment of serious subjects as well as comic misdirections, the whole encased in a fabric making repeated reference to its own theatrical illusion. In the face of all these contingencies, artists were thrown onto their own resources so that, more than most of its contemporaries, the play as then presented offers an historical study of visual interpretive practice in direct relation to a printed text. In a wider sense, the frontispiece illustrations are evidence of what is still a largely unexplored area of Shakespeare studies in the years before editions declaredly related to performance: the manner in which the plays were visualised by individuals who came to them for the first time not through theatrical performance but through the equally directed process of illustrated reading. While The Comedy of Errors thus has specific forces with which to engage, it also acts as an example of the larger processes of illustration as they change through time. What I am attempting in this chapter, then, is to show how a single play is treated by different artists and in different forms over 89

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the longer span of visual treatments, when working independent of stage history, engaging with the conceptual and stylistic issues of their own period and the material forces which surround and determine them, and to which they respond. Arguably the largest single difficulty inherent in the transmediation into visual treatment is a concern insistent in any response to the play: its supple and elusive placing within and across genres, with the implications that this presents for the naturalism through which scenes and characters are depicted. The fusion, or to some commentators confusion, between comedy and farce has long been noted, most recently analysed by Kent Cartwright in the introduction to his edition of the play.1 To this should be added a further structural element: the romance which, as Goran Stanivukovic has recently argued, brings with it elements of tragedy: The play begins tragically: there seems to be no hope from the outset. But then something strange and remarkable happens and the tragic opening loses its power in both action and language.2

The play’s exchanges of identity, the characters’ location in a different place, the magical appearances of others in place of familiar figures, and elements of threat all resemble tropes familiar in prose romances. As Stanivukovic goes on to argue, ‘this intertwining of comedy and romance’ foreshadows Dowden’s coinage of the term for Shakespeare’s late plays.3 To this complexity we may add another element: the very title, ‘Errors’, suggests the moral process of knight errantry in search of truth that along the way involves a series of separate adventures and misunderstandings, something not too far removed from the structure of some prose romances. These categories make the play not only difficult to perform but, for different reasons, hard to illustrate, especially in a single frontispiece. Here, the selection of moment for single visualisation must also be a selection of genre, an act fraught with dangers of becoming reductive or misleading. The play’s generic complexities and tonal swerves create a further danger for a visual frontispiece, in that some of its action might well be found fitting in a tragedy. From the very beginning, with Egeus bound with ropes centre stage, this darker mode is apparent, and the violence directed against Dr Pinch, while in a way prefiguring the later psychological mistreatment of Malvolio, may easily move the play towards the tragic if given the prominence of a single illustration. For the frontispiece illustrator, then, the play erects as many barriers as openings. 90

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To these problems must be offered a larger consideration. Written in converse with an Italian tradition, as much of commedia grave as of the lazzi that drive commedia dell’arte, it is in its very structure a virtuoso variation on earlier forms that are themselves highly self-reflective, and thus essentially about the theatre as much as about its own characters and events. If this were not enough, it inherits further metatheatric force from its sources in Gascoygne’s Supposes and, in turn, that play’s origins in the work of Plautus. The prelude to the latter’s Menaechmi,4 one of the play’s ultimate sources, reminds us that the scene is not a real place, that the people on stage are not real people, and that the whole rests on a series of assumptions shared by dramatist and audience – the supposes of Gascoygne’s title. Presenting this, alongside the multiple generic swerves of the play, in any illustrative form, represents a problem of a kind rarely encountered in work of this type. What the prologue is in effect doing is making quite clear that the play depends on the audience’s acceptance of its artifice. This kind of metatheatrical awareness, of course, prefigures one of Shakespeare’s own major concerns in the later plays, in the incessant overhearings and overlookings of Hamlet as much as in the perplexities about reality in the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘This thorn bush my thorn bush, this dog my dog’ (5.1.243–4). As illustration and performance move towards realism of both narrative and place, under the influence of the novel, in which many of its illustrators were highly experienced, the issues of presentation become even more demanding. Nor is the process any simpler in a later edition with multiple images. There, the difficulty lies in selecting which plot lines to cover without unduly favouring one, keeping them all individually alive while maintaining the vigour of them all. This quality depends in part on the references made in both the Rowe editions, which rest on the stage designs of Sebastiano Serlio, revealing a degree of knowledge about the theatre and the nature of genres not often attributed to their designers. The debt to similar plays, especially Supposes, would have made the play more accessible for its original audiences, bolstered by a kinetic energy of tradition. But for the first illustrators over a century later, such knowledge was largely absent. François Boitard brought to the designs the compositional syntax and allusive repertoire of European Catholic art and a finely developed sense of earlier visual narrative, to present in one design a series of temporally separate events that lead to a climax of event and theme. Louis du Guernier was perhaps best known for his images of The Rape of the Lock, another text of compound genre, its stings hidden in gossamer suggesting a similar, if more fierce, parallel to the duality of Errors. Both the 1709 91

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20 François Boitard: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, 1709.

(Figure 20) and 1714 images show the final act. The presence of the Duke and the Abbess in both places them not before about a third of the way through the scene, but the management of the foreground and the nature of its architectural setting reveal important differences between the two, signalling the difficulty of pigeonholing the play according to contemporary theories. The 1709 engraving sets the events within a unified architectural frame in a frontally composed form. Linear perspective draws the spectator’s eye straight back between two tall buildings, towards a third at the rear that is parallel to the picture plane. What is striking is the design of the buildings: in their architecture and arrangement, they correspond not to Serlio’s design for Comedy but that for Tragedy, with houses of the nobility and royalty fit for ‘strange adventures, and cruell murthers’ – but also ‘actions of love’.5 That the houses in the Boitard image follow this prescription, dignified and ‘stately’, is clear when they are compared with Serlio’s design for Comedy, in which the buildings demonstrate a variegated and vernacular architecture. The reference to Serlio’s tragedic design certainly comments on the generic identity of the play, but it does more. The sombre tone of the play’s opening, in Egeon’s story, and the moral 92

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seriousness of its ending, the debates about religion and economy, are all inscripted into the design to impinge on the reader’s consciousness before the play-text has been encountered. The design itself conforms to another tradition: that of what might be termed compositional polyscenality, in which a series of events is presented within the image’s recession, moving from the final act’s earlier happenings in the foreground – the debate between the Syracusan Dromio and Antipholus, the second merchant drawing his sword – to those approaching its conclusion – the Abbess kneeling before the Duke. The whole is gathered up by the abbey doors, the perspectival vanishing point mimicking that of religious paintings in Catholic Europe.6 Complexities comic and threatening are skilfully drawn together to direct the eye and the reading intelligence to the play’s conclusion, the moment just before the entry through the abbey doors to the ‘gossips’ feast’ (5.1.405) with which the play concludes. This geometric processing completes the narrative of the play, embracing elements of threat and knockabout comedy, at the same time as revealing, through compositional dexterity, its theatric artifice. The play’s dual identity, and its own metatheatric concerns, are thus finely matched in visual form. And, lest the composition should convey a sense of distance and retrospection, the shadows suggest the second merchant’s ‘By this, I think, the dial points at five’ (5.1.118), pinpointing a moment of event that suggests the reader’s direct involvement in the action at the time when it takes place – another merging of theatric and actual. It is a remarkably astute construction of the play in visual form, something only possible in the work of an artist familiar with the workings of religious narrative. Later paragraphs will reveal its skill by comparison, since its entwining of the play’s multiple identities are unique within its visual history. The traditions developed by Boitard are radically simplified in Louis du Guernier’s frontispiece to Rowe’s edition of 1714, which employs a more recent approach to naturalism and is concerned not with subtle semiotic presentation of idea and progression but with the creation of verisimilitude in action and location. His image dispenses with the symmetrical placing of the buildings and changes the convent from a dignified structure seen almost directly from the front to a more varied architectural form seen from the front and side. These differences move it far closer to Serlio’s Comedy, its greater variety of architectural forms and comparative irregularity suggesting the indigenous vigour and variety of comedic pattern. The resemblance is most evident in the inclusion of the three types of building that Serlio defines as essential to a comedy: ‘a church, an inn and a brothel’. Not all of these appear in the play – an inn is only 93

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mentioned and a brothel implied – but the presence of the three different orders of building in the vigorous mix of vernacular structures in du Guernier’s design subtly unfurls the play’s levels of action, offering to those aware of its resonances a further point of comparison with Italianate comedy. Unlike most of the 1714 engravings, this is far more than a simple re-working of Boitard’s design. Now, the action is given a quite different meaning by the looser organisation and the new resonance it provides through the allusion to Comedy and not Tragedy in Serlio’s work, perhaps the best known architectural and scenographic reference source of the day. Yet whereas the 1709 image subtly unites the genres by its compositional summary of the play’s events, the 1714 confuses them, offering the reader little help in understanding either the play’s outcome or its larger generic nature. A major reason for this deficiency is the displacement of the abbey doors from their position as the visual climax. Now devoid of its direction and conclusion, the visual treatment of the play becomes incomplete in narrative. This is itself a shift of modality: instead of careful direction, the resultant confusion reflects one of the major tropes of the play, and in this anticipates other images that address the quality more minutely. The frontispiece is the first of several that both suggest an individual moment of action and imply the mistaken identities that are the basis of Roman comedy from which it takes its origin. But when seen in the shadow of the earlier frontispiece, the image suggests something different about the play: the comedic confusions are there, as are the suggestions of tragedic structure, but the confusion of farce, not its sheer energy, is what prevails. Without the fundamentally medieval technique of strict progression of events, there is little possibility of showing such temporal complexity in a single frame. Not until the nineteenth century will there be a visual analogue of this aspect of the play’s currency, made possible by multiple imaging within an illustrated edition facilitated as much by changes in printing processes as by different readings of the play’s modality. But in these later treatments it is achieved within the printed text, an approach balancing the sequential narrative of the novel instead of the synchronic presentation of the Biblical narrative painting. Long before such a change takes place, Hubert Gravelot’s design for the second edition of Theobald’s Shakespeare in 1740 (Figure 21) takes quite a different approach, to demonstrate the play’s tensions between metatheatric reflection and narrative realism. In 1709, the play’s self-reflexivity is evident in the extreme formality of design, making artifice as prominent as the narrative it presents in its multitemporality. Instead, Gravelot’s image demonstrates its naturalistic force by involving readers as direct, experiential witnesses, inviting 94

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21 Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, 1740.

them to believe that they have turned a corner to come upon a single event. Strong diagonals, originating in the figure of a woman looking down from the tower and matched by the kneeling figure of Egeon, focus the beholding eye on this encounter, and also metaphorically echo her involvement in the scene. Instead of suggesting future events within a theatrical frame, the image offers a moment of tension in an apparently naturalistic setting of the kind found in contemporary novel illustration, wholly avoiding the problem of generic identity. As a frontispiece, it performs the valuable function of inviting the reader to enter the text and explore its identities and directions, instead of making suggestions about genre and outcome. In making this change, the engraving embodies one of the major shifts in Shakespeare imaging. In extreme manifestations, such an approach presents single events with a concern for verisimilitude that adopts in visual terms the idea of the omniscient narratorial position of the novel, so that dramatic action and movement are denied. 95

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22 Edward Edwards: dual frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, 1775.

A slightly later visual treatment of the play, Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition (Figure 22), addresses the issue of genre in a more distanced manner. As Chapter 3 has shown with reference to other plays, the edition’s claim to reflect performance is contradicted by its visual material. The result is another exploration of the play’s identity. Edwards’ frontispiece design shows Antipholus of Ephesus struggling against those who restrain him, while Pinch stands to the left in a posture of admonition. Adriana, whose line ‘Oh bind him, bind him, let him not come near me’ (4.4.100) appears as caption, stands close by. Combined with the setting, an Italianate street scene, the effect is to create an occurrence quite without any immediate comic thrust or comedic implication: the image effectively moves the play out of the complexities of its generic identity into the mingled genre of novelistic naturalism, with no hint of future events. It is a recollection of moment, akin to an event in the life of Tom Jones; but whereas in the novel such happenings are sewn together with other images to unite the 96

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textual threads, here there is only a single statement of event and, hence, of genre, so that the other strands are left untreated and the reader’s response governed only by this moment of threat. Yet this is not the only effect on the reader. In many copies of this edition, as shown here, the reader is simultaneously confronted with Edwards’ scene and an engraving of John Dunstall as Dromio of Syracuse. Dromio is shown in profile, holding out to the left the rope’s end that is so significant a mark of misplaced identity towards the play’s close, and that constitutes part of the play’s repeated emblems of twinship in the parody of the gold chain that it offers. The relaxed shoulders, blank expression and the emphasis in the costume to suggest a long body and short legs all present the figure as innately ridiculous, not only making the scene comic in itself but locating it within a particular convention of stage comedy. The act of generic placement is made more forceful by the circumstance that the reference is not to Shakespeare’s play but to Thomas Hull’s adaptation The Twins, presented at Covent Garden in 1762. The plot of this play does not differ materially from Shakespeare’s, but the fact that it concludes with a moral taken from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ suggests that it significantly blunted the original’s sharp juxtaposition of genres into the simplistic claim that the play’s progress teaches that ‘Whatever is, is right’. The result is an early, and highly effective, demonstration of the curious, distancing doubleness of an image purporting to show what at the time was called a personation: one person taking on the role of another. When seen together, Edwards’ frontispiece and Dunstall’s portrait present an alternation between novelistic naturalism, devoid of the play’s self-reflexive concerns, and a stage comedy that refuses to acknowledge its own darker intensity. Such realignments may well have caused confusion for original readers of the edition, and perhaps also hint at indecisiveness in the editor and illustrators. The uncertainties over genre have now been replaced by concerns with its relationship to naturalistic portrayal, raising larger questions about how a single theatrical continuum can embrace both the naturalism of Edwards in showing the sufferings of Pinch, something moving at least towards commedia grave, if not quite to tragedy, and the comedic, nearfarcical figure of Dromio. In the coming together of the two images is contained the play’s essential generic complexity, at the same time emphasising in the metaphor of illustration the metatheatric elements basic to the play’s origin in Plautus and Gascoygne. These are concerns that will be addressed in quite different ways by later illustrators; but, along with the 97

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two Rowe images, this double frontispiece demonstrates not only the play’s complexities but the difficulties inherent within a single image reading and how, in one image, the paradox of using a fundamentally medieval compositional device succeeds uniquely in bringing together its multiple forms.

II Nineteenth-century visualisations of the play continue the implicit exploration of genre and its relation to naturalism that has, without parallel statement in critical or theatrical terms, and almost wholly without the notice of later critics, come to be a major preoccupation of the earlier illustrative tradition. Two images from the beginning of the period offer alternative stances towards the play’s genre, at the same time revealing new approaches to the problem of presenting dramatic action within a synchronous medium. That they differ radically in scale, rhetoric and style is an index of the degree to which Shakespeare imaging has altered since Rowe, and both show considerable sophistication in addressing the problems of visual translation of a complex textual continuum. The earlier of the two, and the larger and more rhetorically distanced in medium, setting and style, was painted for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery by John Francis Rigaud and engraved by Charles Gauthier Playter (1800: Figure 23).7 That only one painting of the play was completed for the Gallery reveals its low status in contemporary performance and criticism, a condition echoed in its sale for 10 guineas (£10.50) at the auction held at Christie’s in May 1805, a figure that compares poorly with Rigaud’s initial fee of £315 for the painting – the standard fee for a Royal Academician contributing to the Shakespeare Gallery.8 The achievement of the image is effectively to present the main forces that drive the action in the form of a frozen visual statement, revealing them within an instant of the action while at the same time conveying a sense of suspense – although it does this in a compositional form quite different from that used by Boitard, presenting the main characters together in a single plane. The central focus is the confrontation between the Duke and the Abbess, who are linked by gesture and eye-line across the middle ground. Their gestures also implicate Egeon, who kneels before the executioner at the right foreground. Between the two key figures stand the two sets of twins, distinguishable because Antipholus of Syracuse wears the chain. At the very centre stands Angelo, grasping the chain and looking questioningly at Antipholus, providing a visual fulcrum within an image that presents the characters in 98

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23 Charles Gauthier Playter, after John Francis Rigaud: The Comedy of Errors, 1800.

almost complete symmetry. The setting is naturalistic, the costumes following the kind of scrupulous historical authenticity fashionable in many Boydell images. The result is to move the play doubly out of the theatre, first by eschewing any reference, literal or metaphoric, to the nature of performance and secondly by adopting a notional historic and geographic accuracy that locates events within the forum of their fictional occurrence, not the date and theatrical conventions of the play’s composition. Yet the suspension of event just before the final resolution is dramatic in the full colloquial sense: the appearance of Egeon has the urgency of a Christian martyr, and the threat to his life appears genuine, albeit offset by the stylised pairing of characters. This duality succeeds, within the image’s powerfully synchronic statement of narrative drives, in conveying the mingled tone and compound generic identities of the play. 99

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When exhibited, the painting would have followed the practice of the Gallery by having displayed with it a textual quotation, and this was given permanent form in the engraving. In both, the inclusion of nine lines from the play’s text (5.1.330–8), rarely so extensive in the collection, suggests that the complexity of the scene in this lesser known play was not immediately recognised. By the time of the Gallery’s opening, the presence of textual quotations alongside paintings was an established process, having been sanctioned by the Royal Academy in 1798; those who knew the plays would in consequence have been able to place each image within their larger dramatic currency. This demonstrates the new possibilities, and the new difficulties, of the viewing situations of this and all the Boydell paintings. When exhibited in the Gallery, the conjunction would inevitably invite discussion among the viewing public; when shown in a domestic setting, either framed or in a portfolio, a similar yet more intimate reflection would have been possible. Both, however, depend on the viewer’s knowledge of the play as a whole for full assimilation: here, as in all the images on paper or canvas, the work treads a narrow path between offering an isolated moment of action and a broader critical reading of the whole – a path negotiated in different ways, and with varying success, by different artists. Two images were commissioned for the edition of the plays issued as part of the Boydell venture, both by Francis Wheatley. One is a rather weak treatment of the exchange between Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus in 4.4; the other a new departure in showing the episode narrated but not shown where Egeon’s twin sons and their mother are rescued from drowning, in a composition borrowed from images of the miraculous draught of fishes. In so doing it complicates the play’s narrative, hinting at its subsequent unfolding; but the choice seems odd, perhaps driven by a wish to present an event in the manner of a history painting in the grand style – something to which Chapter 10 will return.9 Henry Fuseli’s image for the Rivington Shakespeare, edited by A. C. Chalmers in 1805 (Figure 24),10 is almost contemporary with the Rigaud, but approaches the task of visualisation differently, in a manner appropriate to its contrasted scale and material function. Fuseli’s approach is bold and simple, seizing on a single incident not as a turning point but as a metonym of the play’s movement. This is the moment in 2.2 when Antipholus of Syracuse rejects Adriana, made clear by the inclusion of the line ‘Plead you to me, fair Dame? I know you not’ (2.2.138). While lacking the compound iconography of many of Fuseli’s images, it operates with an immediacy that is probably more effective in its reading context. The design shows the confrontation directly, set simply with 100

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24 Henry Fuseli: frontispiece to The Comedy of Errors, 1803.

a doorway that reflects one of the play’s key comic encounters, all before an open sky. The moment of misunderstanding is intensified by the presentation of Antipholus from the rear, stressing his posture of recoil, emphasising the blank faces of Adriana and Luciana. Both women slightly resemble the courtesan figures in many of Fuseli’s paintings, sharing their fashionable Empire costume; but their faces are softer, and their hair less elaborately coiffed, so that the predatory sexuality common elsewhere is absent. The image functions by distilling the play into one essential trope, that of mistaken identity, but it does so in a manner that is fundamentally serious rather than comic, reflecting the depth of feeling voiced in Adriana’s speech (2.2.101–37). When considered as part of a particular reading experience, encountered opposite the title page by a reader who might well not know the play, the engraving’s success is revealed. The slightly sinister aspect of Antipholus’ rear view and the blankness of the two 101

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women suggest a moderated uncertainty; but the linear architectural forms and clear sky all suggest a greater calm, so that the encounter is shown in a manner that goes beyond farce to suggest a gentle questioning that is highly effective in involving the reader. More striking is the way in which the image makes reference to the play’s selfreflexive qualities. This it does first through the situation it represents in which characters attempt to make sense of the events, showing the text’s recurrent concern for the nature and validity of narrative; and secondly in the stylisation with which the characters are shown, hinting at the confusions of identity by the defamiliarised forms in which the figures are presented, and also in the very act of dramatic personation. Through this dual reading the engraving reveals itself as both simple and complex. In uniting these elements in a single image it draws the play’s forces together at a level quite different from that of the Boydell engraving, addressing not only the play’s concern with genre but its own metatheatricality – the figures exaggerated almost to the point of caricature mirroring the play’s dialogic relationship with the traditions of character and event in which it locates itself. At the same time, the frontispiece offers a forceful example of how the synchronic moment of a visual image may mediate the temporal unfolding of a dramatic structure. For these reasons it is much more effective than Francis Wheatley’s treatment of a similar scene of misunderstanding mentioned above, using the compressed format to advantage to emphasise the moment within its larger movement rather than presenting the scene in a more direct attempt at comedy that aims to imitate something of an imagined grand style. The treatment by Frank Howard in The Spirit of the Plays of Shakespeare (1833: Figure 25) adopts a totally different technique for this and all the plays. Instead of the single trope of Fuseli or the diagrammatic final scene of Rigaud, it presents a series of seventeen ‘outline plates’ which re-structure it into a rigid linear chronology. Events only referred to by characters are given full visual treatment, so that not only the shipwreck but ‘The Marriage of Antipholus of Ephesus with Adriana’ and ‘Aegeon arriving at Ephesus’ are shown. Curiously, one result is that the opening scene, with the appeal of the bound Egeon that raises such profound questions about the play’s identity, is omitted, as the events he describes in this scene take prominence over the situation in which he describes them. In itself a curious and disturbing dissolution of this key scene, the change of mode is symptomatic of a much larger rearrangement of the play’s structural syntax. Such revision takes no account of the very specific way in which events are disclosed, the importance of telling that the play 102

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25 Frank Howard: first illustration to The Comedy of Errors, The Spirit of the Plays of Shakespeare, 1833.

repeatedly embodies, or the complex relation between action, recollection and dialogue that is inseparable from the generic nature of drama. In consequence the play’s tension is slackened and its pace relaxed; any suggestion of the dynamic identity of farce, at one extreme, and tragedy, at the other, is absent. Yet, while the simple outline technique of the engravings denies the presentation of nuance in character or setting, in this play it can be seen as offering a positive critical reading. The simple draughtsmanship depicts the action within a style of sparse, diluted classicism quite different from the bawdy vigour of Plautus. Perhaps the redefinition causes the onlooker to reflect on the play’s more serious concerns, while revealing an outlook quite consistent with laterRomantic constructions of an idealised classical aesthetic. Perhaps, too, the stress on the united family before the action of the play begins emphasises the sense at its end of the discovery of relationships long thought lost. In this way the play’s romance movement is strengthened, while the designs for individual episodes make clear its moves to other forms. While the visual enactment offered by John Thurston (Figure 26) is just as radical as Howard’s, it differs strongly in style and takes a much more immediate approach, leaving the onlooker in no doubt about the play’s generic identity. 103

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26 John Thompson: The Comedy of Errors, Illustrations of Shakespeare, 1825.

First published as a frontispiece and headpieces to each act in an edition prepared by Charles Whittingham in 1814,11 the wood engravings by John Thompson after Thurston’s designs became popular when issued as a volume 104

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of single-page visualisations of each play.12 The form is unique in its approach. Whittingham’s edition was a duodecimo volume, one of the kind fashionable at the time because of their tiny size, sometimes intended for ladies to keep in their reticules, and perhaps broadening the franchise of illustrated Shakespeare. The title’s claim that the images are ‘adapted to all editions’ suggests that they might be pasted into other volumes at appropriate textual moments – an extension to more lowly purchasers of the cult of grangerising or extraillustration. Each of the images measures 4 × 5 cm (roughly 1 ½ × 2 in) – about the size first employed by Thomas Bewick in his British Birds and other books of the century’s first decades. When presented together, in a single page measuring 14 × 23 cm (5½ × 9 in), the images offer a concentrated progress through the play, the first engraving presenting its totality through an emblem or collection of representative elements, with five remaining pictures each presenting an important moment from each act. Much of the effect in the Errors page derives from careful selection of moments for visual treatment, three of the six images enacting the trope of mistaken identity, so that any suggestion of complexity or multivalence is avoided. This is a Shakespeare given wide appeal through its physical energy, and in this it anticipates many of the more successful twentieth-century revivals and adaptations. The initial image shows a confusion of identical clothing, to represent emblematically the Duke’s question when confronted with the two Dromios in Act 5: ‘Which is the natural man, / And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?’ (5.1.332–4). The question immediately provides context and direction for the succeeding images, yet the dynamic thrust that results is curiously undermined in the final image. Instead of offering a resolution to answer the Duke’s question, it shows Pinch being doused with water, an event that does not even continue the confusions of identity shown in the other images, let alone contributing to the play’s conclusion. This swerve of concept and abandonment of logic rejects the pattern that the page of images creates at its outset. Yet perhaps this is the key to its effectiveness: in avoiding the romance closure, it privileges the play’s comic confusions over any coming together, and in moving away from the confines of a theatrical drive perhaps reminds the reader of the metatheatric reflections with which the Plautine antecedent of Errors begins. The oppositions circulating around genre and reflexivity evident in these two treatments are overtaken in the succeeding decades by concerns for a realism that reflects the general stylistic tenor of the wood engraving, then the dominant visual medium in illustration of the novel, poetry and the new illustrated journalism. What emerges very rapidly as the dominant form is the illustrated edition 105

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27 John Gilbert: title page to The Comedy of Errors, 1856–60.

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28 John Gilbert: illustration to The Comedy of Errors, 1856–60.

with a large number of line engravings that constitute a visual analogy of the play’s unfolding narrative and changing temper. In this play, the new format offers both new opportunities and new difficulties, paralleling more closely those of performance in holding together its multiple forms while retaining the sheer range that they present and maintaining some notion of visual continuity. The approach is demonstrated effectively in the edition of Howard Staunton’s serial edition, in which Errors contains nineteen images by Sir John Gilbert, offering a continuous visual analogue to the play’s narrative progress that is heavily naturalistic in approach, in many cases with considerable sensitivity. It does, however, make clear its own understanding of the play’s generic identity from the outset in the illustrated title page (Figure 27). Dr Pinch is being doused with water, while a separate lower panel shows the Dromio twins as comic caricatures of the kind often used in Victorian imaging to depict servants and lower orders as approaching the sub-human. The result in the title page is a suggestion of comedy existing somewhere between knockabout farce and 107

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29 Kenny Meadows: illustration to The Comedy of Errors, 1838–43.

rather brutal persecution. The engravings within the play itself sometimes approach a more serious note, as with Adriana’s appeal to the Duke at 5.1, her hand outspread in supplication forming a graceful counterpoint to the executioner’s axe that appears just above (Figure 28). The moment of threat is transitory, soon counteracted by the figures of Dromio and Antipholus disappearing through the gates of the abbey. Gilbert’s images for The Comedy of Errors are not as analytical in approach as are his designs for many other plays: while they provide a parallel to the play’s movement they do not approach a reading of its tonal changes and generic complexity. Perhaps as a reflection of the play’s comparative neglect at this time, much the same may be said of the rather earlier edition of Barry Cornwall, with images by Kenny Meadows. Although first issued serially between 1839 and 1843, it appeared in several subsequent versions, some with colour plates, but all with a series of line drawings or engravings by a range of artists, and so may be seen as a contemporary alternative to the single visual process offered by Gilbert’s 108

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images. Errors is not among those more fully visualised by Meadows, the main illustration being the full-page frontispiece showing Dromio of Ephesus being whipped with the rope’s end by Antipholus (Figure 29). The only hint of a comedic outcome is provided by the mildly caricatured figure of Dr Pinch at the right. Denied the generic encryption of the Serlio images, the background is suggestive as much of a large Victorian villa as of the abbey before whose gates the action takes place. Whether this is a piece of imaginative translocation, intensifying the action by making it familiarly placed, is for the viewer to decide. More complex readings are offered in Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. Each page has footnotes by the editors, Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, mostly from the latter’s edition of 1859–60. With one significant exception, the illustrations for The Comedy of Errors were designed by Henry Courtney Selous and engraved on wood by Frederick Wentworth. Their sequential treatment of the play’s tonal shifts repay detailed discussion, revealing a contemporary response to a play still not popularly staged, as well as showing the operations of through-illustrated editions, offering an example of the kind of reading experience specific to their time and form. Their value, then, is both very specific and generally exemplary. The first image to greet the reader is an illustrated title page showing Egeon bound before the Duke (Figure 30). Nothing in its tone or content suggests comedic genre or romance outcome. The event is framed by the hefty figures of guards, with women in the background, one holding an infant, all of whom provide a sombre tone in their kneeling postures and grave expressions. Any suggestion of the play’s comedic structure must come from the knowledge the reader brings to the image and from the title at its foot; for the uninitiated this is bound to induce a confusion to match the severity of Egeon’s appeal in Act 1. Particularly striking is the way that Egeon’s posture indicates urgent pleading for life, whereas his opening words, the very first in the play, do not quite share this intent: Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, And by the doom of death end woes and all. (1.1.1–2)

Selous’ images present the rest of the play in a very different tone. Dromio is depicted as a farcical, almost sub-human figure, even in the moments when confusion of identities causes the exploration of serious ideas, as in the image of 2.2 (Figure 31) where Adriana is shown discussing her marriage with the wrong Antipholus. Yet the absurdity is nicely balanced by the naturalistic setting which, shorn of the cultural associations of Serlio’s prescriptions, locates the scene in 109

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30 Henry Courtney Selous: title page to The Comedy of Errors, 1864.

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31 Henry Courtney Selous: The Comedy of Errors 2.2, 1864.

a convincingly Italianate locale. Adriana’s intervention before the abbey gates in 5.1 is effective in a different way (Figure 32). The image provides a powerful geometric conflict as Adriana interposes herself between the Duke and Antipholus, the event once more strengthened by the naturalistic architecture before which it appears. Adriana’s appeal, on her knees before the Duke, that occurs on the next page (Figure 33), matches the force of the scene with an appeal couched in terms appropriate to Victorian conventions of sentimentalised femininity. This translation of feeling into body-language, so familiar in mid-nineteenth-century imaging as to be almost invisible, is matched by another act of relocation that is more original: all of the images present the action in an Italian setting, with no effort to convey the exoticism of Ephesus as an ‘Oriental’ Otherness. This is striking in Victorian images, often so concerned with accuracy of place and time. The departure suggests a curious blend of realism and metatheatre – an acceptance, perhaps, of the Plautine Prologue’s disarming assertion that the city represented on the stage will for the next play ‘become another town’.13 The Cowden Clarkes’ edition concludes with two engravings that balance narrative realism against comic exchange. A full-page engraving (Figure 34) 111

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32 Henry Courtney Selous: The Comedy of Errors 5.1, 1864.

presents the two Dromios as identical twins, gesturing towards each other in terms which hint at the physiognomic theories of the period to show their subordinate status and intellect. Coming as the final direct textual illustration of the play, the image leaves the reader with the impression that its tone is predominantly comic and insignificant, and in this it perhaps reveals a problem 112

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33 Henry Courtney Selous: final illustration to The Comedy of Errors, 1864.

implicit in having different artists contribute to the play’s visual processing. A quite different reading is offered by the vignette that appears at the end of Act 5, after the Cowden Clarkes’ footnotes (Figure 35). It represents a view of the coast of Ephesus, framed by a Greek key motif framed two high-Victorian flourishes. Historical naturalism is thus given the visual last word, in counterpoint to the precision of the final footnotes. In occurring after the text and notes, the engraving also emblematises the larger cultural location of illustration within the assimilation of the plays at this period. The visual conclusion offered by Gilbert (Figure 36) offers a quite different reading, suggesting a more conventional notion of the happy comedy that concludes with resolution and gaiety. 113

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34 Adrian Ludwig Richter: ‘The two Dromios’, The Comedy of Errors, 1864.

One adopts the realism of the novel, the other the spontaneity of theatre; one is sedate, the other innocently celebratory. Far from being resolved, the generic complexities of The Comedy of Errors are presented in all the images discussed here with various degrees of critical acuity, textual reading and experiential immediacy that, at their best, sharpen and intensify their insistence. What is remarkable is not that the images fail to clarify the play’s generic definition, or do little to silence the critical discussion that continues to surround the play. It is that, both at a time when performance was rare indeed and criticism at best nascent and, at a later period when editing and illustration occur in dialogue with performance practice, they present it in supple and engaging forms and return the reader to the play’s own critical selfinterrogation. Common to both these later editions is the construction of a verbal-visual text in which the play’s tensions are fused in a manner quite different from that of their predecessors, their multiple imaging allowing a wholly different 114

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35 Henry Courtney Selous: tailpiece to Act V, The Comedy of Errors, 1864.

36 John Gilbert: final illustration to The Comedy of Errors, 1856–60.

relationship between image, word and reader. Building on repeated statement, it allows a level of narrative expectation and fulfilment, emotional involvement or critical analysis that is essentially diachronic in place of the single images of earlier volumes which, especially in a play of such generic complexity, demands choices about trajectory and mood that are especially demanding. The repeated use of illustration within the unfolding text may thus offer a more complete analogy to the theatrical currency of the play, either when read or in performance, although what it gains in immediacy it may lose in critical incisiveness. 115

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The two approaches, synchronic encryption as opposed to diachronic naturalism, are the larger conceptual arc beneath which the individual editions, and the reading experiences they generate, extend beyond this play to enfold treatments of the others. The difference offers itself as a telling example, albeit perhaps at a more extreme level, of the differences of visual treatment and reading experience between the two kinds of imaging, and the imaginative, conceptual and material circumstances in which they exist. In a play as supply complex in movement and tone as The Comedy of Errors, however, this process is especially revealing and, given the very limited performance history of Errors, such experiences assume particular importance in the history of the play’s reception.

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CHAPTER 6

TEXT, IMAGE AND TEMPER IN KING LEAR

While The Comedy of Errors develops its trajectory of visual treatments from a printed text with little or no intersection with performance, for King Lear the tradition is almost completely the reverse. Betterton’s Lear was already established on the stage when Boitard came to England and began work for Rowe; his frontispiece image, and the tradition that it inaugurated, reveals a close exchange with performance in a manner that reflected, continued and challenged the changes in text that occurred throughout the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth. Teasing out this relationship consequently offers another view of the illustrative tradition, complementing the path followed by Errors with one travelled alongside performance. It also has much to reveal about the forces directing textual adaptation, in terms of the economic situation of the London theatres, the power of audience demands and the changing patterns of emotional response to the play. Including as it does several easel paintings, the play’s visual history thus broadens the discussion in another important direction. From the first illustration in 1709 until well into the nineteenth century, the visual history of King Lear is dominated by images of Lear on the heath. Although appealing at first sight, the seeming continuity is far from simple. Variations of detail raise questions about which text of the play is being presented, and at what precise moment of its action; both questions are enfolded in the larger issue of any relation to stage performance and if so, which. On a much broader plane is the relationship between images of the play and changing artistic styles and conventions, and the ideological and aesthetic imperatives with which they intersect. Exceptions to the heath tradition are few, but highly significant in their textual readings, to say nothing of their individual power. What appears, 117

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then, to be a rare instance of a fairly consistent iconography of one of the plays is instead laden with larger concerns that have much to imply about vectors of presentation and assimilation, at the same time as offering a valuable new standpoint for the assessment of what still remains to some the controversial suggestion of the two-text theory. From the beginning, the images suggest the continuing instability of the play’s identity in performance and text, both as separate structures and in the convoluted and constantly changing relations between them. In the late 1980s James Ogden argued convincingly that the play’s first illustration, that by François Boitard for Rowe’s 1709 edition (Figure 37), rested firmly on Nahum Tate’s version of 1681 rather than that more directly attributable to Shakespeare.1 His analysis was used to support his larger argument: that Rowe’s stage directions are taken largely from Tate, who introduced the term ‘heath’ twice in the third act. This in turn may rest on Davenant’s use of the word in the witches’ scene (2.5) added in his Macbeth: ‘Scene, a Heath’. The Rowe image supports this by arguably representing the painted drop cloth of this setting and a jagged lightning flash, suggesting the supernatural evil of Davenant’s witches. Tate’s version is also implied in the presence of Kent and Gloucester in contemporary court dress, and the possible resemblance of Lear to Betterton himself. While the thrust of the article is directed to textual matters, it has major implications about the nature and subsequent importance of the image. This does more than return to earlier views of Boitard’s designs as largely resting on contemporary performances. It raises questions about Rowe’s editorial practices and the ways in which text, performance and image may intertwine not simply in this image, but in the whole iconographic tradition that it spawned, where the episode on the heath is presented as the play’s frontispiece in several editions and in some independent treatments. François Boitard arrived in London in 1700, and was thus able to see King Lear on the London stage, but only in Tate’s version. In its location of the figures, with Kent and Gloucester on either side of Lear, his frontispiece design certainly mimics stage convention of the day, with the central character flanked by those of less importance, while the figure of Edgar as Poor Tom is shown entering from stage left. That this is the traditional point of entry for evil figures, inherited from medieval conventions for the devil, need not work against the design as a stage record. The suggestion that the figure of Lear resembles Betterton, who took the role in Tate’s versions when presented in the first decade of the century, may be supported by the portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller.2 As is customary in portraiture of the time, Betterton is shown facing 118

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37 François Boitard: frontispiece to King Lear, 1709.

to the left; but three engraved versions of the period reverse the image, a not uncommon approach to save time in the engraving process, which of course will turn the image through 180 degrees when printed from the engraved plate. One, by Robert Williams, is a mezzotint, the finest and most costly form.3 Of the two line engravings one is by Michael Vandergucht, who also designed the portrait of Shakespeare used as the frontispiece to Volume 1 of Rowe’s edition. It would be satisfying to suggest that Boitard saw this Betterton engraving when designing his Lear, but highly unlikely, since the engraving was published in 1710. He might, however, have seen the Williams mezzotint, an engraving by J. Wooding,4 or another by an anonymous engraver, the last two appearing in the 1690s. The Wooding reverses the Kneller; the anonymous print does not. That Boitard’s design was engraved while Elisha Kirkall was working under the pressure of producing all the engravings for Rowe makes it quite possible that the engraving followed directly Boitard’s original, so that when printed the image reversed its original orientation. The result is to draw the image closer to the play in Betterton’s production. 119

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Another, more material, element may link the engraving to performance: the lightning flash that splits the image’s middle ground. This echoes Tate’s stage direction, but may also record performance. Andrew Gurr supports the prevalence of lightning effects in the Shakespearean theatre, while others suggest they were produced by a firecracker linked to a falling rope by means of a ‘swevel’ or swivel. The Drury Lane accounts record 6d for lightning in King Lear on 1 June 1716 and the same amount for The Tempest on 6 January the same year.5 The span of these dates suggests the availability of similar effects in Betterton’s theatre, and the superior staging practices in Paris might well have offered similar possibilities to Boitard’s illustrative imagination before he came to London. What results from this not very satisfactory piece of detective work is no more than conjecture: Boitard may have seen Betterton in Tate’s Lear while in London, either before or during the two years at most that he had to produce all the Shakespeare designs; or he may have seen an engraving of Kneller’s portrait, most likely one or other of the anonymous engravings simply because they were smaller, cheaper and most widely available. Or all of these; or, of course, none. This exploration may well seem marginal at best, but it has value for several reasons. One is that it reveals possible links between the image and the theatre, implicit within which are a larger relationship between textual editing on one hand and performance practice on the other. The links can only be described as ‘possible’, resting on a series of feasible rather than actual equations; but they nonetheless bring together fields often held apart. Seen within the larger history of illustration, as later parts of this chapter will suggest, the stage and page relation is further complicated by the intervention of frontispiece and other images, so that the debate about the play’s textual varieties is shown within a larger conspectus of variance. A consequence of this is the importance of the selection of the moment in the play which became the subject of the majority of subsequent images. That these chose essentially the same events reveals their importance in contemporary readings of the play, which suggest that the encounter on the heath is in some measure the play’s climax of event, and perhaps also of anagnorisis and self-awareness in Lear – something important for reasons discussed later. There is a third layer of significance. The presence of Kneller’s portrait in two major reproductive forms – an expensive mezzotint and cheaper, more widely available line engravings – makes clear the importance of portraits of actors at this time, but also their prominence as individuals as well as in the roles they performed. That is one strand of the popular representation of the theatre, balanced by the prevalence of portraits in character; but, as these paragraphs 120

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have shown, the two cannot easily be separated when the production processes and the popular availability in which they operated are considered. Finally, the exploration demonstrates again the difficulty of finding indisputable evidence of a direct line between performance, portraiture and engraving for an edition of the plays. The presence of this image in Rowe’s version, which adds stage directions to the text from Folio and Quartos as well as Tate, confounds things still more. From the play’s first visual treatment, it appears that the text is far from clearly established: it is not so much that the two-text issue has always been present, but that multiple variants, merging like intersecting coulisses, are the basis of what has been understood as Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear. There is an irony here. The edition of the play by Rowe is significant in establishing a copy text of Shakespeare’s version, with the addition of many stage directions, that would be an important basis for the subsequent version of Johnson and later editors. Yet the frontispiece quite clearly departs from it in both the absence of the key role of the Fool and in details of setting, both of which refer not simply to a production, but to a production of a different text. That this scene becomes the pattern for the majority of later images for the rest of the century, and remains prominent even beyond, suggests an important consequence of the textual variations through which the play has passed in performance and editing for both stage and study. Rowe’s 1714 frontispiece, by Louis du Guernier (Figure 38), continues and extends Boitard’s design. It retains the bleak landscape and lightning flash, establishing both the setting and moment, confirming the importance of the scene and hence the play’s trajectory. There are important differences here, in the inclusion of the Fool, shown with the cap, bells and jester’s staff of tradition in earlier plays, and in the torch carried by Gloucester. This is clearly Shakespeare’s play, not Tate’s, and illustrates text more than performance, since the Fool is absent from Tate’s version and from the stage until 1838, and Gloucester’s torch is mentioned only in the Folio. Du Guernier seems, then, to have worked from print, not theatre; the obvious, if ironic, inference being that he used the most easily available text, that of Rowe’s 1709 edition. Yet the lightning flash remains, suggesting a tradition of staging; and the pivotal importance of the scene implicitly continues Boitard’s reading to suggest, as much as to construct, a dramatic movement in the play that accords with prevalent ideas of the rhythm and moral movement of tragedy. Few readers of either would have encountered anything like Shakespeare’s text other than through Rowe. Versions of Tate still 121

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38 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to King Lear, 1714.

held the stage, and the folios were rare, and costly.6 The 1714 design is important in one further way. In presenting the moment where Lear shows compassion to the Fool and the ‘poor naked wretches’ he represents, the image offers a moment of self-discovery that fits well within a trajectory leading to Tate’s happy resolution, with Lear’s survival and the marriage of Cordelia and Kent. The apparent resolution hinted at in the storm scene would surely have been difficult to reconcile for Rowe’s readers; perhaps ironically, the tension presents the play’s innovative structure and moral and emotional complexity. Other frontispiece illustrations of the mid-eighteenth century followed with remarkable precision the scheme of Rowe’s original image. They are also important in numbering among the few images for which written instructions survive. One is Francis Hayman’s image, for which Hanmer’s notes follow closely the scheme of Boitard and du Guernier: 122

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39 Francis Hayman: frontispiece to King Lear, 1740–44.

A naked barren heath, with a poor thatch’d weather-beaten hovel upon it. Edgar comes out of the hovel like a Tom o’Bedlam, all in rags, his hair ruffled and gnarl’d and mix’d with straws, and his gesture and action frantick. The king’s fool having peep’d into the hovel runs back from the mad-man in fright. The King bare-headed and in gray hairs stares with amazement at the fellow and fixes great attention on him. Kent habited like a serving-man waits upon the King. A very stormy sky with light’ning and rain.7

Hayman’s design (Figure 39) follows the instructions implicitly, but adds to it the central detail of the diagonal lightning flash. What is new in both words and image is the treatment of the Fool, who runs out of the hovel to seek Lear’s protection. This could not, of course, have occurred in any production of the time; yet the general design of the engraving, with its frontally composed 123

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40 Francis Hayman: frontispiece to King Lear, 1770.

alignment and simply presented ground, with characters closely grouped, suggests something of contemporary staging. In the image’s continuation of some of Rowe’s devices, and most particularly in the simple existence of Hanmer’s directions as much as their content, it maintains the trajectory established in the two earlier images. A second prescription occurs in a letter from Garrick to Hayman, dated 10 October 1745: Suppose Lear Mad upon the Ground with Edgar by him; His Attitude Should be leaning upon one hand & pointing Wildly towards the Heavens with his Other, Kent & Fool attend him & Glocester comes to him with a Torch; the real Madness of Lear, the Frantick Affectation of Edgar, and the different looks of Concern in the three other Characters will have a fine Effect.8

Although perhaps intended as one of a series of new paintings, the image took form only as the frontispiece to Jennens’ edition of Shakespeare, published nearly three decades later (Figure 40).9 The same moment is depicted, and 124

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a suggestion of performance given in the focus, typical of Garrick’s own acting, on facial expression – ‘different looks of Concern’ – in the surrounding figures. The presence of the Fool, however, is a radical departure from Garrick’s practice: although he moved progressively away from Tate towards something approaching a Shakespearean script, he stopped short at the Fool since he felt, for reasons discussed later, that contemporary audiences could not cope with such radical change from the familiar text. The two written directions confirm the importance of the earlier tradition, most particularly by showing its continuity as reflecting the temper of the age and, in the case of the later set, the closeness of the visual tradition to the theatrical. Both of John Bell’s editions continue the dual tradition of earlier images. By the 1770s Garrick’s use of Tate had been gradually revised, largely by the return of lines from Shakespeare, during successive performances, to say nothing of the textual alterations made by Colman. It has been argued that Bell’s 1774 text rested on Garrick’s prompt-book of 1756 – although whether that corresponded to his own later performances is a separate question. The text of Garrick’s performance published by C. Bathurst 1786 describes itself in the subtitle as Marked with the Variations in the Manager’s Book at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane.10 Its inclusion of cues for thunder and lightning confirms and extends the link between stage and image by now established as an essential iconographic component, and the edition also makes textual changes, cutting eighteen of the lines of Tate kept by Bell, and restoring fifty of Shakespeare’s.11 Two points are important here. First, it is clear that while Garrick was aware of the inadequacies of Tate’s version – he cut, for example, the scene in Act 4 with Edmund and Regan in the grotto – he could not go as far as to reinstate the Fool, but he could move more closely towards the letter, as well as the spirit, of Shakespeare’s play through smaller reinstatements and replacements. As Stone felicitously puts it, ‘By gradual infiltration Garrick was restoring Shakespeare’s wording as well as Shakespeare’s character emphasis’ (94). The reasons for this were strictly governed by what the public would bear, and while it is easy to see them as evidence of his commercial acumen, which in part they were, the reasons for the reluctance of the public to accept Shakespeare’s ending rest as strongly on the taste of the day. Repeated quotations from contemporary accounts of Garrick’s performance talk of the great emotional effect it had on the audience, leading him ‘to cater to the public taste for tears and pathos’ (Stone, 96). William Cooke (Memoirs, 107) spoke of how the reuniting with Cordelia ‘drew tears of commiseration from the whole house’; the Grays-Inn Journal (12 January 1754, 93), how Lear’s ‘sudden Apostrophe to his 125

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daughters drew tears from every eye’. Further evidence of this is provided by Stone, and repeated in Kalmin A. Burnim’s study, quoting contemporary responses stressing the prevalence of tears in Garrick himself as well as throughout the audience.12 What is shown here is what Stone calls the ‘temper’ of the age, something closer to the emotional force of sensibilité and early Romanticism than to eighteenth-century classicism. These comments are revealing when considered in parallel with the tradition of images of Lear on the heath. Boitard’s presentation makes clear that it is the play’s turning point: Lear’s self-realisation made manifest. When contemporary audience responses are added to the illustration tradition, it reveals their place in the emotional systems of the period by marking out Lear’s recognition of his folly, and his resultant compassion, as the play’s central element. This goes some way to explaining Garrick’s reluctance to restore Tate’s ending; it would go quite against both traditions – of stage, in consequence of Garrick’s performance, and of image, in direct succession from Boitard’s originating image. In consequence, it gives the images another, and very rare, significance and influence in the history of Shakespeare illustration. There is another reason for Garrick’s caution, rarely noted in textual discussions. The audience for Shakespeare was by no means homogeneous, and the practice of half-price admissions continued well into Garrick’s reign. The price riots of 1763 followed his intention to abolish the practice, and succeeded in its retention. The logic of this – that working men could not attend the performances from the beginning, being still at work – made perfect sense, but also resulted in their being admitted in time to see the last two acts of the play performed first, often a Shakespeare.13 The second half of the programme would be a mixture of short scenes, songs or a contemporary play, often a farce or pantomime, featuring a popular performer. A practical result of this was that many would come to the theatre for this and begin their entertainment by seeing the two last acts of King Lear. Seeing Shakespeare’s text, with both Fool and original ending, would have been confusing enough for those present for the whole evening, since both went directly against stage convention, current ideas of dramatic decorum and the emotional responses these projected. For those who saw only the conclusion, it would have been close to incomprehensible in adding an element of comedy in the Fool yet denying the happy resolution this would imply. Drury Lane could not afford to produce Shakespeare without the popular pieces performed later in the evening; hence, the avoidance of the confusing mixed genre made perfect economic, as well as aesthetic, sense. It was not only the working people who felt this incongruity; the 126

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41 Edward Edwards: double frontispiece to King Lear, 1773.

sentimental nature of many of the shorter late-evening pieces reminds us that the mood of the time was moving steadily towards emotion in audiences of all kinds, not just those of lower rank. In discussing the later price riots, Marc Baer argues persuasively that they continued the unrest manifested in 1763, when working people saw cheaper admission as one of their few rights, and regarded their removal as another instance of government control.14 That these occurred when the Seven Years’ War had at last concluded, the Treaty of Paris being signed in February, might well have influenced the need for cheap popular entertainment, although this is of course imponderable. Yet the effects of war would surely have been felt by some of Garrick’s audience, and the circumstances add a further dimension to the riot, hinting at the incursion of foreign policy into directorial decisions concerning the restoration of Shakespeare’s text with the Fool and the final death scenes. 127

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Edward Edwards’ design for the 1774 Bell (Figure 41) again follows Boitard’s scheme, but concentrates it by including only the figures of Gloucester and Edgar as Tom o’Bedlam with Lear. The hovel and tree remain, and the lightning stroke is more pronounced than before. A major change in the volumes themselves is the introduction of short quotations as captions; here they are part of Lear’s reply to Edgar’s speech on his own sufferings: Thou art the thing itself –––––Off, off, you lendings (3.4.95, 97)

The lengthy dash indicates the omission of ‘unaccommodated man’ ‘no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’, the compression strengthening the image’s action in which Lear tears at his upper garment while looking at the near-naked Edgar, emphasising again his compassion. That it is directed to Edgar and not the Fool relates it to Garrick’s version: the emphasis returns to the earlier reading of the play that sees the event as a turning point that prepares the final resolution. The frontispiece does more than record something of performance. It reveals popular taste in the trajectory that it presents so that, right from opening the volume in which it appears, the reader is presented with heroic defiance and self-sacrifice, tightening the play’s emotional threads to match the growing concern for feeling. The actor portrait added to many of the later copies of Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition shows not Garrick as Lear but ‘Mr Reddish in the Character of Edgar’, and is captioned ‘There could I have him now, & there, & here again, and there.’ The words occur a few lines before those illustrated by Edwards in his scene from the play, albeit without any intended sequence. The images were the work of separate artists, and the plates issued some months apart, the Edwards on 25 March 1773 and the Grignion on 25 October. The costumes are also quite different, with the later image faithful to performance, given its aim in presenting an actor ‘in the character of Edgar’, although like all such designs it offers little about the play’s dramatic interactions. Inevitably the question arises of why the relatively unknown actor was shown rather than Garrick. One reason is precisely that unfamiliarity: it may have been included to allow those collecting the images separately to complete their set of contemporary actors. There are eleven images of Garrick in Bell’s English Drama collection which ran alongside his Shakespeare. Although the illustrations offer little as performance records, they are suggestive as a compound reading of the play as both theatric event 128

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42 Edward Burney: double frontispiece to King Lear, 1788.

and literary construct, and the inclusion of Reddish reveals another aspect of the material demands surrounding Shakespeare publishing. Bell’s 1788 edition follows the same pattern of balancing scenes with portraits of actors in character, moving from production without wholly rejecting it (Figure 42). The portrait shows ‘Miss Brunton as Cordelia’ above the lines ‘O dear father / It is thy business that I go about.’ For the first time, Cordelia’s role is given individual visual emphasis, perhaps another shift towards theatric emotionalism, even though there is no indication of her treatment at the play’s end. The extra-theatrical engraving often bound beside it treats the encounter between Lear and Gloucester in 4.6, captioned thus: G LOSS : Is’t not the King? L EAR : Ay, every inch a king.

The imitation memorial tablet in which, like all the scenes in the edition, it is placed, and the figure of the pelican pricking its breast to feed its young both echo the reading of Lear as the self-effacing heroic figure protecting his subjects. 129

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43 Philip James de Loutherbourg: second image for King Lear, 1788.

This and the caption again place the image within the fashion of sensibilité, a mood wholly matched by the portrait of Cordelia. Lear now becomes the aristocratic figure of emotion, his anger with Cordelia now by implication cancelled by his new-found understanding. While both images reject the earlier iconography of Lear on the heath, they retain its concern with Lear’s compassion, an emphasis that becomes increasingly strong towards the end of the century. As both images, like those of Bell’s earlier edition, were available for independent purchase, their need to satisfy public interest is again revealing in suggesting the popularity of emotional treatments. The book also has a second image for King Lear (Figure 43), a rare practice in the edition. It follows the tradition of showing Lear on the heath but departs from it by showing only Edgar with the king, and omitting both hovel and lightning flash. Lear is shaking his fist at some unseen element at the left; as the setting shows only a bush and a few rocks, and the weather is suggested largely by the windswept hair of the two figures, there is a slight resemblance to a more famous image of the play in performance, Benjamin Wilson’s David Garrick in the Character of Lear, now best known in the mezzotint by James McArdell published in 1754,15 perhaps hinting that it, too, presents a performance – although the lack of 130

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resemblance to Garrick and the thirty-four years separating the two argue against this. Wilson’s image might also be seen as continuing the depiction of Lear as a figure moving towards compassion, but now moving from sensibilité to a more forceful Romantic presentation of the violence of nature, which acts as a metaphor of Lear’s own disturbance as a ‘ruin’d piece of nature’ (4.6.136). Appearing beyond the associations of a textual frontispiece, the image is in some measure freed from the uncertainties of which text is being presented. The same is true of other painting from the mid-century. George Romney’s Lear in the Tempest Tearing off his Robes (1762)16 develops the approach by its use of a more extreme chiaroscuro, Lear’s face lit by Edgar’s torch in the surrounding dark, emphasising his distraught expression and wayward hair; the stormy setting of earlier treatments is concentrated into the contrast between dark foliage and the conventional flash of thunder. Two passages are sharply lit in the overall darkness: the jagged envelope of moonlight, complete with the habitual lightning flash, and Gloucester’s flaming torch. The dark foliage and Lear’s facial expression combine to reveal the distress of human and natural forces, each a metaphor of the other. For a later viewer, however, it is the central lighting that gives the image its special power. It resembles the technique later developed by Joseph Wright in his own landscapes and, most forcefully, his paintings of scientific and industrial activity, stressing the intensity and threat of the scene, the allusion placing the disturbances of Lear and the natural world within a frighteningly new frame. The two treatments of the play by John Runciman and his brother Alexander, both dating from 1767, reveal a similar underlying approach. The former’s King Lear in the Storm visualises the line ‘as mad as the vex’d sea’ by presenting Lear before a raging incoming tide; the latter’s King Lear on the Heath shows the central figures with their clothes blown aside, the Fool shown explicitly as a poor naked wretch. Both are discussed and reproduced in Painting Shakespeare (85–8). In moving away from the restraint of earlier images and presenting the scene in ways clearly impossible in the theatre, they redefine the emotional force of the play in the new emotional vocabulary of the early Romantics, and in its move towards new kinds of naturalistic narrative. All three present the same scene of the play; but now the force is far greater, and the outcome far less assured than in the more restrained treatments of the earlier years. Not all mid-century images of the play presented this scene, or the play itself, in such a manner, nor did they automatically place Lear at its centre; yet many retain some aspects of earlier convention or refer to Tate’s text. Pieter van 131

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Bleeck’s Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia (1755: Plate 9)17 combines theatrical conversation piece with more naturalistic setting and lighting – a process already mentioned in works such as Zoffany’s Macbeth and Wilson’s Romeo and Juliet. It presents Act 3 Scene 4 of Tate’s play, perhaps in the 1753 or 1754 production in which Mrs Cibber performed with Garrick. Cordelia and her maid Arante are shown in ‘The Field’ (3.4, s.d.) when they are interrupted by the ‘two Ruffians’ (3.4.7, s.d.) sent by Edmund to abduct them. Edgar, as in Rowe’s images a conventional madman with corn in his hair, but now armed with a staff, appears at the right to chase away the attackers. The traditional lightning is transformed into shafts of sunlight through cloud, perhaps to suggest the women’s escape; but the violence of the storm contributes to a different order of threat and emotional disturbance. Commenting on the scene in Tate’s text, James Black places it within the larger frame of the attempted rape scenes that were ‘an almost essential feature of a Restoration play’.18 The painting’s selection of such a scene, and the implied sensuality it contains, is enhanced by Cordelia’s costume of richly coloured, fluid silk. Perhaps a late flourishing of the ‘liquefaction of her clothes’ appreciated earlier by Herrick, it contributes to a larger aspect of contemporary sentiment that might best be described as a form of eroticised vulnerability. The result is a contribution to a species of contemporary scopophilia – something seen later in the Boydell paintings of the Rev. Matthew William Peters, showing scenes from The Merry Wives and Much Ado,19 which use similarly sensuous forms, and share the splayed feet of the main figures that are a feature of contemporary erotic art.20 The relation to the theatre is strong; but so, too, is that implied by the sensuality, which may posit a link between Covent Garden Theatre and the people who paraded outside it, reflecting a similar relation in the plays of Wycherley and Congreve. It serves as a reminder of the remaining power of Tate’s play, and is a rare departure from established structures of imaging, important in its rejection of the heath scene as revealing another aspect of the emotional and physiological temper of the period. A climax in the tradition of showing Lear on the heath comes with the painting contributed by Benjamin West to the Boydell Gallery, and its fine engraving by William Sharpe (1788: Plate 10).21 Within a composition of slashing diagonals and vivid coloration, it continues the combination of episodes by now conventional. Gloucester is compositionally, as well as psychologically, balanced by the Fool; a different kind of balance is suggested in the slight likeness between the latter’s face and Lear’s, suggesting the two as paired forms of madness. The lightning flash is retained, absorbed into the painting’s 132

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diagonal geometry, to link Gloucester’s torch with Lear’s arm raised in defiance of the storm and the feet of the Fool, huddled in shelter against it. There is no hint of the compassion of earlier illustrations, so that what suggestion of redemptive self-realisation in the figure of Lear there remains arises through the near-manic energy in his railing at the storm, another facet of the Romantic imagination. The engraving’s caption identifies it as ‘Act III Scene IV’, suggesting a move away from the earlier editions, yet the words engraved beneath the image show their lingering presence. The scene is set as ‘Part of a heath, with a Hovel’, echoing Rowe’s possible borrowing from Macbeth, followed by lines mingling several textual variants: Off, off ye lendings: Come, this button here. (3.4.96)

A more revealing link with tradition is the presence in the far background of Cordelia and Arante in flight from the ‘Ruffians’. Along with the lightning, this suggests that the influence of Tate, and the first frontispiece engraving of the play, remain significant in the image, as perhaps they are in the collective memory of King Lear. A different kind of relationship to the theatre, while to some degree retaining earlier convention, is more imaginatively directed in a watercolour painted by Henry Fuseli in 1772 (Plate 11).22 Here as in all of his work, Fuseli’s deep knowledge of literature and Renaissance iconography are fundamental.23 So, too, is his approach to figure painting, its emphasis on body structure and posture revealing an idiosyncratic Romantic concern to show inner identity through outer form. Instead of the planar composition of the earlier images, Fuseli’s design sets the action at an angle to the picture plane, with Edgar’s figure at the left far larger than those of Lear, supported by Kent and the Fool, at the right. The contrast in size is matched by one of lighting, with Edgar in shadow and the others in bright, white light. The effect is not so much to emphasise the latter group but to show them as Edgar sees them, suggesting that this is a factor of the feigning madness of the event after which it is titled. The theatre is still present, but modified by other aesthetic allusions. The three figures are presented on some rocks that resemble either a lighted podium or the plinth of a sculpture, the latter enhanced by the lighting that makes the group appear like marble. The most forceful change comes in the postures of the group. Kent and the Fool are holding the falling Lear in the position of a deposition from the cross, immediately presenting him as a Christ-like 133

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44 George Scharf: ‘Macready as King Lear’, Recollections, 1839.

sufferer, more sinned against than sinning. It is an allusion beyond the immediate frame of the play that is typical of Fuseli’s personal annexation of religion through the larger lens of Romanticism. That Edgar holds the staff in very much the posture of a pilgrim intensifies this mood: that the whole is given an intensity that, quite beyond the nature of the play-text, enriches it greatly through the new metaphoric power that it adds.24 In these features it reveals how far depiction has moved away from Boitard’s first engraving; but it also reveals, like many of the intervening images, its close reflection of the temper of the age. The paintings of West and Fuseli should not be read as marking the end of the tradition of imaging begun by François Boitard, or the serpentine course of its relation to the stage or performance in 1709. It is tempting to see Macready’s 1838 production, in which the Fool was at last restored, as the return to the stage of Shakespeare’s play – that is, a text constructed with materials from F and Q without the aid of Tate, Garrick or Colman. Not so. The Fool, like Ariel in contemporary Tempests, was played by a young woman; more significantly, the staging seems in many ways to continue the early designs of Rowe. The outline sketch by George Scharf (Figure 44)25 treats the same scene, in a similar landscape, with the familiar lightning flashes and the same character blocking. 134

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The importance is twofold. In showing the same events as before, it hints that Scharf is consciously or unconsciously following the tradition that this is in some way a pivotal moment in the play; and, in presenting it with a fundamentally similar design, it shows the strength of the tradition that has lasted well over a century. It would seem, then, that the power of the early images lasts for far longer in this play than in many others, suggesting a reading that, while not dependent wholly on Tate, certainly conserves an idea of its trajectory which few readers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would recognise, but which changed to reflect the currents of feeling of a period in which the nature of emotion did not simply evolve but was the subject of much philosophic and aesthetic attention.

II What began with Boitard’s image of Lear on the heath, resting on some degree of knowledge of Tate’s version, has become a significant conversational tradition in which theatre, print and different readings and performance practices have interweaved with visual works in a range of media. The images of which this is formed reveal something of the complexity, or perhaps confusion, with which the play was presented and absorbed at the time – a period which began when, as has become clear, very few had a knowledge of Shakespeare’s Lear or indeed many of the plays in what would later, with various degrees of consent, be seen as an authentic text. That all show the heath demonstrates the lasting power of Tate’s stage direction; that each arguably presents a slightly different moment in the text hints at the influence of one or another production, emphasising the link with the stage, or – especially in the presence or absence of the Fool – that with the progression of editions published alongside the images. More broadly, the changing styles of the images reveal the shift from a distanced rhetoric of the early years to a looser, more immediately experiential style of early Romantic painting. Perhaps most significantly, the images show the persistent appeal of the scene, along with changes in focus in response to the wider cultural frame, using various conventions to display madness, mental confusion or compassion, according to the individual reading of the artist. In this pattern of diversity within an essentially common trope, the images show the constant interest in Lear on the heath as a statement of suffering, and this in itself is highly suggestive about their place within the temper of the age. Their range is suggestive in one more way. Paradoxically, the furore that greeted the emergence of the two-text theory many years later suggests the absence of a more 135

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relaxed, fluid approach to the play, albeit resting on more limited historical awareness, in the period of the play’s first images. The relation between performance and image is to a degree resolved, but in larger terms further complicated, by an image from a quite different source, The Universal Museum of September 1767, discussed by Kalman A. Burnim. It shows Cordelia at stage left with Spranger Barry leaning against a pillar after killing the two ruffians. Comparing it with an account of Barry’s treatment of the play’s closing scene written by Tate Wilkinson,26 and stressing that Barry based his performance closely on Garrick’s, Burnim asserts that the illustration is ‘a highly authentic pictorial record of the manner in which this particular moment in King Lear was traditionally staged not only at Drury Lane but at other London theatres as well’.27 This suggests strongly that in the third quarter of the century Tate’s ending was still being performed, supporting the reading given in the foregoing paragraphs that the image of Lear on the heath served as a preparation in emotional terms for this conclusion. What is striking is not that the image appeared in a moderately popular magazine rather than an edition; no editor concerned with serious Shakespeare activity, in which group Rowe must be included, would publish a representation of a scene clearly from Tate. What is especially ironic is that the image is now unobtainable in academic libraries and may be found only on a subscription website devoted to periodicals. The circumstance offers itself as a warning against the use only of what might be termed the formal resources of theatre history and suggests a need for greater reliance on the printed ephemera of the day, which were more concerned with showing what was actually seen in the theatre.

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CHAPTER 7

RHYTHMS OF ACTION AND FEELING: THE ROMAN PLAYS

One of the strangenesses about the way in which Shakespeare’s plays have come to be categorised is that, with one exception, the plays set in or about Roman history are the only ones grouped according to their settings. The exception is ‘the Scottish play’, but that is wholly the result of theatrical superstition. We do not speak of ‘the Italian plays’ or ‘the Greek plays’: what is it about the plays of Rome that has attracted such treatment? In the 1880s they were categorised as history plays in an edition by Charles Wordsworth,1 where they were printed in the order of the events presented, occurring in the same volume as King John, which followed them most closely in historical sequence. There is some logic in grouping them with the English histories. All are strongly political, with possible resonances at their times of composition and at most times when performed. Yet there are clearer ways in which they seem to group together. John Ripley moves towards one: Caesar’s overall rhythm is stately and unhurried. Yet there is no want of excitement; processions, mob scenes, violent events, and military alarums take care of that. But time must be allowed for the formal beat of the poetry, the omen-laden imagery.2

As well as a perceptive comment on this play’s structure, the comment is an important truth about the formal patterns of all the Roman plays: their rhythm and movement is quite different from that found in the histories or tragedies. I want to argue here that in part both features come from Shakespeare’s continual development of the movement of tragedy which, as with the constant formal change in the comedies, is apparent in the structural shifts and innovations apparent as the canon expands in development of both central role and generic convention. Hamlet refuses to play the revenger; Hamlet ironically 137

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reinvents the structure of revenge tragedy. Macbeth begins as a reluctant insurgent; Macbeth ironises and deflates the structure and logic of justifiable rebellion in the second tetralogy. Yet the form of the Roman plays involves far more extreme redefinition of the pace and direction of tragedic movement, combining rapid action with a rhythm of language – the formal beat of the poetry – that work together in a composition unlike those of the other tragedies. Titus Andronicus has caused many readers and viewers distaste because of its violence, long eclipsing its supple rhythms of action and poetic exploration of the nature of theatre and convention before the edition of Jonathan Bate3 and the film arrangement of Julie Tamor began its rehabilitation. Yet it remains arguably different from the later plays concerned with Roman history, its structure determined more in relation to tragedy of revenge and Elizabethan theatricisations of Seneca: for this reason, it is not discussed here. In the other plays, central and destructive actions come early, at a point where other tragedies might well have ended; Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus move towards a second moment of conclusive violence and loss, through a pattern of restraint as well as inevitability, always controlled by patterns of reflective speech. In each of these plays there is an order of opposition that, while apparent elsewhere in the canon, is now developed with a new concentration and force, achieved with remarkable fluidity of movement and poetic reflection. This is the conflict between individual drive and duty to external forces. Caesar is driven by the friction between personal and political loyalties, to friend and state, in Brutus; Coriolanus, that between amour-propre and duty to city; Antony and Cleopatra not, in the old cliché, that in the incompatibility between Rome and Egypt but between each one’s idea of the other. Given Shakespeare’s knowledge of classical philosophy, and that of many in his audience, it is not difficult to see all three as reflections of a battle between the Stoic and the Epicurean, or perhaps better two kinds of Hedonism – achievement of happiness through personal pleasure or public duty – presented through dramatised metaphors of language and action. The absence of Antony and Cleopatra from the stage between 1606 and 1759 was perhaps as much due to its profusion of short scenes and rapid alternation of mood, setting and tempo, as to its unacceptable eroticism. Coriolanus has similar shifts between conflicts of different orders – personal, moral and military – in what for many is a puzzling reconfiguration of heroic tragedy. Caesar, although most frequently performed, has similar qualities – and, like the others, the rhythm is one of both language and action. The curious grouping together of ‘the Roman Plays’ seems when seen in this way to have more validity than rests 138

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on their setting: by their forms, highly experimental in their address to traditions of structure and historiography, shall ye know them. The features outlined above present sizeable difficulties in visual presentation; but there are other forces at work to make this a challenging venture. For a frontispiece or single painting, presenting a key moment is complicated by choosing between a range of episodes which might quite reasonably be seen as turning points – anagnorises of an individual as well as pivotal moments of event – as a more serious equivalent of the difficulties with The Comedy of Errors, perhaps. In two of the plays the difficulty is enhanced, and the opportunity enriched, by the complete absence of staging in the earlier eighteenth century; for the third, Julius Caesar, the difficulty is perhaps increased by the play’s sheer popularity, making the selection a matter of following or rejecting performance practice and perhaps reader expectation. In all, there are political issues to be considered, in themselves and in relation to the time of publication; and the influences of staging offer further putative sources or conflicting demands. It is within these forces that images are constructed, and the special nature of the plays confronted. The dearth of paintings, with the exception of those presenting actors in character or, later, characters beyond actors, is another reflection of difficulty. Further, only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when fully illustrated complete editions of the plays became a commercial and social imperative for publishers and readers, were illustrations produced that could mirror the plays’ range in manner and mood through sequences of images cut into the text, as demonstrated in The Comedy of Errors. Earlier illustrators, producing one or at most two engravings for each play, faced the task of defining by selection a moment of textual climax that, because of the aesthetic and narrative range of each play, produced solutions that extend further than most of their work for other plays in determining a reader’s concept of the plays’ trajectories. The relation, or lack of one, between such designs and contemporary performance adds another term to the equation. Such issues have been discussed in earlier chapters, but they now take on a new force because of the special rhythms, and relations of theme, in the Roman plays. The circumstances make the choices and approaches of illustrators to editions of the plays of particular interest in the history of their construction and assimilation over the central two centuries of the illustrated edition’s primacy.

II Since Julius Caesar had an almost unbroken performance history, and was thus one of the few plays that François Boitard was able to see, it would be reasonable 139

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45 François Boitard: frontispiece to Julius Caesar, 1709.

to expect that, like a handful of his designs, the image for this play would in some measure resemble stage practice. Elsewhere, this takes two forms: the presentation of recognisable actors, as in King Lear; or some aspect of stage setting, as in the few which show a gap between cloth and stage floor. Those that follow neither approach and instead present a scene chosen without regard to staging are the most revealing about the play’s construction in image, as they configure the play in a new manner for those encountering it for the first time in print. The two Rowe versions, each significant in itself in selecting the same moment, reveal clearly different approaches. Boitard brought with him from France devices of religious painting, as discussed in Chapter 5, that combined moment with whole; du Guernier, from his work with the novel, an insight into moments of detail deployed to work within a narrative sequence, leaving the words to drive it forward. Boitard’s design (Figure 45) reveals its subtlety in both presenting the moment and suggesting future action – in this mimicking the tone and approach of Antony’s speech. Around Antony, shown pulling the grave cloth away from Caesar and raising his arm in a gesture of dismay, are 140

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46 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Julius Caesar, 1714.

three figures that form a triangle of reception, each with a different form of response and together showing the effect of the speech. The composition works as an equivalent to a tableau vivant just before the rioting begins, the theatric performance held back in a manner unique to the illustrative medium, and thus presenting event and consequence with considerable skill. We may also detect something of calm rhetorical control in the blank face of Antony, suggesting a parallel to the heavy irony of his repeated ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ (3.2.84, 89, 96, 101). The results of both elements are shown in the responses of the crowd. All look on attentively while, significantly throwing the action forwards, some are already gesturing with a vigour that will soon overflow into riot. By contrast, du Guernier’s design (Figure 46) has none of this implied movement. Antony’s grasped hands resemble Bulwer’s gesture for Ploro, lamentation, and the surrounding figures are static in mourning. Each image responds differently to the presentation of a dramatic moment: Boitard by implying future action in its taut containment of energy, du Guernier by presenting a hiatus in the action. The difference reveals much about the acuity of the two designers. 141

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Both present a moment of speech, but while du Guernier’s design stays within it, Boitard’s moves beyond the single event to imply its violent consequences, echoing the movement of Antony’s carefully paced oration. The result is that the image successfully integrates the two elements of the play’s compound rhythm – its violent and rapid action and its measured use of poetic and rhetorical devices – in a manner and to a degree very rare in a frontispiece illustration, and certainly unequalled in such images for this play. The rarity of this reading is enhanced by its divergence from its importance in the theatre of the time. Leonard Digges records that the much later confrontation between Brutus and Cassius was the play’s high point, recording ‘O how the Audience / were ravish’d.’4 Winter observes that the same scene ‘has been the popular favourite ever since’.5 Colley Cibber discusses Betterton’s performance in it with adulation: his steady Look alone supply’d that Terror which he disdain’d an Intemperance in his Voice should rise to. Thus with a settled Dignity of Contempt, like an unheeding Rock he repelled upon himself the Foam of Cassius.6

The language here, with its emphasis on expression and gesture, suggests the scene as ideal for visual treatment, yet it appears in none of the eighteenthcentury editions. Betterton first acted the role in 1684 and repeated it until 1710; if Boitard saw any performance of the play, it would most likely have been his. Yet he chose not to reproduce it, preferring Antony’s speech and thus declaring the independence of the illustrated edition not just from one performance but from the tradition it continued. Not until the 1881 Drury Lane production by the Meiningen company, and Beerbohm Tree’s 1898 production with elaborate practicable sets by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the extended riot scene that followed, did the passage take on such a central function and force.7 The two earliest illustrations both treated the scene in their frontispieces with more success as a statement about the play’s movement, hinting at the events that follow as well as presenting the scene itself with various sorts of immediacy: and it is Boitard’s that shows the greater grasp of the play’s rhythm, the play of word and action that defines it here transfigured into visual form. At the same time, it begins a practice, followed in 1714, of reading of the play’s movement independently of that in contemporary performance. An index of changing taste as well as idiom is provided by seeing these images in comparison with Bell’s ‘Literary’ edition which, like King Lear, has two images for the play. The first (Figure 47) emphasises the nobility of Roman death, showing Cassius beating his breast and proclaiming to Casca that he would 142

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47 Ramberg: first illustration to Julius Caesar, 1788.

rather kill himself than serve with Caesar. The speech begins with Cassius playing on Casca’s idea of Caesar’s wearing the crown: I know where I will wear this dagger then; Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. (1.3.89–90)

But the caption instead gives the two lines which follow, completing the earlier ones’ logic: Therein, ye Gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye Gods, you tyrants do defeat.

The image shows the speech’s opening and the caption completes it, so that the episode, in its force the climax of the exchange, is given full statement in the two working together, a fine example of the more imaginative use of quotation in going beyond caption to fuse with the image in providing event, mood and idea. 143

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48 Rhamberg [sic]: second illustration to Julius Caesar, 1788.

Its appearance alongside an image of Mrs Ward as Portia above the words ‘Dear my Lord, / Make me acquainted with your cause of grief’ (2.1.255–6) acts to broaden and intensify the suspense generated in the other engraving. The second engraving shows Antony’s speech over the body of Caesar (Figure 48). Again, the quotation is selected to complement the image precisely while avoiding the lines which convey mood and incipient action most directly: the opening ‘O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers’ (3.1.254–5) and the later ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’ (273). Instead, the elaborate frame bears the lines ‘And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge / With Ate by his side come hot from hell’ (270–71). The image reflects these in detail, but draws together the full movement of the speech in its gestures, and also makes a larger reference to the status of Caesar within the Roman republic. Antony’s eyes are uplifted to echo the appeal to the god of discord and violent unrest, to match the words beneath. By this time, the theories of Le Brun and Bulwer were outmoded, but the depiction of Antony’s hands seems to resemble them. His left, fingers spread and thumb held apart, 144

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recalls Bulwer’s Suffragor, the deponent verb meaning to vote or appeal, here suggesting an appeal to the Gods and thus extending the lines quoted beneath; his right, a tightly clenched fist, resembles Bulwer’s Minor, threaten. The caption is also matched in the engraving’s frame which, instead of the more usual wreath of flowers and inscription ‘SHAKESPEARE’, shows a Roman eagle, with outstretched and fearsomely sharp open beak, suggesting that the emergent Roman state will avenge a crime against its own principles as much as against Caesar. The pillar beneath which Caesar lies, its pediment showing an equestrian statue of the kind memorialising heroes, and the words ‘Pompeius Magnus’, take up the location defined by Brutus but turn it to reverse its significance. Brutus predicts that the assassination will be re-enacted in festive celebration: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, That now on Pompey’s basis lies along No worthier than the dust? (3.1.115–17)

In linking the setting to Antony’s speech, the engraving has the reverse function, presenting the leader of the Roman republic and one of the nine classical worthies to enhance the stature of Caesar as his successor, and further intensifying the magnitude of Antony’s loss and anger. Each of the engravings unites word and image with precise intellectual and aesthetic economy, and together they present a sequential movement that draws together motive and consequence. As readings, they show the immanence of violent action within complex literary structures, again uniting the play’s two aspects easily held separate; as part of a larger publishing scheme, they reveal the subtlety possible with dual images. The inclusion of images of performers here and in many versions of Bell’s two editions shows a grasp of the importance of performance record, but in no way dilutes the independence of the read text as a critically thoughtful experience of the play – another kind of performative reading. As Chapters 2 and 3 have shown, the actor engravings are simple statements, as much portraits of performers and records of costume as part of the action. That is the role of the scenes from the play, and here and in other instances they produce that in a way unique to the illustrated text. Editions from the 1830s and beyond would present far more images within the text of a play; but in doing so they arguably dilute the force of illustration by being more simply narrative in nature, lacking the firm intersection of image and text seen earlier. The dual treatment may or may not present the antitheses noted by 145

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Ripley, but it certainly provides a strong visual metaphor for such balanced rhythmic growth.

III One of the complexities of Antony and Cleopatra is its double trajectory, with the two central figures taking their own lives. The death of the hero – the anagnorisis and tragedic self-realisation – when seen in classical terms is the climactic point of tragedy; in consequence the selection of moment for illustration presents more difficulty here than in the other tragedies. Perhaps for this reason, and because of the lack of stage precedent, earlier treatments are more various than those for Caesar. In this it is reasonable to suppose another influence: that of the tradition of paintings and engravings of the death of Cleopatra from long before Rowe’s first edition. Chapter 2 has already demonstrated one response to this complexity, the presentation of two images in the Bellamy and Robarts edition that show the deaths of both protagonists (see Figures 5 and 6). This is something made practicable only by the edition’s inclusion of two images for each play, and perhaps especially important in making the two deaths of equal status, something often overlooked in reading and performance. More effective, however, is the single frontispiece produced by Gravelot in 1740 for the second Theobald edition (Figure 49). Here the availability of only a single image is turned to advantage by skilful selection of moment and treatment through simple but forceful use of surroundings. Instead of showing either the death of Cleopatra or that of Antony, the image draws the two together by showing Antony standing beneath Cleopatra in the tower at the moment before attempting suicide. The surroundings, placing an Egyptian obelisk within classical Roman architecture, point up the conflict of cultures; the shadow in which Cleopatra is presented suggests impending death; and the fallen drapery in the foreground implies the collapse of the formal, baroque curtain used at the right of many images of the time, again undermining Roman values. The visual suspension of action creates suspense, offering a hiatus of reading in which the nature of the relationship’s cultural and political oppositions is held up for scrutiny, while at the same time its end is made inevitable. And, for those – there must have been some, although few – who did not know the ending, there is enough uncertainty to propel the reading forwards. Images between Rowe and Bell most frequently follow precedent in showing the death of Cleopatra, but Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition instead presents 146

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49 Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to Antony and Cleopatra, 1740.

a confrontation from earlier in the play. Cleopatra is shown offering her hand for the kneeling messenger to kiss, while Antony approaches from behind and to her left. This introduces one of the play’s confrontations, intensifying it by presenting the moment before it occurs. The difference between the characters is underlined by the conventional Roman setting, with the characteristic pines of the Roman campagna, a common shorthand to identify place. The classical swagged curtain at right, especially when seen in comparison to the falling drapery in Gravelot’s version, again suggests an earlier moment of stability before the coming emotional storm, as well as emphasising the cultural gulf. Effective in suggesting the relationship, it is perhaps too subtle in selection and management to convey fully the play’s driving conflicts. The two images for Bell’s second edition (Figure 50) are much more effective, drawing the play’s action together by reflecting on Cleopatra’s nature. The portrait shows Mrs Pope in the role, but is unusual both in design and by moving beyond the usual isolated profile towards a fuller presentation of scene behind a figure more lifelike in pose and gesture. Captioned ‘I have one thing more to ask him yet’ (1.3.44), it shows Cleopatra in 147

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50 Edward Burney: double frontispiece to Antony and Cleopatra, 1788.

thought on what seems a species of Georgian day-bed; the pose, one finger at the lips, suggests a continuation of the scene’s discussion with Charmian and the messenger about Antony’s wife. The ‘one thing’, implied within the pose, suggests her considered manipulation of Antony. The second image, with Cleopatra shown looking down at the dead Iras, appears above the words ‘This shows me base’ (5.2.299). The suggestion here is of heroic temper, Cleopatra realising greatness in the moment just before death in following the example of Iras. That she is shown in profile, wearing a crown, recalls a Roman medallion, reinforcing the idea of classical heroism and also hinting at her place with Antony: ‘Husband, I come’; the outstretched arm and open hand before Charmian contrasts sharply with the introverted gesture of the portrait. What were at the time, in an age of sensibilité and emotion, seen as the two faces of Cleopatra, are thus skilfully drawn together, in a manner far more powerful than most images showing only the death scene. Enobarbus’ speech describing Cleopatra’s arrival is the second most celebrated part of the play, in visual treatments as well as performance or as a recital piece. Early performances treated this as comical, a decision not quite as absurd 148

1 John Gillray: Wierd-Sisters; Minister’s of Darkness; ‘Minions of the Moon’.

2 John Gillray: Very Slippy Weather.

3 Johann Zoffany: David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth.

4 Unidentified artist: Macbeth at Drury Lane.

5 W. R. Pyne after John Wright: A Performance at a Country Barn Theatre.

6 Benjamin Wilson: David Garrick and George Anne Bellamy in Romeo and Juliet.

7 Philip James de Loutherbourg: first set model for Omai.

8 Philip James de Loutherbourg: second set model for Omai.

9 Pieter van Bleeck: Mrs Cibber as Cordelia.

10 Benjamin West, engraved by William Sharpe: King Lear Act III Scene IV.

11 Henry Fuseli: Edgar, Feigning Madness, Approaches King Lear.

12 William Etty: The Arrival of Cleopatra.

13 Unidentified artist: Mr Quin in the Character of Coriolanus.

14 Richard Earlom, after Francis Bourgeois: A Scene in Coriolanus.

15 Thomas Lawrence: John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus.

16 George Cruikshank: Coriolanus.

17 John Lewis Marks: ‘Coriolanus’.

18 John Raphael Smith, after George Morland: The Slave Trade.

19 W. Sheldricks, after W. Lambert: Edmund Kean as Othello.

20 John Lewis Marks: Othello.

21 George Hollis, after J. M. W. Turner: St. Mark’s Place, Venice: Juliet and her Nurse.

22 J. M. W. Turner: The Grand Canal, Venice.

23 Henry Woods: ‘Portia’, The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

24 C. R. Leslie: The Principal Characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

25 Thomas Stothard: Shakespearean Characters.

26 George Dawe: Imogen found in the Cave of Belarius.

27 C. R. Leslie: Sketch for Twelfth Night Act 1 Scene 3.

28 C. R. Leslie: Queen Katharine and Patience.

29 George Clint: Falstaff’s Assignation with Mistress Ford.

30 Henry Peronnet Briggs: Romeo and Juliet – Act II Scene V.

31 Francis Danby: Scene from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

32 John Opie: Portrait of A Lady in the Character of Cressida.

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as it might seem, given the role of the speaker and the language of the speech, which might suggest it as an ironic parody of the passage in Plutarch from which it derives. The treatment it receives throughout its visual history is revealing about the larger approach to the play, especially in the nineteenth-century fully illustrated editions. None of these shows Enobarbus delivering the words, losing the opportunity to reveal anything of its literary design or the response of the listeners on stage, hinted at in the short interjections at 2.2.215 and 228, and made explicit in Agrippa’s comment at its close: ‘He ploughed her, and she cropped’ (2.2.238). Instead, all images depict the events described, some with modifications of event, all as much concerned with accurate depiction of the barge as with presentation of the heady atmosphere of the verse. It is as if an obsession with naval architecture has overcome any sense of the erotic potency of the language, or its comic possibilities. Unsurprisingly, the edition of Charles Knight is the first to take this approach, with a vignette at the foot of a page at the very end of the second act. Its appearance here follows Knight’s usual practice of including images at the beginning or end of each scene, here facilitated by the availability of a small space after the letterpress. The act begins with a headpiece captioned ‘Room in Pompey’s House’, forming a pairing with the closing vignette neatly to present the antithesis of the two central figures. The vignette itself shows the vessel with something approaching authenticity, Cleopatra seated at the stern in a pavilion recalling those in Elizabethan tournaments. The engraving’s very small scale limits its effect, so that the sensuality of the language is barely noticeable: all is in accord with pre-Victorian morality and the illustrative practices of visual archaeology working as textual elucidation, dominant throughout Knight’s edition. This applies, however, only to the earliest printings of the play, and those published in London. That produced in New York by Peter Fenelon Collier, using stereo plates supplied by Knight, takes things further. In one of the several printings of the eight-volume set produced between 1870 and at least the late 1880s, the play includes a series of images added from other sources that intensify the visual content but completely change the nature of the play when read. The additions are not the result of grangerising or extra-illustrating by an individual collector, since all are part of the original machine binding, and one includes the directions ‘Vol II’ and ‘Act II., Scene ii’. The difference is important; extra-illustrated editions result from personal choice, often that of a print collector as much as a Shakespeare specialist, whereas inclusion by publisher denotes a wish to extend the images available to a reader, and is thus a public rather than personal decision. 149

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51 after John William Waterhouse: ‘Cleopatra’, The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 1888.

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The first of the two new images is an engraving after John William Waterhouse’s ‘Cleopatra’ from The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1888: Figure 51).8 It appears as a recto page before the ending of Act 1, beginning with the opening of Scene 5 and ending with the exchange with Alexas, ending with her question ‘Did I, Charmian, / Ever love Caesar so?’ (1.5.69–70). The effect is to throw the reader’s attention forwards while reading the passage where Cleopatra talks with Charmian about her love for Antony as greater than that for Caesar. The image presents the character in isolation, reflecting the idea of Cleopatra made familiar from popular readings of the play and perhaps best described as determinedly seductive – or, just as feasibly, seductively determined. Consequently, the reading is significantly coloured by the image, which takes the figure out of the dramatic continuum by having no direct reference to any part of the play, and the dialogue against which it appears is modified by the mood implied in the engraving, however construed by the reader. A similar modification occurs with the other full-page illustration, an engraving after Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra (Figure 52).9 Antony stands transfixed as he first sees Cleopatra; by contrast, the Egyptian queen reclines in her barge and stares into the distance. The barge is swathed in heavy fabric; two oarsmen stand guard as Antony approaches, and the stillness is accentuated by a flute-player between the two figures. The relation between the two figures is at once conveyed as one of near-idolatry in Antony and assumed indifference in Cleopatra, presaging one of the many planes of its complex geometry in the play. In the volume, the engraving appears before Enobarbus’ famed speech, prejudging and limiting its effect by making the event more precisely directed. Image and text are separated physically and in meanings, rather than working together to produce a genuinely integrated text that parallels the combined effect of the speech’s setting and movement on stage. This version of Knight’s edition assumes something of the character of an anthology; how, then, do the editions that intersperse multiple images within the text offer an integrated reading? Those that attempt this find difficulty with the play’s trajectory, doubtless for the same reason as did many theatrical productions, with the result – especially in later performances dominated by scenic effects – of the omission of many short scenes. Despite its strong textual pedigree, Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare ultimately fails because the images by Selous present the play largely in the idiom of the Victorian novel, failing to grasp either the play’s movement or the intertwined and conflicting erotic 151

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52 after Lawrence Alma-Tadema: The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, c. 1883.

intensity and political tensions on which it rests. Kenny Meadows’ images for Cornwall’s edition fail to reach the highest level of the artist’s dark imaginings – those for Othello in particular – and instead assume something of Victorian saccharine, with frequent cupids bedecking Cleopatra’s throne, and the queen herself drenched with jewels to the point almost of caricature. Even the engravings of John Gilbert do not meet the challenge, instead offering dark cuts that present moments of action or negotiation. Seemingly, Victorian illustrators were as ill at ease with the play’s movements as they were with the sonnets and narrative poems, but there is another reason for their comparative lack of success. Some of the plays in these editions display a genuine manipulation of the through-illustration form, by development of character, parity of setting to underline theme, suggestion in early cuts of subsequent events and, most effectively, the use of images in a page opening to convey stringent textual readings. Maintaining such an approach is far from simple, demanding a thorough knowledge of the texts and their workings: for most of the illustrators, too, it was a task undertaken at great speed. 152

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The fluctuations of mood and rhythm in this play do not easily lend themselves to such treatment. It seems, then, a disorder of the form as much as an individual shortcoming, although the intensity of the moment, especially for those reading the plays aloud in families or small groups, would seem another explanation in the engravings’ lack of depth. Certainly, their popular success indicates no general sense of their inadequacy; perhaps the habit of reading popular illustrated novels, which lacked the subtlety of a Cruikshank or Marcus Stone, is another factor. One of the finest illustrators of the later century, John Everett Millais, produced no Shakespeare engravings, a circumstance much regretted. Two images do, however, explore the play with a more explicit regard for the erotic tensions at its core, one an engraving and the other an oil painting regarded as scandalous, redeemed only by its presentation of a figure both Shakespearean and classical in origin. The first is an engraving by J. C. Armytage after a painting by Jean Leon Gérôme, published in the ‘Imperial’ edition of Charles Knight (Figure 53).10 The edition, in two heavy folio volumes, contained one or at most two engravings for each play, mostly reproductions of contemporary paintings that had previously appeared as engravings in the Art Journal, simultaneously bolstering status and saving cost. The engraving is captioned Cleopatra and Caesar, the painting itself known as Cleopatra before Caesar.11 Its place in the volume, before Caesar’s entry in 5.2, gives it an ambiguous meaning, too late to show the first meeting with either Roman yet hinting at both. The quality adds greatly to its power, presenting only the erotic force of Cleopatra as she emerges from the carpet at her feet. The male figure, either Antony or Caesar, sits at a desk in the middle ground; the attendants gaze at the queen’s body. The painting also gains from its apparent authenticity of setting, adding to the incongruity of either Caesar’s appearance, more like a colonial administrator than an emperor. The overall impression is one of sensuality and power, enhanced by the distance between the characters and the apparent disdain of Cleopatra, the whole encased in an erotic charge between the semi-naked woman and the male figures. In this instance the single plate inserted in the course of a text is very successful: placing and image are together responsible for this, one of the few mature readings of the play in visual terms. In avoiding a continuous visual treatment, the edition succeeds in distilling the play into one image in a manner not elsewhere achieved – and, in so doing, it raises important questions about the nature and effect of single images within a printed text, something 153

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53 J. C. Armytage, after Jean Leon Gérôme: Cleopatra and Caesar, 1873–6.

almost paralleling the workings of an emblem in the sixteenth century that encapsulate the whole moral quality of a verbal text. The other image to respond directly to the play’s eroticism is a further reading of Enobarbus’ speech, rare at its time of production during a period of caution and limitation in Shakespeare painting, as Chapter 10 will show. This is William Etty’s The Arrival of Cleopatra (1821: Plate 12).12 It is an intensely crowded composition of nude and semi-nude figures, some onboard ship, some as Nereids in the water and others on the shore, with a group of putti in the sky above the prow. Cleopatra is shown at 154

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a larger scale, further discomposing the painting’s unity as a narrative. In a sense, though, this enhances its function, turning it into an unreal vision of heightened eroticism, a dreamlike balance to the language in Enobarbus’ account, and also to a degree in Plutarch’s account on which it builds. The nudity was accepted on its display as following precedent, both in adopting a Rubenesque quality in the figures and in portraying an historical scene – or, what at the time amounted to much the same thing, a scene from Shakespeare. Circumstances surrounding it are suggestive. Commissioned for a fee of 200 guineas by Sir Francis Freeling, knighted for services as Secretary of the General Post Office, the image is made respectable through association with public service, and therefore moral rectitude. The sensuality is exacerbated by the exotic setting, the inclusion of dark-skinned oarsmen within the rich, pseudo-oriental decoration building on imperial legend. There is little in contemporary performance to suggest these elements; this is far more the product of private meditation, intended for private consumption. It was also, for Etty, the beginning of a successful career specialising in paintings of the nude, often of literary or historical subjects, as well as fine anatomical studies and skilful demonstrations of colour and design.13 Comparing the images of Alma-Tadema, Gérôme and Etty adds further to the conceptual relationships between word and image that this play in particular throws out. Whereas the first two offer a view of the whole, contained within a moment, the Etty is very specific, making no comment on the consequences of this first vision. All three were initially conceived for display outside the play, the first anticipating the action and thus in a sense slackening the reading experience, and the last revelling in a sensuality that offers an equivalent in pigment to Enobarbus’ language. Paradoxically it is the Gérôme that works most effectively as a single image within a bound volume. Either on canvas or paper it suggests again the importance of the act of identification and selection that is part of the editorial process. It also suggests that, in a play as complex and various as Antony and Cleopatra, a single image is perhaps the most secure way of presenting in visual terms dramatic and literary form and texture.

IV Coriolanus both benefits and suffers from a tradition of painting existing before Shakespeare’s play, mainly from Nicholas Poussin; this has been examined in 155

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54 François Boitard: frontispiece to Coriolanus, 1709.

detail, both in itself and its effects on later treatments of the play, by Moelwyn Merchant.14 That the first images draw on the composition and the moment of this painting is striking in several ways. Remarkable in immediately linking the play to a French convention, it reminds readers that not only has the story of Coriolanus a long European currency but that Shakespeare’s play, in continuing and modifying it, demonstrates his place within a European tradition, unusual at the time. Like Poussin’s painting, Boitard’s design (Figure 54) concentrates the fundamental conflict of the play in the ‘intervention scene’ (5.3), seeing it as one of personal identity and familial relations. In this it maintains the clash between personal feeling and duty to state earlier advanced as the rhythmic deep structure of the Roman plays, in Coriolanus twisted and intensified by the central figure’s insularity and rotation between two countries. As Merchant points out, Boitard follows Poussin in presenting all of the figures outside the military camp on the same level, whereas in Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus occupies a throne of state and thus dominates Volumnia, Virgilia and his son. A visual presentation of the scene in this way had occurred 156

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much earlier, in one of a series of five designs by various artists and engraved by the Flemish master Philips Galle in 1575.15 The image, after a design by Johan Stradanus, shows Coriolanus outside his tent on a raised dais, with a military encampment as background. The work of Galle was well known in England, and in other circumstances could have formed the basis of the play’s frontispiece. Boitard’s experience in France, however, led him to the approach taken by Poussin. Whereas in other instances his design is both faithful to Shakespeare’s text and insightful in its presentation – his Comedy of Errors design powerfully demonstrates both qualities – here he moves to a quite different precedent. In so doing, he founds a new tradition of Shakespeare representation since, as will emerge below, subsequent images overwhelmingly follow his lead, with the resultant dilution of the scene’s meaning and effect. The importance of Coriolanus’ placement enthroned in the centre as an emblem of rank is combined with its force in revealing the character’s pride and his disgust with the condition of Rome, Shakespeare’s text operating at a depth greater than Poussin’s canvas, which instead emphasises the pull of his family against his return to the Corioli. The result is seriously to limit and distort the play’s inner dynamic, changing it to a conflict between duty and personal relations which, while still present, are part of a conflict far more complex in Shakespeare’s play. In addressing Volumnia from the throne, Coriolanus extends the pride of the play’s opening to a more direct personal level, enriching the conflict of character that is the principal driving force of the play. The Poussin tradition continues through all the earlier editions and is seen in engravings by du Guernier and Hayman, marking off the print tradition as quite distinct from that on stage. Yet an engraving of 1749, which John Ripley argues depicts James Thomson’s adaptation of that year,16 takes the conflict between emotion and duty to a more explicit level in showing Coriolanus embracing his mother (Figure 55).17 Whether or not it reflects the stage, the image moves far closer towards contemporary sentimentality of the kind recorded by the audience to Garrick’s Lear, presenting the scene more as a conventional soldierly leave-taking than signalling the larger conflict at its root. The figure of a soldier departing for the wars would surely have added an emotional resonance for many viewers, and the publication in a magazine suggests a wider and more general readership. The state of the copy reproduced here, cut from the journal and pasted on card, confirms the idea of its greater reception, suggesting another use for prints beyond their place within a volume of the plays. James Quin’s Covent Garden production of 1749 returned to the staging of Stradanus and Shakespeare, with the throne as an emblem of rule throughout 157

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55 Unidentified artist: ‘The Scene of the Tragedy of Coriolanus’, Universal Magazine, 1749.

the scene. A contemporary engraving (Plate 13) adds a new dimension to the tension between domestic and military allegiances.18 The throne is a strikingly contemporary chair, while Quin wears the costume then considered historically accurate. The result for a present-day viewer verges on the absurd, yet the conflict of orders is curiously enhanced by the incongruity of the two elements. Quin’s staging was adopted by Thomas Sheridan in his Smock Alley adaptation of 1752 and by Kemble at Drury Lane in 1789, subsequently becoming the standard approach in the theatre. That the Poussin design continued in illustration long after the staging had changed suggests a rift between stage and studio hard to explain except through respect for tradition. The images of Bell’s two editions approach something of the complexity of the scene, but only through the separate images of actor and event that are bound together in most copies. The 1774 edition has a design by Edward Edwards (Figure 56), showing with a restraint perhaps too evident Coriolanus before two Plebeians above lines from his second encounter with the people, 158

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56 Edward Edwards: frontispiece to Coriolanus, 1774.

departing from the text in having him show his wounds, rather than offering to show them in private as the illustration’s caption makes clear: ‘I have wounds to show / you, which shall be yours in private’ (2.3.68–9). Next to it is an engraving of Mrs Hopkins as Volumnia, kneeling as in the earlier depictions. The difference in scale limits the force of the pairing as a single image, but the juxtaposition is valuable in showing two facets of the central character’s pride, widely separated in the play’s action: when, as here, the frontispiece alone is included, the treatment is less effective in revealing the play’s opposed forces. A similar duality is evident in the 1788 edition, where a forceful image by de Loutherbourg is matched with Mrs Yates as Volumnia. One treatment, however, takes the force of the scene to a new level in the skilful exploitation of a medium rare in Shakespeare imaging: a bas relief sculpture produced for the Boydell 159

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57 Anne Damer, engraved by William Leney: bas relief of Coriolanus,1803.

Shakespeare Gallery.19 One of two produced by the sculptor Lady Ann Damer, the other showing Cleopatra enthroned, it presents Volumnia and Virgilia walking before Coriolanus in a procession completed by soldiers at rear. The original is now lost, but a fine stipple and line engraving by William Leney remains, both as a separate print and included in the title page to the second volume of the Boydell prints (Figure 57). The minimal recession of the medium is used to present the scene as an alternative version of the original performance, Coriolanus standing behind the two women as, their bodies suggesting their distraught states, he urges them away. One of the soldiers at rear stands with banner raised as if ready to force the women away; Coriolanus himself is shown in a posture of careless indifference, an unorthodox but effective reading of his pride. Such is the force of the Poussin tradition that not until much later is the scene illustrated in a manner that presented the figures in the relationship that, as Merchant convincingly argued, would have been Shakespeare’s staging – the throne of state being probably the most frequent and important element of movable scenery on the Elizabethan stage. John Gilbert’s title page for the Staunton edition (Figure 58) comes close, and certainly conveys the force of the rejection. Yet the effect is limited by the presence of both groups on the same level and the treatment of the throne, which is only partly visible at the extreme right. The scene only achieves the full effect it would have had on Shakespeare’s 160

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58 John Gilbert: title page to Coriolanus, 1856–60.

stage, and had been given in most performances after Quin’s, in The Leopold Shakespeare of 1880. This achieved considerable popularity when published, combining scholarship with visual immediacy by combining the Delius text and Furnivall’s essay on the plays’ chronology.20 The design of the scene (see Frontispiece to this volume) skilfully matches the viewpoint of audience and reader by being placed at an angle behind Volumnia and Virgilia, emphasising the difference in height to further stress the conflict. 161

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59 Unidentified artist: untitled illustration showing Menenius and the Plebeians, Coriolanus, 1880.

As the first illustration to show the scene in this way, the Leopold image is a remarkable instance of the difference between print and stage practice, rare in following a convention from easel painting, especially one from France; remarkable, too, in the delay of over a century before the stage effect was illustrated. Here, the tradition of imaging quite independent of the stage marks a direct departure from performance, something diametrically opposed to the persistence of presentation apparent in the illustration of King Lear examined in Chapter 6. Perhaps the tradition reflects the sheer difficulty of illustrating the play, especially its rapid changes of rhythm; perhaps, too, it suggests a different kind of emotional engagement with the plays evident between audiences and readers, especially within the alternating rhythms of tone and event in which the clashes of loyalty are presented. It is not only in the intervention scene that The Leopold Shakespeare shows greater subtlety in presenting these conflicts. It approaches the play through a series of small engravings – no more than 6 × 8 cm (2 × 3 in) – at key moments, beginning with Menenius explaining the body of the state to the Plebeians (Figure 59). As a treatment of the opening it contrasts strongly with the later 162

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60 Gordon Browne: headpiece to Coriolanus Act 1, 1888–92.

version by Gordon Browne for the Henry Irving Shakespeare (Figure 60) which prefaces Act 1 with an image of Coriolanus and the crowd. The latter is perhaps more credibly violent, especially in the lunging figure in the foreground; but it presents Marcius as a figure more of diffidence than pride. There is little strength to the composition, and its selection as headpiece to the first act does little to suggest its larger ramifications. Folded into the action, the Leopold image impresses by its very smallness, suggesting the opening scenes’ rapid pace; the size and openness of the Henry Irving version, both dictated by the placement of the image, both act against this. Throughout, the Leopold edition continues to reflect the play’s rapid variation of action, continuing to show battle scenes and confrontations, all held together by head and tailpieces that draw on Roman statuary and regalia. Supplementing these are larger images occupying nearly a full page, of which the scene with Volumnia is one, and another is a forcefully naturalistic depiction of a duel on horseback, captioned ‘The fight between Marcius and Aufidius’ (Figure 61). These militaristic elements are balanced after the intervention scene by a page opening near the very close. The left-hand page (Figure 62) shows the return of 163

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61 Unidentified artist: ‘The Fight between Marcius and Aufidius’, Coriolanus, 1880.

Volumnia, above the stage direction ‘Enter the Ladies, accompanied by Senators, Patricians, and People’; the image opposite (Figure 63) shows Volumnia addressing the crowd, above the caption ‘Welcome, ladies, Welcome!’ (5.4.69–70). Volumnia stands above the Plebeians, who reach up enthusiastically towards her while she acknowledges their cheers. In this relationship it balances the play’s opening, the pride of Marcius before the Plebeians revealed as an absence of the humanity demonstrated vigorously by the women characters and their reception at the close – a poise often overlooked when the play is read. The paired image, unique in this play and in the whole volume, is the final visual component: on the next page, the play’s conclusion with the murder of Coriolanus is presented in text only. Here as throughout, the balance between rapid, violent action and personal conflict within and around Coriolanus is skilfully marshalled. The Leopold version is unique among later Victorian illustrated editions in showing the play’s balance, approaching the rhythm claimed for Julius Caesar at the start of this chapter. The use of space is a major contributor to this, with some episodes dealt with briefly, in small vignettes, while those that drive the 164

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action are given more extensive presentation. In these ways it reveals itself as one of the more sensitive of the later, through-illustrated editions; the more authentic treatment of the intervention scene is an important part of this. The play’s treatment on canvas and reproductive engravings has consisted largely of the meeting between Marcius and Aufidius, the result as much of the desire to present actors in character, especially John Philip Kemble, as to reveal the balance between this encounter and that with Volumnia. The most striking is that by de Loutherbourg’s pupil Francis Bourgeois, which gains added force in a coloured engraving by Richard Earlom (Plate 14).21 Aufidius approaches Coriolanus with arms widespread in confusion at the moment before recognition; Coriolanus is shown in the act of turning towards him. A quotation below precisely locates the scene as well as offering pointers to the image, the two working together in unusual critical harmony: A UF . Though thy tackle’s torn Thou show’st a noble vessel. What’s thy name? C OR . Prepare thy brow to frown – know’st thou me yet? A UF . I know thee not. Thy name? C OR . My name is Caius Marcius (4.1.61–5)

The image is composed in the heroic grand style; within it, the uniforms of Aufidius and the guard are offset against the simple cloak of Coriolanus, whose extreme change of circumstance is stressed by the central stature of Mars, god of war. The principal figures’ opposition around this element stresses visually their difference, and the ending of the quotation with Coriolanus’ given name ironically forces a comparison with that of the statue: Marcius, Mars. In its single moment the image presents a turning point in the play, but goes further, suggesting its driving paradox in action and character. While the Universal Magazine image extends the older tradition to match popular emotion, Earlom’s engraving after Bourgeois addresses the play with a deep awareness of structure and theme, a difference that itself offers a metaphor of the play’s difficult extremes. The best known single image of the play is the portrait John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus by Thomas Lawrence (1798: Plate 15).22 The approach here addresses the play’s issues less directly and is more concerned with the actor’s individual performance. Coriolanus stands on the threshold of the house of Aufidius, with a background of the burning city. That one foot is advanced over the threshold is 165

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62 Unidentified artist: ‘Return of Volumnia’, Coriolanus, 1880.

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63 Unidentified artist: ‘Welcome of Volumnia’, Coriolanus, 1880.

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a much older convention of statuary and portraiture to suggest the actuality of the figure as a living entity, but here it achieves new resonance. It suggests a tentative movement, supported by the arms folded defensively within the heavy cloak yet countered by the upright posture and defiant expression. Together the elements convey well the duality of the scene’s opening and the role itself; that Aufidius is not shown, and instead the onlooker stands in the position he will shortly assume, add both greater involvement and an element of suspense that complements the figure’s irresolute stance. Despite their many differences, the two paintings of the scene share elements of interpretation. Both have the implicit duality of all portraits of actors in character, the pivotal ‘as’ in their titles here given particular resonance by matching the tension between the names Marcius and Coriolanus. The existence of the Bourgeois as canvas and print is extended in the Lawrence by the several versions of the painting, the first exhibited in 1798, and others made in the nineteenth century. Both develop aspects of contemporary ideas of classical heroic style, furthering for the modern viewer the dual identity at the play’s core. Finally, both combine close awareness of the play in both text and performance with a strong identity as aesthetic object, offering another strand of Shakespeare imaging as discussed in Chapter 4. Like the Gérôme painting of Cleopatra, each defines the play in a single composition, something more feasible because of the more distanced, formal rhetoric in an easel painting or large print than in a frontispiece image or through-illustrated volume. What, then, of the ideas floated at the chapter’s start of the Roman plays’ shared identity through their concern with conflict between person and state, and the special qualities of movement and rhythm identified by John Ripley? A single frontispiece image will present problems familiar in the treatment of any play, but raised to a higher level; such treatments of Coriolanus intersect, as shown above, with the Poussin tradition, distorting a key element of the play’s early impact, but always in response to the taste of the period, much like Garrick’s ‘Arrangements’. The same is true of images of Antony and Cleopatra, weighted as they are by earlier concerns with the presentation of character and event – what might be termed both the serpent and the asp – in the process inevitably smoothing out the rapid variation of setting and idea. Julius Caesar is treated with success in some single images, and again it is Boitard’s sense of earlier multiscenal narrative that is most effective, combining strong feeling and narrative thrust in the image of Antony’s funeral oration. The editions that represent multiple images may or may not solve these problems, since they impose rhythms 168

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of a different kind, related to the selection and placing of images that are directed as much through questions of production and cost as aesthetic and narrative growth or range. Yet at best, these in themselves function as much as metaphors of the text’s mobilities in action and mood. What emerges most strongly is the sheer difficulty of visualising these plays: that is probably the main aspect that holds them together as a group as much as their place of setting as literary and performative entities.

V Questions of rhythm, allegiance and emotion are not, however, the only visual thread that makes up the compound textual fabric of the Roman plays: it is stating the obvious to say that the other is their strong political thrust. Rather than focusing on visual treatments within editions, a look at some treatments in more widely available forms suggests the impact of the plays in broader, and often more immediately contemporary, situations. Most familiar are caricatures which feature lines of Cassius to Brutus from Julius Caesar: ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus’ (1.2.135–6). One, by George Bickham, was published in 1740, and shows Walpole as the Colossus, attacking his dominance in the election of that year.23 Another refers to ‘Master Betty’, the young actor whose dominance is bemoaned by the figures of the Kemble brothers, John Philip and Charles, nicely turning the acting profession in on itself through using one of its best known performance points.24 But it is from Coriolanus that the most effective take their origin. A caricature by George Cruikshank shows George III confronting a protesting mob, over the lines ‘What would you have, ye Curs, that like nor peace, nor war?’ (1820: Plate 16).25 The placards carried by the protesters are inscribed with demands for parliamentary reform, at the beginning of the political upheavals leading to the act of 1832. Powerful though this is, and certainly demonstrative of the knowledge of Shakespeare necessary for its effectiveness, its focus is more on the political arena than the literary or theatric; but in harnessing the figure of Coriolanus as the model for George III, and in showing the actual slogans of demonstrations in favour of reforms supported by Sir Francis Burdett, a figure of mingled radicalism and remoteness from the people, the image skilfully adapts the play’s tensions to an immediate political situation. The translation into French of Shakespeare’s words in the caption, echoed by the banners’ tricolour colouring, show again the image’s careful balance between satire and sedition, then still linked with revolutionary France. That Burdett himself had been 169

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imprisoned for that offence underlines the power of the image and the continuing political relevance of the play. Something more striking is achieved in a little known caricature by J. L. Marks, printed in the satirical journal Duncombe’s Miniature Caricature Magazine (Plate 17).26 This shows a figure in Roman dress, with a speech bubble containing the same speech from Coriolanus 1.1, compressed to show only ‘What would you have, you curs / Go get you home, you fragments’. The rioting figures at the right-hand side are dressed in contemporary, early nineteenth-century costume, drawing it insistently into immediate conflict. The Coriolanus figure enriches this change, shown as it is in a profile that resembles most depictions of Robert Walpole; yet the immediate political context is much more precise. The image appeared in number 17 of the magazine, which was launched in 1824. There is no record of the frequency with which it was published – many periodicals of the time had no regular schedule – but the number 17 suggests that it appeared in the 1830s or 40s. This was a time of agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws, which prevented the importing of corn until the domestic price was at a high level, causing extreme distress and leading to the foundation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. Walpole was strongly against the repeal; riots ensued, as depicted here. The situation is thus directly parallel to that of the opening of Coriolanus – the attitude of the speaker even recalls the folded arms of the Lawrence portrait. Like Gillray’s Macbeth image discussed in Chapter 1, it shows the currency of the plays in visual fora way beyond the theatre, and the readership conventionally associated with the plays. Both the Cruikshank and the Marks prints add to this a degree of explicit anachronism in visual treatment. Deeply contemporary within their own time, by introducing a visual fusion of Shakespeare’s time with an urgent problem of the time of their manufacture they open the possibility of positive anachrony that has become, since the midtwentieth century, one of the basic principles of Shakespearean production.

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CHAPTER 8

RANK AND RACE IN OTHELLO

With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespeare would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Smallcoal wench; Shakespeare, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councillor: And all the town should reckon it a very suitable match.1

Rymer’s assessment of Othello is as well known as it is appalling to more recent readers, but it does reveal one very significant aspect of the play: Othello exists as a negotiation between a series of discourses of race, rank and gender, located within a frame of historical actuality and the various levels of performance which it contains, within and beyond the theatre. That each reading or production it receives is a parallel, and deeply contemporary, construction of these discourses and their interactions has been shown by Marvin Rosenberg,2 Virginia Mason Vaughan3 and others, and it is both inevitable and right that the play should more recently have become the focus for political activism of all kinds. Yet the more recent insistence on ethnicity, and the varieties of postcolonial criticism that have facilitated it, can easily overwhelm other aspects of the play’s dynamic conflicts. Other readings, from other periods, deserve careful recovery if a broader awareness of their place within the play’s internal forces and the social currents in which they operate is to emerge. In short: was this emphasis always there in the play’s performance and presentation, and how did earlier receptions perceive this dimension of the play? This is, of course, a question far more easily posed than answered. The retrieval of earlier interpretations ‒ which cannot be described as profuse in number ‒ is dependent not only upon the tunnel vision of the age through which they are now seen, but on some understanding of a ganglion of other 171

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associations from their own time. Thus, decoding an eighteenth-century treatment of the play rests not only on an awareness of the magnetic field of resonances and associations of which it is the product, and that of the flexible dynamic grouping too easily simplified into ‘the contemporary audience’, but on the straightforward survival of whatever material elements in some way evidence its actuality. And these themselves are, of course, not transparent records: reviews, diary accounts, written texts of performance and illustrations in paint or on paper are all transformative, as much as translucent, media. But this does not invalidate either the effort or its result. Investigating this plethora of information can at the least make available new materials as constituents of the debate, and at the most successful offer another layer of transformation through which the debate itself may be enriched. What follows, then, is an effort to explore and re-present some of the lenses through which the play has been seen, and the frames ‒ social, political, intellectual, aesthetic – by which it has been surrounded and reconfigured. And, in the effort at retrieval and reconceptualisation, some light may well be thrown on approaches and attitudes to the interplay of forces on which the play is built. Leah Marcus has raised questions about the degree to which accusations of racism may be laid against the play, most particularly in passages present only in the Folio, mainly Roderigo’s speeches in support of Iago’s attacks on Othello and Desdemona. Her sensitive handling of the issues suggests that ‘According to most readings of the play, Othello is not quite racist’, but that to gain a full reading ‘we need to be able to study the Q-F differences in all their painful clarity in our modern editions, which presently obscure them’.4 Christina Luckyj helpfully locates the play within the terminology of Shakespeare’s time, and in his own work elsewhere: In Shakespeare’s time, ‘race’ denoted not the pseudo-scientific classification with which we are familiar but rather family lineage, nation, or even ‘the whole race of mankind’ (Timon of Athens 4.1.40); systemized, institutionalised ‘racism’ as we know it had not yet fully developed.5

This is not, however, as straightforward as it seems. Luckyj goes on to suggest that Iago’s language ‘points nonetheless to a “racialization” or “proto-racism” that was beginning to emerge by the late sixteenth century’, drawing attention to other scholarship that supports this view, also citing a proclamation of 1601 by Elizabeth I announcing the deportation of Blackamoors who are consuming resources needed by her own people, and another discussion that finds intimations of racism in other documents of the queen at the same time.6 She does not, however, refer to a letter the queen 172

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sent in the same year to the Ottoman Sultan Mahumet Cham, addressed ‘Most high and most puissant prince’ and continuing in the diplomatic tone used to a ruler of any origin.7 The difference signals a circumstance that I shall develop in the paragraphs that follow: the treatment of Othello depends as much on his rank as his race, and this is reflected fully in images and in performance from the earliest periods. Apart from their value in contributing to a debate about editing, interpretation and performance practice, these articles raise two issues. First is the degree to which ideas of racism in the twenty-first century may be applied to a critical reading of an early seventeenth-century text. Inevitably the answer must be ‘to some extent’, but with a degree of moderation calculable only by a depth of research with a variety of textual objects, as the work of Luckyj demonstrates. Yet, valuable as these are in offering a larger contemporary frame for the play, they do not resolve the larger questions of the play itself or the difficulties of addressing it today. This in turn raises the second issue: the presence of such attitudes within a work of fiction. The words are the product of an inscribing intelligence, the author-function known as Shakespeare; but they are spoken by an invented intelligence, the roles of Iago and Roderigo, within a fictive frame depending on the development of evil purposes. Some would argue that this places them in a special category, to one side of judgements about their offensiveness in the period of composition or reading; others would see them as remaining offensive in both, as living human documents constructed in one age and read or performed in another, and hence inevitably revealing the astigmatic vision of both. The impossibility of resolving such issues does not raise them above the urgency of our knowledge of them. Their address in performance has in some manner been present since the play’s earliest stagings, since decisions must be made about costume – especially the now discredited custom of blackface – and the retention or removal of certain lines and the delivery of those retained. These concerns are equally insistent in the discussion of images of the play – perhaps more so, since they offer a wider kind of evidence, seen through the eyes of artists and engravers, into the aesthetics of earlier periods and the social frame surrounding them. This is especially valuable in the first century of illustration in print, moving from the first images of 1709 to the abolition of the slave trade. The attempt to locate the play within these broader forces suggests that its visual history offers a more sensitive reading than that of some twenty-first-century readings. 173

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II Despite having been rejected because of their awkward draughtsmanship, or seen simply as performance records, François Boitard’s designs for Rowe’s 1709 edition constitute a significant and at their time unparalleled response to the plays, with all the caveats raised in earlier chapters. Othello was one of the few plays that Boitard might have seen on the London stage, and so the image (Figure 64) may present some kind of evidence of staging; even if this is discounted, it remains an early and direct form of visual response to a read text, offering at once a critical interpretation and an imaginative reconfiguration. The importance of the image, in several dimensions, is reflected in a single feature that too easily goes unnoticed: Othello is presented wearing contemporary English court dress, the usual costume for the central characters in early seventeenth-century productions. The effect of this on the audience, and on the reader, can only be hypostatised. For some, it may have given the characters a kind of invisibility that allowed them to pass immediately through the blur of historical presentation into the actuality of the human, moral dilemma that was the main thrust of the plays, as evidenced in earlier critical writings. For others, it perhaps allowed the actuality of the performer to become more immediately and insistently present. A more secure judgement is that, as a general rule, it was a standard procedure that did not arouse comment on grounds of its anachronism or interpretive vigour. Only in later periods, when the drive towards an imagined historical authenticity in costume became dominant, would it have seemed curious or incorrect: in a sense, every production from the period of Rowe’s edition would have been mounted in modern dress. For the present-day reader, the reconfiguration thus performed makes insistent and suggestive comments on both Othello and Othello, the role and the play, which when seen from a variety of angles and within a number of frames have much to reveal about earlier notions of performance, text and the larger life that surrounds them. The most immediate consequence of this is to show Othello as the central character of the play, clearly the tragic hero. Comparison with Johann Zoffany’s later painting of Macbeth (see Plate 3) reveals the same costume for both characters: there is a simple equation between them as protagonists. This is significant for what it reveals about contemporary approaches to the character, and the degree to which it differs from later views: the figure is defined not through exotic difference but through its absorption into theatrical convention. Whatever other methods used by the contemporary theatre to present the

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64 François Boitard: frontispiece to Othello, 1709.

conflicts of origin and situation within the figure of Othello, and the conventions of visual delineation that Boitard’s print may or may not exploit to similar ends, at one level the essential similarity between the figure and others, most especially Iago, is made directly apparent. Seen in another way, though, the costume functions as a metaphor of Othello’s displacement: the Moor of Venice becomes the Moor of London, the familiar costume acting as both a measure of transculturation and a statement of incongruity. This is, perhaps, the most immediate effect of the image on a present-day reader. To what degree it was shared by readers in 1709, or members of the audience at a production of around the same time, we may only conjecture. Rymer’s response, from less than two decades earlier, may well be representative of some viewers’ experience, in seeing the play as a violation of rank; yet, as later paragraphs will argue, the sight of a noble figure from African or other countries loosely seen as ‘Moorish’ was by no means unusual in London at the time of Rowe’s edition. Against these points must be balanced the visual presentation of Othello’s face and hair. Is it an unashamedly racist parody, a visual counterpart of the words in which Iago and Roderigo describe Othello to Brabantio in the play’s 175

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opening scene? Or is the apparent exaggeration of feature derived more from the hasty engraving, apparent also in the features of Desdemona? There are some images of the play, as will later emerge, where racial caricature is apparent; but in this one, it seems that the dignity of the figure is preserved, not only by the formal costume but in the traditional acting gestures, which together locate it within a tradition of heroic tragedian rather than ethnic outsider, presented either as victim or threat. What is also apparent is an aspect that will become increasingly important in this discussion: Othello’s rank, revealed here in the costume as fitting to a tragic hero. More recent concerns about the play’s presentation of miscegenation are harder to place within Shakespeare’s own time or that of Rowe’s edition. But two points are worth making here; one is the court’s rejection of Brabantio’s concerns about his daughter’s marriage, which surely suggests a direct overthrow of such bigotry. The other is the performance of the play on 28 January 1707 at the Queen’s Theatre, with Betterton in the title role, given ‘At the desire of several ladies of quality’.8 These circumstances cannot, of course, be seen as representative, but they do suggest that no such revulsion was apparent to at least one group of theatregoers. A broader range of evidence exists for the discussion of social rank as an essential component of attitudes to those of different races, and this will reveal itself as a major factor in the paragraphs that follow. David Dabydeen has drawn attention to a convention of English painting from the first half of the eighteenth century of including black servants, often young boys, as attendants to men and women in fashionable family portraits or conversation pieces, reflecting the practice itself in aristocratic circles.9 The convention is at its height at the time of Hogarth, two or three decades after Boitard’s designs; but its practice is worthy of record in its relation to Rymer’s words. This continues a longer presence of Africans of all social ranks in England where, according to some sources, slaves were immediately set free on arrival.10 Alongside this tradition should be held the presence in London of diplomatic visitors from territories recently or potentially colonised, who are received with all the ceremony expected for European visitors, their participation in various social dialogues and their presence attracting both popular attention and that of artists and engravers. For Rymer, the ‘blackamoor’ is essentially conceived as a domestic servant; for those receiving ministers or dignitaries from other societies, worthy of all the usual diplomatic courtesies, the visitors are enriched by the fascination of the exotic. The differences in rank are crucial. At the time of the play’s composition, they were regarded as part of the divine order, enforced by the 176

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sumptuary laws on dress, even though the concept was challenged by some – including Shakespeare himself – and the laws were falling into disuse. In the play, the rank is of course repeatedly emphasised by the military hierarchy represented by Othello, Iago and Cassio – something too easily overlooked. It is pertinent to recall here the portrait of the Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth.11 The subject is presented not in court dress but in costume of his own land: what to the wearer is inflected with formal ritual within his own society becomes something rich and strange for the contemporary English onlooker. The same is true, as will emerge below, of the mid-eighteenth-century experience of visiting dignitaries. The effect is thus the diametric opposite of that in Boitard’s depiction of Othello in a costume which, to the dramatic character who wears it, is of a distant culture, but to the onlooker is one associated with customs of government, enriched by associations of the tragic hero that it has gained through custom and usage. Shakespeare had, of course, already played with the metatheatrical possibilities of diplomatic exchanges of this kind, in the visit of the ‘Blackamoors’ and ‘Muscovites’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost; Jonson would explore them in a different way in The Masque of Blackness (1605). It is also important to remind ourselves that Othello did not exist in a theatrical vacuum. Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, dramatising Aphra Behn’s novel about the suffering and final triumph of an African chief, was one of the more popular plays of the early eighteenth century, receiving 329 performances between 1695 and 1799.12 On 27 April 1704, for example, it was performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields after a production of Othello in which Betterton played Cassio. In October 1708, theatres of court and stage elided when Othello was played at Drury Lane ‘For the entertainment of Joseph Dias, Ambassador from the Emperor of Morocco, lately arrived’.13 What seems to emerge from this is that, in the theatre of the early eighteenth century, the construction of Othello is driven in part by forces other than concerns with ethnic difference. It is determined in equal measure by conventions of presenting the tragic protagonist in a play by Shakespeare, and operates in dialogue with the visits of foreign ministers that move out of the private theatre of diplomacy into the larger arena, and at times the actual performative theatre, of public view. The resultant negotiations between kinds of costume and orders of identity over the succeeding century are perhaps as close as we can come to a parallel to the attitudes to ethnicity and difference in approaches to Othello and Othello in the later twentieth century: these earlier debates stand as a metaphor of those being conducted today as much as an historical corrective to them. 177

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65 Louis du Guernier: frontispiece to Othello, 1714.

As the century progressed, the theatre of diplomatic protocol was more frequently and more elaborately constructed. The exchange of diplomatic and theatrical performance is revealed in a report of a visit by some Iroquois dignitaries in 1710, when a trip to a performance of Macbeth was held up by the audience until the visitors were seated on the stage and made available to public view.14 Not only is the presence of the visitors as a kind of theatre made immediately apparent; so, too, is the implicit presence of ideas of rank in the difference they embody. Since being seated on stage was something generally available only to the wealthiest members of the audience, the equation between exoticism and domestic aristocracy is once again clear.15 The second frontispiece, produced for Rowe’s 1714 edition (Figure 65), moves from the moment before the killing to just before Othello’s suicide, with Emilia holding the dead Desdemona and Othello reaching for his dagger. While Othello is shown as clearly African, and is now dressed in a rather softened version of formal English costume that imprecisely suggests a flowing robe then probably characterised as loosely ‘oriental’, this is less significant than the 178

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66 Hubert Gravelot: frontispiece to Othello, 1740.

change of event, which introduces a new method of absorbing the character into an indigenous tradition. The selection of the moment after the murder emphasises the moral trajectory of tragedy as greatness misdirected or too late realised, placing the character within an assumed tradition of Western tragedy rather than excluding him from it. The result is both to emphasise the figure as part of a literary, rather than a racial, construction, and also to endue it with something of the dignity of the exotic foreigner of high rank, mingling the social implications of high tragedy with those of diplomatic exchange. Hubert Gravelot’s image for the same scene, in the second edition of Theobald’s Shakespeare (1740: Figure 66) approaches the play quite differently, with Othello strangling rather than smothering Desdemona. The setting is ornately baroque, and Othello wears what seems an Italian robe; yet he is shown clearly, but without caricature, as of Moorish origin. The shift from 179

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67 Francis Hayman: frontispiece to Othello, 1770.

English court dress to Italian costume returns the play to its original setting, but maintains the sense of Otherness in the character: he is the Moor of Venice here, and in this regard his identity as outsider is maintained. But the symbolism of the serpent twining around the torchère gives universality: the two features combine to stress the complexity of Othello’s position and action. Remarkably, too, it gives greater prominence to Desdemona, not simply by showing her as the focal point of the composition but in her hand on Othello’s wrist, indistinguishable between restraint and tenderness, perhaps suggesting a balance to Othello’s ‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee’.16 Francis Hayman produced two treatments of the play, the first for the edition of Sir Thomas Hanmer in the 1740s, of which more shortly, and the second as one of five designs published in 1773 by Bowyer and Nichols (Figure 67).17 This later image returns to English dress and the moment of heroic struggle after the death of Desdemona, with Othello holding Lodovico and Gratiano at bay with his sword. It is a reading that once again elevates Othello as the noble tragic hero, intensified by the return to English court costume; but there is a crucial ambivalence. The figure is presented in a manner far closer to racial caricature, and is easily 180

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68 Francis Hayman: frontispiece to Othello, 1740–44.

read more as a rejection of Othello on racist grounds than as the assimilation into the tragedic heroic model. Hayman was 65 when he produced the image and, like the other four for the later edition, it is far less securely drawn than his earlier designs. Is it, then, an example of poor design, or a piece of racial offensiveness, or conceivably both? The reader must decide. Certainly, though, it achieved a very 181

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narrow currency, in an edition by a little known publisher that included only five plays, and its lack of subsequent reproduction may suggest that it is less representative of views of the play or the contemporary equivalent of racial attitudes. Hayman’s image for the Hanmer edition (Figure 68), better known and widely reproduced, operates differently, suggesting that the change in the later version may imply a more general shift in attitude over the years, to which later paragraphs will return. The earlier version shows the characters in a rococo interior of the kind familiar in all of Hayman’s designs, suggesting Othello’s displacement by setting rather than costume. This moves away from court dress to suggest something of Moorish exoticism, although the headgear approaches an academic or court hat rather than a turban, giving an elegant combination of the two worlds – not, in itself, an unsubtle statement about Othello’s position. Only a careful reader can identify the scene as near the play’s close: the bed on which Desdemona lies is suggested by a curtain at the left, and Othello restrains Lodovico and Gratiano by an outstretched arm, not a drawn sword. The posture and gesture are forceful enough to suggest a tragic hero, and the face has none of the offensive caricature of the later design; selection of moment and visual treatment are overall much subtler. Frustratingly, Hanmer’s instructions about the scene to be illustrated and the way it should be treated are missing, but it seems unlikely that they would not have been explicit in the direction of dress. The import of this is made greater by the instructions that survive for Titus Andronicus: The Moor must be richly dress’d being a governing faviourite [sic]. Inrich his scymitar, and as nothing adds so much dignity as a Turban I desire you will put one upon his head and let it be set off with jewells.18

Those for The Merchant of Venice are if anything more explicit. After describing the ‘handsome Antichamber’ in which the casket scenes take place, they continue: Towards the other side of the room Morocchius a moorish Prince richly habited in the garb of his Countrey with a turban and scymitar: young and of a noble figure discovering high birth and spirit.19

Hanmer seems here to be echoing an established view of the exotic visitor of distinguished rank – he would presumably have had experience of such occasions in his role as Speaker of the House of Commons. Reactions to visits of this kind are balanced by those of aristocratic travellers. In a poem dating from 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gives the following account of ‘Mahometan’ dress:

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See; the vast Train in Various Habits drest, By the light Scimitar and sable vest, The Vizier proud, distinguished o’re the rest20

The final element, the headdress, is confirmed in a letter of the same year, in which she refers to its ‘vast white feathers’.21 This clearly marks the shift in origin of Othello from Rymer’s ‘blackamoor’ to an aristocratic visitor from the Ottoman Empire, the comparative authenticity of which can be judged from an image in a later, but standard, work, The History of Costume, by Braun and Scheider.22 David Garrick’s appearance as Othello in the 1774–5 season was brief and unsuccessful, but in one respect it followed the pattern set by images from the mid-century, in following Hayman’s precedent in wearing a turban as part of the costume. As the century progressed, the theatre of diplomatic protocol was more frequently and more elaborately constructed, offering further frames for the discussion of the play’s central character in terms of identity, most importantly in the presentation of rank. In 1761, a group popularly known as the ‘Cherokee Embassy’ visited London. Its itinerary included several visits to Vauxhall Gardens, a trip to see a horsemanship display, dinner with the Lord Mayor at Mansion House and a visit to the curiosities at Dwarf’s Tavern. Vauxhall, itself a significant space which generated its own social discourses in terms of shared dining, dancing, concert-going and the discussion of paintings in the supper boxes,23 became the site of a curious exchange of anthropological observation, in which the London cits observed the Cherokees and were in turn observed themselves. An article in the London Chronicle commented on how ‘these wild hunters were surrounded by as many wild gazers on them at Vauxhall’ and wondered ‘what they think of the noble savages of Great Britain’.24 This suggests a stance of mutual fascination and respect rather than an attitude of superiority based on rank or race; there is to later readers a similarity to Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibales’ and its resonances in the first encounter between Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. What is important here is the interest aroused among those outside the highest social orders: while the elite cased their concerns within diplomatic protocols, those of a lower rank showed fascination, not overt prejudice; yet as responses to a subsequent visit indicate, motives were not always so straightforward. A year later, a group of Cherokee chiefs were received at Mansion House and visited some capital ships and military stores at Greenwich and Woolwich. Against this official courtesy should be held wider public responses. A letter to

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69 Isaac Taylor: frontispiece to Othello, 1773.

the London Chronicle questioned the motives of ‘people running in such shoals to all public places’ to see them, the ‘wild gazers’ and the ‘three hundred eager crouders’ who queued to shake their hands at Vauxhall Gardens.25 The writer asks whether they acted from hospitality or contempt, pondering what the chieftains themselves thought of their reception, and this raises questions of darker, patronising motivation. The Public Advertiser pointed out that the naval and military visits ‘must give them a high Opinion of our Strength and Grandeur’ in defending them against the Spanish: the colonial power is quite clearly being emphasised here.26 One of the most revealing images of the later eighteenth century is Isaac Taylor’s design for Bell’s ‘Acting’ edition (Figure 69).This departs from convention in showing Othello reacting to Iago’s ‘With her, on her, what you will’ (4.1.34) machination, significantly including not only this line as caption but adding the ejaculation ‘Oh devil’ (4.1.243) uttered in the company of Desdemona later in the scene. Rather than the near-caricature features of Rowe’s images, 184

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Taylor’s is much subtler: the skin tone is darker but the features are not exaggerated, suggesting perhaps an actor in blackface; yet the design can hardly represent any contemporary staging, instead presenting a naturalistic setting. Indeed, there is little difference between the coloration of the Othello and that of Iago. Othello’s costume is now emphatically Moorish and this, taken with the restrained facial treatment, gives an effect not of diminution through racial caricature but of a different kind of conflict. Seen against Iago, dressed as a soldier, Othello appears an exotic aristocrat, the Other transformed from threat to aloofness, and the whole event located within a tone of tragic misdirection inseparable from innate nobility. Iago’s predatory manipulation suggests itself as having another motive, one recalling Coleridge’s suggestion of ‘motiveless malignity’ rather than a racial attack. Taylor’s original design, however, makes Othello’s complexion much darker.27 Whether the change in the engraving, which Taylor himself executed, is a tacit or unconscious acknowledgment of this, or related to the difference of medium, is impossible to say. Clearly, whereas Rowe’s images unite Othello, through costume, with a traditional tragic hero, in Taylor’s image the element of displacement apparent in dress is made more explicit by the extreme contrast between that of the two figures, so that the foreign dignitary is shown as wholly betrayed by the indigenous soldier. Costume is also important in the contrast with the figure of Garrick, included as a second frontispiece in many copies of the play. Here, he wears his habitual court dress: this makes far more obvious the difference between indigenous and foreign, further complicating issues of rank, military and social. The costume of Othello may or may not reflect that of performance as accurately as does that of Iago; no matter, since the difference is eminently clear in print. Judging from these composite verbal and visual texts, the construction of Othello’s identity has undergone considerable revision. From a figure transplaced into the role of an English courtier it acquires an exotic dignity, enriched by direct encounters with distant cultures described, with various degrees of accuracy, as Moorish. But however the figure is redefined, it retains an innate dignity and force: the condescension and racial insult of Rymer is not immediately apparent here. The character is moved away from the notion of servitude represented both in eighteenth century movements against slavery and in the paintings showing black servants. Secondly, the aristocratic nature of Othello himself is made clear in ways that are inseparable from his costume. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is again helpful here. Passing through Nuremberg in 1716, she comments on the town’s sumptuary laws and adds ‘I wish these laws were in force in other parts of the world’:28 clearly, clothes and rank remain intimately 185

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related in the construction of character. This has a direct bearing on the play’s larger structure: in stressing Othello’s aristocratic breeding, later images more closely locate the play within traditional ideas of the social bases of tragedic character. This change is enhanced by the posture of Othello, which acts subtly to redefine the nature of the role within the tradition of recent theatre history. He is shown backing away from Iago, with his left arm extended and his right at his side. This is a posture made famous by Garrick and used repeatedly at moments of crisis that include Lear on the heath, Macbeth’s exchange with Lady Macbeth shown in Zoffany’s canvas, and his posture as Romeo (see Plates 3 and 6). In showing the encounter with Iago in this manner, the image is not making specific reference to Garrick, who played the role only three times, over twenty years earlier, and with limited success. Instead, it is placing the character firmly within the tradition of the heroic in performance, moving the play further from Rymer’s simple reading and in a very direct manner relocating Othello alongside the other Shakespearean tragedic figures, rather than departing from them to stress the character as a racial interloper. This is echoed in one of Francis Gentleman’s notes to the play in Bell’s edition, which describes Othello in terms appropriate to a tragedic hero as ‘amiably elegant . . . full and sententious . . . flowing and harmonious . . . rapid and powerful’ (I.159). The larger structural integrity of the play is praised in Gentleman’s Introduction, which sees the play as ‘regular, we had almost said perfect’, and rejects some passages with Roderigo which it describes as more fitting to comedy: ‘These we do not like’ (I.151). In visual and verbal terms, Othello’s exoticism is retained, but reconciled with his position within the pattern of Western heroic tragedy: the subtler treatment of the face is a significant contributor to this quality in underlining a genuine difference, not one based on what may easily be seen as a tradition of caricature. While these images are significant as presentations of the play’s issues on stage and in print, its exchanges with larger cultural dynamics are suggested by a celebrated sequence of events with which they are nearly contemporary: the treatment received by Mai, or Omai, a Tahitian who accompanied Captain James Cook on his return from his second voyage in July 1774 and remained until taken back to Tahiti in 1776. From the outset, stress was laid on his aristocratic bearing, The Westminster Magazine commenting in August 1774 that: ‘his deportment is genteel, and resembles so much that of the well-bred people here’. As Harriet Guest makes clear, this attitude was not so much a fashionable desire to see him as a noble savage but an attempt to moderate his apparent Otherness: Omai’s natural superiority was a simple way of showing that he was not like the 186

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many black servants who were frequently seen as a threat to social harmony in the lower orders. Such approaches, she claims, show ‘the ease with which his perceived exotic characteristics could be Anglicized, could be masked or adequately expressed in the idea of his social rank – the rank attributed to him as a result of his association with high society’.29 Omai’s stay in England involved a number of visits that combine a very specific order of social anthropology with the performative discourses of a variety of social spaces. The itinerary included a visit to Hinchingbrooke House, a tour of Chatham Dockyard, a performance of Handel’s Jephtha at Leicester, and an introduction to Hester Thrale. The climax of these events of aristocratic theatre was his presentation to the king and queen, recorded in an anonymous engraving titled Omiah, the Indian from Otaheite, presented to their Majesties at Kew by Mr Banks & Dr Solander, July 17, 1774. Fêted by London society, dressed in the lace and ruffles of the courtier, Omai became not only an honorary Englishman but an honorary member of the aristocracy, with all its privileges, and proficient in its discourses of language and performance. This cultural redefinition should be seen against a much larger imprecision in understanding Omai’s actual origin. In its first reference to Omai, The Westminster Magazine called him ‘this exotic black’ (July 1774, 348); one of the islands visited by Cook in his voyage was named ‘Morea’, suggesting it as the home of Moorish peoples; and references to Omai as an ‘Indian’ are common. That some attitudes to the Other persist across time is implied in the imprecision with which Othello’s own identity has been defined, to the extent that the 1997 Arden edition of the play devotes over two pages to discussing the question ‘Should the Moor of Venice be played as a black or as an “olive-coloured” Moor of North Africa?’ (14–17). Taken together, these drives suggest that Omai is seen through a contemporary lens that configures him as simultaneously an amalgam of many kinds of exotic Other and a reassuringly familiar aristocrat, as revealed through an innate performative grace and applied costume. The parallel with Othello in both areas is striking, suggesting much about responses to the play in the late eighteenth century, and serving also to imply some of the attitudes it played against at its first performance. The prioritising of rank over ethnicity may well be seen in the reversals that occur in the first two scenes of the play. At its outset, the racial epithets of Iago suggest a generalised rejection of an Other that threatens as much because of rank as of race, suggested in the use of animal and therefore sub-human language – ‘Barbary horse’ (1.1.110), ‘old black ram’ (1.1.87) and most intrusively the ‘beast with two backs’ (1.1.15). Yet these are dispelled by Othello’s entrance to the court – 187

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a performance mirrored in the presentation of Omai – and his ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors’ speech (1.3.77ff). As his entry resembles that of a Western nobleman, so his justification of his demeanour to Desdemona is an appropriation into the exploration and colonisation culture that Venice – and contemporary English society itself – represents. Othello’s account of his voyages, and the discovery of ‘the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1.3.145–6), is an appropriation of the discourse of the traveller’s tale that places him firmly within the identity of the discoverer not the discovered, and thus the domestic, not the exotic, while he retains all of the charm – in every sense – of the newly encountered visitor. The fusion of exotic and domestic in both Othello and the reception of Omai can be seen in other ways in visual and theatrical traditions of the eighteenth century, the two effectively merging through the shared conventions they employ, and the performative and anthropological bases on which they rest. The process is seen forcefully in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Omai (1776: Figure 70).30 Although born in Tahiti, Omai is presented in what appears a mingling of classical robes and ‘Mahometan’ clothes, as if to represent a standardised simulacrum of the Other. Both costumes strongly resemble those used as a theatrical tradition for such characters. An illustration of the price riots of 1763, attributed to Louis Phillipe Boitard (Figure 71), shows the principal characters in Arne’s Artaxerxes similarly attired in what has been described as the ‘generically Eastern’ robes of contemporary theatre.31 The two central figures are presumably Artaxerxes, first Prince and subsequently King of Persia, and his confidante Artobanes; the setting is the Persian Royal palace, suggesting that the costume is indeed general in application, but always used to depict royalty or other high rank. Alongside the similarity between Taylor’s Othello and the other figures of generic exoticism and Reynold’s Omai, though, runs a considerable difference. Whereas the posture shown in the former is essentially dynamic, that of the Reynolds figure is essentially static, in allusion to the Apollo Belvedere,32 a common eighteenth-century standard of male beauty and moral staunchness – and, of course, another appropriation across cultural and temporal borders. Reynolds had already used the pose for another celebrated portrait, Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel (1752–3).33 The result is that Omai is equated both with a Western ideal of classical male beauty and with a foremost naval figure of his own time, two elisions that reveal much about the absorption of the figure into a complex matrix of indigenous identities. The Otherness is rendered 188

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70 Johann Jacobé, mezzotint after Joshua Reynolds: Omai, a native of Ulaietea.

vestigial by the depiction of the tattoos on Omai’s left hand, and reconstructed through Western eyes by the use of a costume adapted to fit convention. We might see in the image a construction of the noble savage; but that surely would be too simple, the iconographic allusion to classical heroism and the

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71 Louis Phillipe Boitard: broadsheet showing 1763 riots.

presence of the tattoos offering a rather more complex equation between cultures. The image produced by de Loutherbourg for John Bell’s 1788 edition of Othello (Figure 72) assumes a similar doubleness. Here, Othello is presented in a costume strikingly similar to that of Omai. As in Taylor’s image he is portrayed in Garrick’s posture of recoil, now mediated by the far more vigorous style of the younger artist, but there is one very significant change. The presence of Desdemona in the frontispiece redefines the composition so that it alludes not to Hamlet or King Lear but to the scene from Romeo and Juliet, as made famous in Benjamin Wilson’s painting of 1757 (see Plate 6). As with the Taylor, the resemblance functions not as a reference to a style of acting but as an iconographic allusion to the embodiment of the tragic hero as constructed by the national poet, the emphasis laid not on 190

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72 Philip James de Loutherbourg: illustration to Othello, 1788

Othello’s murder of Desdemona but on their tragically foreshortened love. The absorption of the figure into a very specific species of Englishness is given an emblematic identity of a parallel nature in each of these important images: just as Omai has been admitted into the pantheon of English’d classical beauty, so Othello has been transformed into the epitome of tragedic nobility. This is, of course, undermined by the situation of the image, and the confusions of identity in the presentation of Othello which are held in tension against those in the figure of Desdemona. Her vulnerability in sleep, her left breast exposed, suggests both the earlier convention of such display as a motif of innocence and the more immediate sexual availability on which Iago’s accusations have built. There is no suggestion of this resting directly on Garrick’s performance, since in general de Loutherbourg’s illustration designs betray little of his theatre work; yet the immediacy and vigour of the image suggests an awareness of the stage dynamic held in abeyance during Othello’s speech, something showing a deep grasp of the operations of the theatre. These forms of theatre were mirrored in actual stage performance. Omai, or a Trip round the World, by John O’Keeffe, had its premiere at Covent Garden on 191

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20 April 1786 and ran for three years. The playbill described it as ‘Exactly representing the Dresses, Weapons, and Manners, of the Inhabitants of Otaheite’, and went on specifically to attribute the design: ‘The Pantomime, and the Whole of the Scenery, Machinery, Dresses, &c. designed and invented by Mr. LOUTHERBOURG ’ (two maquettes for de Loutherbourg’s designs are shown in Plates 7 and 8). It would be deeply satisfying at this point to produce an image of de Loutherbourg’s design for Omai’s costume, and to reveal it as nearly identical to the loose robes shown in Reynolds’ portrait and de Loutherbourg’s own image for Bell’s text: this would show a link between the two events that would neatly close the circle and furnish a suitably new historicist concluding flourish. But this is not possible: while the National Library of Australia holds all of the costume and set designs of the pantomime, that for Omai himself remains untraced. Instead, what remains is the text of the pantomime itself. There is perhaps a parallel here with the production of Henry VIII in 1789, the year of George III’s coronation, which like O’Keeffe’s play ends with a triumphal procession. Rather than offering further parallels, however, the later play ends with a celebration of imperial values that eclipses even the vigour of Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740), as Omai is welcomed into the British Empire: RECITATIVE. – C APTAIN . Accept from mighty George our sovereign lord, In sign of British love, this British sword. O BEREA . Oh, joy! away my useless spells and magic charms. A British sword is proof against the World in arms.

The substitution of the British sword for the ‘Mohometan’ scimitar is perhaps emblematic of the shift of national identity, but here the move is different from the inclusiveness suggested by the adoption of court dress by Boitard and others. It is closer to what is today termed ‘protective custody’ in the darkly skilled language of dictatorship than to the more genuine incorporation, into society as well as theatrical genre, of earlier acts of assimilation, and the colonial interests hinted at in the earlier visits of the Cherokee chiefs. Perhaps the years after the American revolution have hardened attitudes and coarsened aesthetic responses: perhaps, too, the change suggests itself as a pivotal moment in treatments of visitors such as Omai, and also of readings 192

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of Othello. By the time O’Keeffe’s work was performed, Omai had been gone for ten years, and the moment of balance between the exotic and the indigenous had passed. But this is not the only example of changing attitudes as manifested in the theatre. In 1776 the Reverend Henry Bate’s musical farce The Blackamoor Wash’d White received three performances at Drury Lane Theatre. Interrupted by shouts, hissing and an on-stage brawl, the play closed unfinished on the fourth night despite Garrick’s repeated appeals. The plot hinges on the decision of Sir Oliver Oddfish to replace all his male domestics with black servants in the attempt to release his daughter Julia from unwanted attentions, whereupon his nephew Grenville persuades his friend Frederick to disguise himself as Amoroso to court her, which he duly does with the use of much double entendre and comic mispronunciation.34 The exact reason for the audience unrest is unclear. Perhaps the idea of a black man courting a white woman, especially one played by Sarah Siddons, was to blame; perhaps it had to do with abolition of half-price admission. One account attributes it to ‘some gentlemen elevated with liquor interrupting the performance’;35 and perhaps it was simply a very bad play. What is particularly clear here is that the complications of racial identity and social rank apparent earlier have now taken on a new dimension. By the time of Bate’s play the abolition of slavery was becoming an insistent demand, but what may have been more important for some was the fear that freed slaves were gaining employment as low-paid servants, hence putting many white men out of work – white men, or their employers, who would presumably have been represented in the audience for Bate’s play. The parallel between the courtship of Amoroso and Julia and the relationship between Othello and Desdemona would surely have been clear; the fear of miscegenation may have lain beneath the riots, or whether this or its comic rather than tragedic approach caused disturbance is again unrecorded. But what is important, and undeniably so, is that the play dealt with black men of a low rank, and their caricature, as opposed to a single Moor of aristocratic bearing being presented as a tragic hero. The difference between the two outlooks is insistent and revealing. A more serious demonstration of the anti-slavery movement became apparent in treatments of black people in visual and verbal texts as the century passed. It is illuminating to compare a painting by George Morland (Plate 18)36 with a colour print of Edmund Kean as Othello (Plate 19).37 Morland’s painting, reputed to be the first depiction of the practice of slavery, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1788 with the title ‘Execrable human traffic. Or the affectionate slaves’, and issued as a mezzotint, both monochrome and colour, accompanied by four lines 193

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of a poem by William Collins, in 1791. This was long before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, revealing the strength of the movement against it at the end of the century. The print of Kean probably dates from around 1814, when he took the role at Lincoln’s Inn, indicating perhaps a similar sensitivity to the legislation by then passed. The shift towards a fuller awareness of the suffering caused by the slave trade is shown, within the conventions of the day, in the Morland painting, not through any overt acts of violence but in the exchange of glance between the two main figures, which places the image within the contemporary concern for sentiment, human feeling within and between individuals, that was coming to replace the more distant rhetoric of grand history paintings. More important, it demonstrates a respect and humanitarian concern not earlier apparent for those imprisoned by slavery, breaking through the earlier separation by rank. Comparison with the image of Kean suggests a similar concern for feeling. The depiction in both avoids the more extreme depictions of face and hair evident in earlier images; there is a move towards more naturalistic representations of difference and away from a loose caricature based on unfamiliarity and the extreme blackface of earlier theatre. William Winter, writing in 1911 and thus well able to hear from those who saw Kean’s performance, claims that it was the ‘most powerful impersonation of Othello that ever was exhibited, – in its effect upon the feelings’.38 Kean was also the first to dispense with the heavy blackface to use a lighter colour, presenting Othello as a ‘tawny Moor’. Regardless of questions of textual accuracy, the change would surely have struck audiences as a move away from heavy theatrical intervention towards something more actual. The two images, both individually and when seen together, suggest a different approach to the play and the contemporary circumstances in which the appalling attitudes to colour were beginning to be questioned. Although probably the most prominent, Omai was not the only visitor whose presence in England enfolds and deepens the reading of Othello on stage and in image. Remarkable for a different set of reasons and circumstances is Ignatius Sancho, who with the aid of the Duke and Duchess of Montagu (not related to the Wortley Montagu family) lived in England for many years after his arrival in the early 1730s. When the Duchess died she left him a substantial amount of money, enabling him to live comfortably and devote himself to writing, musical composition and, if the surviving records are reliable, living the life of an amateur of the arts and man of letters. For these reasons he is almost the opposite of Omai, and the two taken together suggest the double identity with which the role of Othello struggled: the one an exotic stranger, the other much more a part of his adoptive nation. His portrait by Gainsborough39 contrasts 194

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directly with Reynolds’ of Omai and the anonymous artist’s portrait of the Moorish Ambassador: whereas these emphasise difference, Gainsborough’s has the waist-length, left-facing, formally dressed design of any number of mideighteenth-century works, except that it is an African face that looks out at the beholder. Sancho’s two volumes of letters are remarkable statements of his life and attitudes, and the inclusion of one to Laurence Sterne urging the abolition of slavery reveals his social and literary position, accentuating again the duality of his position. Sancho’s earliest biographer, Joseph Jekyll, makes a further, tantalising, comment: Ignatius loved the theatre to such a point of enthusiasm, that his last shilling went to Drury-Lane, on Mr. Garrick’s representation of Richard. – He had been even induced to consider the stage as a resource in the hour of adversity, and his complexion suggested an offer to the manager of attempting Othello and Oroonoko; but a defective and incomplete articulation rendered it abortive.40

Had the request to Drury Lane succeeded, England would have had a black Othello long before Ira Aldridge; but there is no record of any response to this idea. Jekyll’s biography is sketchy and vague, the scholarly approach to it being summed up well by Brycchan Carey: ‘The acting and the theory of music may well have been Sancho’s own fantasies’.41 Yet the issue of rank is again important. In later years, Sancho opened a grocery shop in a fashionable area of London. At a time when many native Englishmen were moving from mercantile origins to acceptance in higher social strata, this may be seen as something familiar in the indigenous community; but it may also suggest the kind of patronage evident in the earlier paintings of Hogarth, or even reveal a degree of self-satisfying patronage in his customers in a desire to prove their own humanitarianism. How far does the material assessed here clarify the attitudes towards the play – those towards relationships between ethnic groups of its own time, and those that developed during its performance and publishing history, in comparison with those through which it is approached and performed in the early twentyfirst century? Because the readings here are made from that later standpoint, it is in large measure impossible to say. But the presentation of the figure within the conventions of tragedic heroism on stage, most particularly in terms of costume – the English court dress ‒ and posture ‒ the Apollo Belvedere ‒ would seem to indicate that for eighteenth-century auditors and beholders it did not have the same incisive quality of offence and patronage that it had for many in 195

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the close of the twentieth century. What also emerges is the balance, and mutual reflexiveness, of patterns of costume, behaviour and observation between theatres of diplomacy and theatres of literary drama: and this, at the very least, offers a wider frame within which the play’s reception and performance may be seen. Yet the perplexities remain. A hand-coloured aquatint by John Lewis Marks, titled simply Othello (early nineteenth century: Plate 20) seems at first glance to return to the darkest bigotries of Rymer’s account; yet it has also been suggested to caricature Kemble in the role.42 Closer examination, however, shows it as resembling Kean’s costume, so that it may well be a criticism of his performance – and the figure of Desdemona is not too distant from many caricature women figures in contemporary cartoons by Marks or Gillray. For example, one of the latter’s most celebrated designs, Tales of Wonder (1802),43 showing a group of women reading M. G. Lewis’ Gothic novel The Monk, has at its centre a woman whose face closely resembles that of Marks’ Desdemona. Is it, then, a racial attack brought on by opposition to the abolition of slavery, an expression of more innate bigotry, a broader statement of male-female identities, or a caricature of Shakespeare in performance? Without further, and more decisive, evidence, the strands are inseparable, and remind us that the issues the play raises are as powerful in the later eighteenth century as they are for every succeeding generation.

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CHAPTER 9

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE AND ENGLISH VISUAL CULTURE

Recent readings of The Merchant of Venice have radically changed its perception. Discussions of the ring conceit have revealed the bawdiness that threatens to upset the gender balance accepted until well into the twentieth century as a gently teasing resolution. Stephen Orgel has explored the way in which Shylock became the focus of attention in performance and criticism; and Quentin Skinner has discussed the play in terms of its use of forensic language in comparison to Renaissance rhetoric.1 All these add greatly to the complexities of the play, showing its multiple interrogations of the Italian comedies on which it largely rests; but for earlier audiences, and more particularly readers of illustrated editions, the play had other focal points. The idea of Venice as a trading nation, and a judicial centre matching England in its fairness and probity, was one, more powerful in the earlier treatments. Later, the attractions of the city as an aesthetic ideal, imagined exotic retreat or actual destination came to dominate. To these were added the elevation of Portia to the summit of female perfection, placed within the larger habit of idealising Shakespeare’s heroines within a very English tradition of portraiture. What emerges is a movement away from the play’s text and some of its more insistent themes and structural features towards ways of relating its setting to political and social attitudes towards the city of Venice. The actual city had been popular among the English since the time of Shakespeare, when it offered the matching sophistications of aesthetic splendour and erotic corruption. These were gradually absorbed within the idea of a sea-girt republic splendidly independent of its neighbours that made its living through trade, mirroring the Englishman’s ideal of his own nation’s identity. In the eighteenth century it became the resort of wealthy young scions 197

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completing their education; in the nineteenth, aided by the luminous sensuality of Turner’s paintings, an aesthetic ideal of warmth and colour. First Byron and then Samuel Rogers wrote poems in its praise; in 1835 the young John Ruskin first saw the city. The latter’s writings, which began to appear in the 1850s, gave Venice the moral force of truth in stone, and added impetus to a Grand Tour now extended to include wealthier members of the middle classes. Above and within all of this, the imagined presence of Shakespeare animated Venice for the visitor from England, who came to the city with what might be termed Portia-tinted spectacles. Richness, decay, past splendour – all were absorbed into a view that offered a series of reconstructions that came to dominate the visual treatment of the plays to a degree stretching from the sympathetic to the distortive. Images of the play in print and on canvas reveal an involvement of Shakespeare’s plays within this larger social conspectus, unrolling like a theatrical diorama since the first visual treatments of the plays in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709. The earliest visual presentations of the play take a more focused approach, presenting the play’s events with little avoiding representation of its setting. François Boitard’s design for the trial scene (Figure 73) follows in proportion and detail the Italian models familiar from the Architettura of Sebastiano Serlio but contains nothing specific to Venice, their forms instead those of a wider Italianate identity. The print also takes from Serlio an essential perspective device of earlier staging, a directed recession that leads the eye to a central character who thus becomes the major figure. Here it is the Duke, seated in a porticoed niche, who dominates the composition and thus the action. It is in this that the international relationship is implied. The doge is the focal point of the image, as is the monarch in English images of coronation or judicial practice, and both derive from much earlier images of Moses the lawgiver or God the creator.2 The link suggests the strength of both nations as resting on just process and a divinely decreed rule of law, and this is echoed in the figure of the clerk who is recording the proceedings directly below him. It is with an emphasis on shared governance rather than sophisticated topography that the visual tradition begins. Yet a consequence of the design foreshadows a reading of the play that will later dominate; the perspective begins in the foreground with the figure of Portia, presumably declaiming the ‘quality of mercy’ speech from 4.1, a diagonal eye-line linking her with the enthroned Duke. The relationship implicitly confirms the sharing of mercy and justice common to the two nations, enhanced to theological force by the saintly enthronement of the Duke. 198

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73 François Boitard: frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, 1709.

The illustration by Louis du Guernier in Rowe’s 1714 volume repeats Boitard’s design almost exactly, suggesting the power of the ideology presented. The one difference is in the curtain that both have in the upper foreground. Boitard’s stretches in a thin line at the top of the composition, a nod at general stage practice, but du Guernier’s is much more fully drawn and swagged at one side, recalling instead a curtain drawn back to reveal the painting that it protects in the long gallery of a connoisseur’s home, a link to the aristocratic awareness of Venetian culture. The two presentations of this scene are perhaps the earliest readings that suggest it as the turning point of the play. Since it had not been performed since 1669 and would not return to the stage until revived by Macklin in 1741, Boitard’s selection of the moment rests on his own reading. The choice perhaps reflects classical French dramatic theory, offering a comedic equivalent of the anagnorisis of tragedy; certainly, it places this element and not the amorous relationships at the centre of the play’s action. The stress on legal formality has another significance. Readers of the play in Rowe’s edition might well have experienced the city and its mores solely through Otway’s Venice Preserved,3 with its idea of Venice as the site of corruption now challenged in Shakespeare’s text. 199

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74 Edward Edwards: double frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, 1773.

Treatments of the play in John Bell’s two editions present different scenes, offering carefully balanced readings of its themes but again making no specific allusion to its setting. A copy of the ‘Acting’ edition contains two prints bound together in the familiar manner (Figure 74). The first shows the casket scene, with Bassanio holding the paper from the lead box, over the caption ‘A gentle scroll’. Its emphasis on the play’s romantic action is offset in the second plate, an engraving of Macklin as Shylock, shown above his line ‘Most learned judge! A sentence; come, prepare’ (4.1.300). The image contributes in one detail to the play’s movement: the scales Macklin holds are falling deeply to one side rather than in the perfect balance of traditional representations of impartial justice, suggesting that Shylock has no doubt about the court’s decision. This both propels the action and restrains it, showing a skill in selection rare in the edition’s actor portraits. Readers who know the play will relish the moment; those who do not (again, we must remind ourselves that there will be some) will 200

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75 J. H. Ramberg: double frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, Bell 1788.

be intrigued by its uncertainty, a fascination which will grow as they read further into the play and the trial scene. Seen together, the two images carefully balance the play’s dual thrusts, and also point up the play’s closeness to the mixed genre of Italian commedia grave; but neither contains a specifically Venetian element. A dual frontispiece from Bell’s ‘Literary’ edition concentrates fully on the trial scene (Figure 75), Ramberg’s Shylock resting firmly on the earlier image, but with one significant change. Macklin now wears a skullcap, properly a yarmulke or kippah, along with the ‘Jewish gabardine’ of the text and the full, dark trousers traditionally associated with Jewish characters. The addition of the Jewish headgear is stressed by Stephen Orgel4 as the start of a tradition seeing Shylock as the play’s tragic outsider, as opposed to the comic figure of its few earlier performances in George Granville’s adaptation and with Thomas Doggett in the role. The scales are now shown in perfect balance, perhaps an assertion of Shylock’s belief that the court will decide impartially and thus, to his eyes, in his favour; perhaps as a metaphor of this, the bare floorboards give

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a mood of bleakness. The second image shows the moment before Shylock’s exit, Gratiano having his arm around his shoulders as he speaks the final words addressed to him. The caption gives only the first line of the speech, ‘In christening shalt thou have two Godfathers’ (4.1.394), omitting the much darker ones that follow: Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not to the font

The omission is effective here because it makes the final outcome unclear, working with the rather ambivalent gesture of Gratiano – is it an arm of comfort or a gesture of brutal irony? The result is to generate suspense for the reader unfamiliar with the play, as well as to recreate the force of the moment before Shylock leaves, the delay adding to that movement’s lack of resolution. The two pairs of images succeed in presenting the play’s lines of action with restraint and precision of detail, the first stressing both the romantic course and the darker purpose, the second working only with the latter, a difference suggesting perhaps the distance travelled in readings since the two were designed – although clearly both rest on Macklin’s performance. None of the images makes explicit reference to a Venetian setting. The casket scene from the first set uses very conventional elements of a classical arch and swagged drape, which might be in any Italian or for that matter French building, and the large pillar which the image of Shylock and Gratiano includes is similarly unspecific. The only indication of setting is given in the costume of Bassanio in the casket scene, but again this is Italianate, not Venetian. At this period in the play’s visual history, its presentation rests on aspects of action, not location – and, in both cases, the treatment of these has a subtlety of grasp unusual in its awareness of the play’s movement and the withholding of its conclusions. Once Venice becomes, for the English imagination, less a moral mirror of itself or a home of corruption than a place of aesthetic attraction, visual treatments move towards presenting setting rather than event or idea. This is largely the result of the growing popularity of the Grand Tour in the second half of the eighteenth century, in both participation and imagination. The term itself was coined by Thomas Nugent for his guide book (1749); others, such as Johann Keysler’s Travels Through Germany . . . in 1757 continued the fashion.5 The effect of this does not find its way into illustrated editions until the next century, perhaps because the tour itself and the attitudes to Venice took longer to filter down into the middle ranks of those who read Shakespeare in popular editions. Probably the most significant change in direction occurs in the edition of 202

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The Merchant prepared by Charles Knight for his Pictorial Shakspere. The timing of its serial issue, between 1838 and 1843, is important, coming after the political reorganisations of the city and the poetic reinventions of Byron and others, giving the usual practice of illustration in the edition a particular resonance. Knight’s aim of presenting each play’s historical and material basis, through illustrations both visual and annotative of its settings, costumes, artefacts and larger topographies, assumes particular importance for this play. Its strongly educational basis assumes a broader base: in visually stressing the plays’ distant settings, it was appealing to a desire in the readers to share in the aristocratic delight of exotic locations, in the middle-class aping of aristocratic mores of the kind satirised in the journey to ‘foring parts’ of Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers,6 that appeared during the serial publication of Knight’s Shakspere. The double contextualising of the play within a taste for exoticism and the new kind of material knowledge fostered by Victorian popular education is clear from the title page (Figure 76), which shows the Piazza San Marco from the Grand Canal, with a delicate yet intimidating ducal barge to the foreground. Important in itself in emphasising place over play, it demonstrates another shift in reader involvement: the scene is shown from the viewpoint of another vessel on the water, a place from which English visitors on a gondola would have seen the Piazza. They would have been unlikely to see the barge, its use restricted to occasions of state; but its inclusion offers a larger, imagined involvement with the city and its formal structures, so that both place and its romantically inflated nature are shown at the outset. Such involvement is continued in the first page of the text (Figure 77). Before a single word of dialogue appears, there is an image of the Piazza, captioned ‘[Saint Mark’s Place]’. Parentheses are used for captions throughout the edition, but in this play they perhaps acquire another significance: they suggest the kind of throwaway ‘you knew that already’ made by a lecturer attempting to include the less well read, or in this case less travelled, members of the audience into the company of those who have visited Venice. On the same page, there is a footnote of several lines discussing the old textual problem of Solanio and Solarino, a factual approach to the restoration of accuracy which mirrors the factualism of the image. But the note is not something that can be related directly to the events of the play, and instead seems included to demonstrate the editor’s academic credentials. Within the visual setting already established, the note suggests itself as a parody of the learned annotation in a guidebook or tour commentary; it is easy to imagine that few readers, and few listeners, would have been much concerned with either. 203

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76 Unidentified artist: title page to The Merchant of Venice, 1838–43.

More revealing is the fact that the figures in the engraving’s foreground are in no way related to those of the play, and the Piazza is not mentioned in the text. Both inclusions are significant shifts. Had the image been of the Rialto, it might have provided an important link to the opening of Act 3, where Solanio’s question ‘Now, what news on the Rialto?’ elicits the news that ‘Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the Narrow Seas’ (3.1.1–3). An early image of that place would have foreshadowed the failure of Antonio’s enterprise, leading to the forfeiture of the bond, and thus would have provided a propellant for the reader in both action and mood. The Piazza is chosen instead as the aspect of Venice that has become its single most representative feature, the metonym of the city as experienced by the Englishman abroad. Further, the figures before it place it in parallel with the then popular topographical engravings of English towns, making the privileged viewer feel at home in the exotic location. The same is true of all but one of the images in the edition: location always displaces text, the sole exception coming at the end of Knight’s second act, where the line ‘in a gondola were seen together’ (2.8.8) captions a view of 204

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77 Unidentified artist: headpiece to Act 1, The Merchant of Venice, 1838–43.

a gondola on the canale grande. Even here, though, the depiction is so general as to have hardly any relation to the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica. Two paintings from the same period, both by Turner, demonstrate the complexity with which both Venice and Shakespeare’s play were then seen within wider cultural and aesthetic frames, and also show the diversity of response which visual treatments received. The earlier, Juliet and her Nurse (1836),7 is probably the most extreme reconfiguration of one of Shakespeare’s plays within the English perception of Venice. The image was reproduced as a line engraving by George Hollis in 1842 (Plate 21).8 Such practice was not unusual, and too much should not be made of it; but the idea of its being used as a kind of surrogate picture postcard is not too hard to credit. The image simply and boldly relocates the play from Mantua to Venice, and presents the two roles of the title as tiny figures thrust right down to the foreground before a view – once more – of the Piazza, here enriched by a spectacular display of fireworks. The Times (11 May 1836) disapproved: Shakespeare’s Juliet! Why it is the tawdry Miss Porringer, the brazier’s daughter of Lambeth and the Nurse is that twaddling old body Mrs MacSneeze who keeps the snuffshop at the corner of Oakley Street.9

Turner’s figures have often been harshly criticised, but this judgement contains something more. In its contemptuous references to a young woman and her companion, both from the lower orders and ‘in trade’, there is a hint of despair at the thought of Venice, the resort of the aristocrat and the wealthy, being 205

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invaded by people of the wrong sort. Already, the anguish at seeing exotic places overrun by common tourists is betrayed. The Morning Post was more favourable. The painting is ‘a perfect scene of enchantment’ (25 May 1836) executed with great skill; but this seems to echo the mystical exoticism of the city rather than its depiction in paint or any relevance to Shakespeare’s play. In 1837, a year before Knight began issuing his serial edition of the plays, Turner exhibited a second canvas, perhaps intended as a pair with Juliet and her Nurse (Plate 22).10 Accompanying it were two lines from The Merchant of Venice: A NTONIO : Hear me yet, good Shylock – S HYLOCK : I’ll have my bond.

(3.3.3–4) Turner was one of the first artists to show his paintings at the R. A. with quotations, but most were from James Thomson or his own unfinished epic Fallacies of Hope, with only a handful coming from Shakespeare.11 What makes the practice more forceful in this instance is the peripheral relevance the painting has to the play, since most of the image is reminiscent of the many other Venetian scenes from Turner’s output in this period. Within it, barely visible in the bottom right-hand corner, is a small figure suggesting Shylock holding a dagger and a pair of scales which once again are not evenly balanced. Its identity is confused by the two titles the canvas has borne. Now known as The Grand Canal Venice, it was also referred to as Scene – a Street in Venice, the title appearing in some copies of the catalogue of the R. A. exhibition in which it was shown.12 This is more than a simple change, moving as it does from a topographical label to something resembling a stage direction. There is nothing of that kind in either of the Quartos or the Folio, and while Rowe added act and scene divisions he did not specify locations. Knight comes closest, with ‘Scene 1. – Venice. A Street’ and similar formulations for six further scenes.13 The practice itself goes back at least as far as Dryden’s edition of 1752, and occurs in many others of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.14 This does not, of course, suggest that Turner had read any of them: the word ‘scene’ appears in a handful of his other, non-theatrical, paintings. The appearance of the title in only some copies of the catalogue suggests at most that, like many other titles, it was invented by a gallery manager, compiler or some other functionary in the chain of display and sale. Whoever its author, the title suggests a closeness between theatrical and painterly awareness, or even a hint that the image’s presentation of figures might resemble an imagined stage design. Remote, certainly; yet worth mention as suggesting the 206

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widespread awareness of the theatre, or at a different level the fickle mobility of language. Besides this, there is another, similarly remote possibility. That the figure with scales at the open window does not resemble the caricature Shylocks then found on the stage gives a further level of suggestion. Is the figure more like a portrait of Shakespeare? If the resemblance is there, it takes to a different level the elision of the plays, the dramatist and the exotic location: now, place, plays and playwright form a single, interwoven fabric of the literary and topographical imagination. The complex of assimilation into larger frames of English identity, especially those surrounding the aristocracy and those aspiring to join it, works elsewhere in a completely opposite direction, and manifests itself rather earlier than the varieties of touristic imaging. An outstanding example of the coming together of the Grand Tour, the English country house and the Venetian play is provided in the painting produced by William Hodges for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery to illustrate the final act of the play. Like most of the paintings commissioned for the Gallery it achieved wider accessibility in the engraved version, by John Browne (Figure 78).15 The image presents the scene in the garden of Portia’s house in Belmont where Lorenzo explains to Jessica the harmony of the spheres, but the setting is not Italian, but an English Palladian country house; Stowe, perhaps, or Stourhead, complete with lake and temple. It has taken a long, circuitous path from Venice to the English shires, but the shift is one that has occurred through a process made inevitable by social and aesthetic moves. The borrowing of Palladian architectural styles begun by the Earl of Burlington in the early years of the century resulted first in his own country house, and then in many imitations. The design, and the notion, grew in part from a yearning for the houses and gardens that aristocratic travellers had seen in Italy: the transposition of the isle of Belmont was a final stage in the process of cultural absorption. The appropriation of Shakespeare into the national culture constructed in negotiation with the European nation, largely as an instrument of differentiation from it, is a further component of this ideology. So, too, is the notion of hierarchy given voice by Lorenzo, placed within the system of local feudalism practised by the great country house estates. It thus becomes almost inevitable that this ideological and pragmatic fabric be given visual statement, in the need to provide markers of aesthetic and social maturity for the estate owners, that resulted in country house paintings. The most celebrated is probably Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough,16 which shows the landowner and his wife surrounded by his possessions – the cornfields, the game, the church ‒ in 207

78 John Browne, after William Hodges: The Merchant of Venice, Act V Scene I, 1795.

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an iconography that asserts either benevolent rural capitalism or the darker aspects of paternalism and enclosure. The form itself spawned many imitations. Placing the Belmont speech within its frame in a sense completes the circle of annexation. Not only does it equate the splendours of the English country house with those of Renaissance Italy; it reveals the owner’s taste (in the sense of the word used by Reynolds and others), and makes clear the inevitable rightness of the order that Lorenzo enunciates – an order, of course, shortly to be deeply and darkly undermined by the return of Portia and the ensuing ring conceit. Shakespeare, Venice, England: all are woven into a close textual fabric that paradoxically reveals a great deal about the English love affair with the Italian city. But this should not remain unchallenged: a quite different approach to this scene is taken by Francis Danby, which is discussed in relation to other qualities in Chapter 10. When to this already complex weave is added the visual nature of performance, the result reveals even greater reconfigurations of the play in direct response to the notion of place. Central to this is Charles Kean’s production of 1858. This took Shakespeare’s text as the point of departure for a series of interludes showing aspects of what was seen as Venetian life. What is new here is that, as well as the stress on the visual splendours of the city, an element of anthropology is introduced in the re-enactment of ritual and celebration that aims at representing the nature and practices of its inhabitants. This suggests a shift towards what, in more modern terms, would be an ideology of tourism, in which local customs are seen as a further dimension of the exotic coloration of sky and buildings. Something of this is made clear in Kean’s own account of the production, given in a ‘Fly leaf’ to the playbill, precursor to a present-day programme-note: The historical importance of Venice has passed away for ever; her palaces are crumbling, her gondolas glide silently through the canals unenlivened by song; the haunt of merchants is no longer on the Rialto; ‒ but the immortal verse of Shakespeare has invested the fair city of the sea with a charm for Englishmen which cannot perish with passing events, but which lives and blooms despite of political or national changes. ‘For unto us she hath a spell beyond Her name in story . . . . . . though all were o’er, For us re-peopled were the solitary shore’17

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This is one of the most direct statements of the great appeal of Venice to the English viewer of the mid-century, explicit in its conjunction of exoticism and Picturesque ruin. Into this is closely woven the power of Shakespeare to construct the romantic and commercial centre of the past, in a manner directly and closely parallel to his presentation of the history of England as both were conceived by mid-nineteenth-century readers. Knight’s quotation makes explicit one of the most important influences on attitudes to Venice: the stanzas from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage of four decades earlier. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice had appeared only a few years before,18 but the relation with Kean’s production is unlikely to have been close. Whereas Ruskin is concerned with architecture and morality, Kean rightly sees in his audience a desire for a very specific skein of the yearning that is a recurrent element of Victorian aesthetics, perhaps heightened by a note of superiority implicit in the membership of an Empire on which the sun never sets: Venetian sunsets are unequalled in their beauty, but they simultaneously symbolise, and are enriched by, the physical and political decline of the city. Following Knight’s lead, Kean stages the play’s opening in the Piazza San Marco. This is more than a production decision: for the audience it is a statement of cultural continuity, subliminally reinforcing a concept of the city in a manner that anticipates the rapid establishment of settings through the cinematic use of Piccadilly Circus or the Eiffel Tower to establish not only a city, but a shared conceptualisation of it. The elopement of Jessica and Lorenzo is presented after the characters enter a set reproducing a stretch of the Grand Canal, complete with real water and real gondolas. The buildings, the bridge and canal are all practicable objects, inhabited during the production by a large cast of supernumeraries, while the canal itself is used by the eloping couple for their escape. All are Picturesque in their shabbiness, and in the stage version brightly coloured, an incarnation of the English view of Venice in its most tangible form. That this is the basis of both the elopement and of a carnival masque touches the exotic with a note of romantic danger. The view of Venice has come to dominate the view of Shakespeare, both heavily reconfigured according to social assumptions, and perhaps psychological needs, of performers and audience; but it is also, of course, safe in the imagination, inflected with a note of the superiority felt by the English when confronted with the habits and settings of others that are seen with linguistic patronage as ‘quaint’. The central area of the set, the canal receding directly into the distance, is never employed, an absence giving physical statement to the appealing, but never threatening, element of the exotic that the city, and in consequence its presentation in the play, have now become. 210

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An engraving of the scene in the Illustrated London News,19 a journal whose readers were of the social group likely to visit Venice, completes the circular relationship between theatrical presentation and personal experience. Kean’s production was not, however, met with universal acclaim. Representative is Henry Crabbe Robinson’s comment that he went to see the production ‘More for the sake of the getting up by Kean ‒ Scenery etc rather than for the Shakespeare play ‒ which in spite of its exquisite beauties of sentiment is intolerably absurd even ridiculous’.20 But even here there is a curious duality: although the scenery is ‘ridiculous’, it is also has ‘exquisite beauties’ and was, after all, the reason why he went to see the play. The remainder of the paragraph has little positive to say about the acting, but uses the expression ‘well managed’ twice when referring to the procession of cardinals in the opening scene and again before the trial. The dualism is an apt record of the mingled reactions the production evoked, and perhaps of the confused motives that drove it. A similar response is shown in Dutton Cook’s review of Squire Bancroft’s production, with Ellen Terry, in 1875. The scenery is ‘admirably painted and contrived’; ‘the costumes and accessories are remarkable for their picturesqueness not less than for their richness and appropriateness’. This would seem to suggest that the visual text follows the play’s action and ideas, but Cook then continues: Since Mr Kean, in 1858, converted the play into a pageant and a spectacle, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ has not been so handsomely cared for by upholsterers, dressmakers, scenepainters, and ‘property’ manufacturers.21

To achieve this, Bancroft and his actor wife travelled to Venice with George Gordon, who made sketches for the designs. The play was now rearranged into seven scenes, to allow five sets to be used without extensive intervals for changes, showing the prevalence of visual over dramatic continuity. For the set changes that remained, three ‘Views of Venice’, painted on drop curtains, were displayed. One was the Campanile of San Marco, continuing the earlier tradition. Even with its extensive cuts, the performance lasted for nearly four hours, and the treatment of the play aroused criticism. Clement Scott commented in the Daily Telegraph, ‘there is a higher value in “The Merchant of Venice” than in Venetian pictures and the perfection of Venetian costume’.22 The public agreed; the play closed after three weeks. In fairness, the lack of appreciation was also in part a response to Charles Coghlan’s Shylock, which even at the start of the play gave the Bancrofts misgivings: ‘our hearts were heavy when the curtain rose upon the venture’.23

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The visual construction of an English Venice if anything reached even greater complexities in Henry Irving’s version of four years later, launched after he had visited Venice to find drawings for his designer, Hawes Craven. The resultant scenes, both exterior and interior, followed precedent in their sumptuousness and avowed faith to Italian originals, in actual architecture and its painted representation. But the production was important for other reasons, gaining wide praise for Irving’s sympathetic treatment of Shylock; this was perhaps the start of a move away from presentations of the play that privileged spectacle and returned to greater concentration on the play itself. In a few years’ time, the work of William Poel, Gordon Craig and Granville Barker would reject the lavish sets that made the play so popular through its annexation into larger social and cultural arenas: Irving’s was perhaps the final version of the play to resemble in significant measure a theatrical ritual of aesthetic tourism. But there is a strong relation, if a more abstract one, between an English concept and any idea of a Venetian actuality. Arguably the greater importance of financial dealings, and the growing importance of the City of London in international trade, lay behind Irving’s characterisation, so that the visual screen is displaced by a more subtle way of seeing. Later Victorian illustrated editions do not share the concern for place so vigorously manifest in earlier years. The twin pillars of mid-century illustrated Shakespeare, the volumes illustrated by John Gilbert and Kenny Meadows, present the play in their usual manner. Gilbert shows the events as seen outside the stage, but makes sparing reference to the locations; Meadows is much more restrained than usual, avoiding both the extremes of farce or darker readings of tragedy. But his treatment includes a sombre, near-caricature view of Shylock in 1.3, and a vignette after the ring conceit that includes one of his favoured coiled serpents, in extreme contrast to Gilbert’s final image of a group of tiny cupids struggling with a large jewelled ring. Gilbert has a small cut of Portia as the lawyer, unremarkable in itself, but assuming a different weight when excised from the edition to be used as the frontispiece to The Mind of Shakespeare, as Exhibited in his Works, by the Rev. Aaron Augustus Morgan, M. A. (1860).24 There it acts as both character study and moral emblem, typifying the distance from dramatic continuum achieved by many visual designs of the period. Another approach is taken in a later, leather-bound imprint of Barry Cornwall’s edition. Alongside Meadows’ cuts this places several full-page illustrations, including two actors-in-character prints from photographs and two large engravings after paintings by J. W. Wright of Portia and Jessica, moving the edition towards the anthology form demonstrated in Antony and Cleopatra. 212

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More revealing is the interest in character that such changes satisfy, part of the general movement evident from the mid-century. In part this is manifested in a shift towards seeing Shylock as the main figure in both performance and illustration. In the book mentioned briefly above, Stephen Orgel has explored this by relating presentations in print or on stage to contemporary issues of Jewish and Christian identity. He draws the attention back to the title page of the 1600 Quarto, which describes the play as containing ‘the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe thowards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh’, and places Macklin’s revival as the basis of the change.25 We might also attribute the shift to the changing fortunes of Portia, part of a larger vogue for portraits of female characters set apart from the plays in which they appear. The Victorian period is framed between two collections of this kind, both borrowing the styles of contemporary portraiture and thus furthering the distance from dramatic text or performance. The earlier was The Shakespeare Gallery,26 which included engravings of forty-five female characters from the plays, including both Portia and Jessica who, like most of the others, are presented much in accord with contemporary ideals of female beauty. Of the two designs, Jessica’s (Figure 79) is more suggestive of the play, presented as she is against a background largely consisting of a blank wall with, in the last eighth of the composition, a view of the canal and a gondola, the two elements combining to convey her constrained existence with Shylock and her freedom with Lorenzo. Portia (Figure 80) is shown against an architectural form that suggests more Pugin than San Marco; but the presentation next to a passage from the final act’s ring conceit locates it within the contemporary view of the scene as a warm, emotional conclusion with the female characters returning to implied domesticity. The second collection was a series of paintings commissioned by respected artists from the publisher of a leading illustrated magazine and then reproduced in several formats, The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1888).27 By then, styles and tastes had changed. The two artists mentioned in the volume’s full title were best known as painters of classical subjects and society portraits, and it is into this aesthetic that the figures are now elevated. More subtle is the image of Portia by the lesser known artist Henry Woods (Plate 23). This shows her in legal robes while reading what is presumably the speech she will deliver in the trial scene. The image combines this with a view of Venice by placing the figure leaning against a balcony above the city, although without showing any of its better known and by that time instantly recognisable features. Interestingly, Woods had painted other works in which 213

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79 ‘Jessica’, from Charles Heath’s Shakespeare Gallery, 1837.

figures are presented before a more fully depicted Venetian setting, but here it is the figure that dominates. As well as integrating the two elements and satisfying the contemporary concern with individual character, reinvented in the portrait style of the day, Woods’ painting encapsulates the shift of treatment over the period considered here. Now it is a character, excised from the play and given an independent existence in the style of contemporary portraiture, that occupies the foreground, while Venice itself is the literal background. This cannot be called a determined return to interest in the play’s larger movement; but it suggests that no longer is the play seen as some kind of sublimated tourist guide. One more circumstance may be 214

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80 ‘Portia’, from Charles Heath’s Shakespeare Gallery, 1837.

relevant to the play’s return to serious consideration, although here again it is placed within the educative imperatives of the age: within the growing Victorian fashion for public and private readings, Portia’s ‘Quality of Mercy’ speech became a popular recital piece.28 Looking back at these acts of annexation, it is easy to reject the extremes of representational accuracy to the material settings, in painting, illustrated edition and staging, as another symptom of the obsessive materialism of nineteenthcentury culture. Yet special circumstances and singular ways of seeing surround images of The Merchant of Venice, which play with a preconceived or pre215

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experienced notion of the city, a Venice of the mind that draws the onlooker in through its corruption as much as its splendour. Productions from more recent times, including the BBC television version, and the film by Michael Radford (2004) have made equally extensive use of the setting, extended by the greater possibilities of the media they employ. As far as we know, Shakespeare never visited the city;29 it was, to him, an imagined world. Then, as now, the power of the City in the sea was strong; then, as now, the English saw the city, and the play, through a sophisticated, if astigmatic, lens.

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CHAPTER 10

SHAKESPEARE PAINTING 1800–1848

The nineteenth-century shift towards figures in exotic settings in The Merchant of Venice, while enriched with its own anthropological flavour, is also representative of a larger change in the nature and aims of Shakespeare painting, towards a new approach that, with some exceptions, became the rule for nearly fifty years. The formal rhetoric or close textual interpretation of earlier years, with their reliance on iconographic and representational practices common to artist and reader, were replaced by depictions of character and situation more accessible in style and more immediate in situation, often recognisably domestic. There was also a larger change: the comparative lack of interest in Shakespearean subjects, with far fewer paintings produced, and fewer still by major figures. The work of Benjamin Robert Haydon is symptomatic. His Romeo Leaving Juliet at the Break of Day was shown at the R. A. in 1810, but the artist removed it, angry that it was hung not in the main gallery but in the Octagon Room, suggesting a lack of interest; its later owner and current whereabouts are unknown. A year earlier Haydon had been commissioned by Sir George Beaumont to paint Macbeth at the moment before Duncan’s murder, but Beaumont rejected the finished painting. After changes, it was shown at the British Gallery in 1812, a significant step down from the R. A.; four years later Beaumont agreed to buy it but, again, it is currently untraced. Such exchange between painter, gallery and patron was not universal, but the events suggest a general response to paintings of Shakespearean subjects. Whatever the reasons, the visual treatment of Shakespeare was far less widespread, and very different, in the years between the failure of the Boydell enterprise and the Pre-Raphaelite rediscovery of emblematic narrative in 1848. 217

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It would be easy to attribute the shift to some features of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery; easy, and not wholly without foundation. The celebration of Shakespeare as a national English genius who broke all the classical rules would seem to support the venture’s initial aim of founding a national school of history painting. Yet perhaps the very saturation of the market on canvas and in print that resulted argued against its continuation. True, there were attempts at imitation and development. James Woodmason’s Irish Shakespeare Gallery was its most direct rival, occupying premises nearly opposite Boydell’s specially built gallery in Pall Mall and opening nearly eight years after it in 1794, when Boydell’s was still open and adding new canvases. Woodmason’s comparative failure may have been the result of its founder’s greater entrepreneurial than artistic experience, but its overlapping with the Boydell venture, the treatment of many similar episodes in the plays in both schemes, and above all the lack of interest from public and reviewers all worked against it. The imposition of a single, portraitformat size for all the paintings also did little to help, although some artists, notably Fuseli, used it to advantage, especially in Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793).1 Other ventures included Fuseli’s own Milton Gallery, Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery and Robert Bowyer’s gallery displaying paintings that were the basis of engravings in his 1792 edition of David Hume’s History of England.2 Yet none achieved the acclaim of Boydell’s venture, suggesting either that Shakespeare was, as Boydell himself assumed, the only figure worthy of such attention, or that the public was tiring of literary painting on a grand scale. Other reasons for Boydell’s failure were economic and political. The blockade of Europe during the French Revolutionary War prevented the import of highgrade paper for the prints’ production, and removed a major market for them when completed. Even without these setbacks, production costs were heavy. Payments for individual artists ranged from a little over £100 to images by Stothard and Smirke to £525 for West’s King Lear, with most artists receiving about £200 per canvas. Fees for engravers were generally higher, averaging half as much again as those for painters, with some far in excess. William Hamilton received only £150 for his painting of Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.1, whereas Thomas Ryder was paid £315 for the subsequent engraving. Even West’s fee was eclipsed by William Sharpe’s £840 for the engraving (see Plate 10). Added to these costs in some cases would have been fees for another artist to paint the image in reverse for the engraver to copy. When the paintings were sold at auction, after the winner of the lottery by which they were disposed decided not to keep them, few reached anything like their original prices, and the total for the sale was 218

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£6,181 18s 6d.3 Some consequences of this were more positive: although several of the paintings are now unknown, others are in major galleries overseas, with West’s in the USA and Fuseli’s in Switzerland and Canada, for example. This is to ignore the nature and consequences of Boydell’s concept of a national school of history painting. It imposes if not uniformity of style, then certainly an idea of rhetorical scale, suggesting large, formally distant paintings, with the implication that they follow an approximation of the grand style defined, as Chapter 4 suggested, by a combination of power, grace, the depiction of passions or feelings through facial expression and, in many English iterations, a composition resting on a linear frieze mimicking classical statuary. In practice, by the time of the Gallery’s inception this approach was largely outmoded. The consequence was its adoption by painters less confident in risktaking – those familiar with working on a smaller scale in book illustration or portraiture, and hence ill at ease in larger productions and more willing to follow earlier precepts. Only those accustomed to painting in larger formats – West, Barry and most particularly Fuseli – broke through tradition to produce images of strength equal to their subjects. It is suggestive that, when at some stage Boydell realised that the large paintings would be unsuitable for illustrating the edition of the plays, the designs, known as the Quarto plates, came from what might reasonably be termed the second order of artists. The result, put in simplest terms, is that many of the large paintings succeed by breaking the rules, while others are less successful by following them. But that ‘less successful’ must be read alongside an important element of the Quarto plates. Painted with book illustration in mind, most include only two or three characters, and in this they are allied to a style already assuming considerable currency: the presentation of events in a manner according to the direct presentation of feeling, often within a less elevated setting. It is towards this that many Shakespeare paintings after Boydell move, in response to a shift of ideas about emotion in general and a changed approach to the plays in particular. Another way of seeing this shift is a change in the theory surrounding painting, something reliant as much on departures in literary and philosophical ideas as an alteration of painterly aims. It might be succinctly summarised as a movement from the Longinian to the Burkean Sublime. Whereas the idealised classicism of the earlier eighteenth century had established codes of presentation that mirror the ideas of Longinus, these elements had become either simplified or redefined in the Boydell paintings and many earlier works. The Sublime that took their place rested on the purifying effects of terror – the experience of seeing objects so vast and fearsome that they set up a physiological 219

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response that purified the blood. Industrial sublime; historical sublime; mythological sublime: all these orders existed in the work of different artists and displaced earlier subjects and treatments from as early as the 1760s. That John Martin’s series of paintings of Paradise Lost (1825–7), with fine reproductions in mezzotint by Samuel Prewett, achieved more lasting popularity than Fuseli’s ill-fated Milton Gallery of some years earlier nicely demonstrates this move, employing as they do references to the architecture and equipment of the new industrial society in a style best described as Burkean Apocalyptic. Martin’s designs should be seen alongside his massive images of desolation such as The Great Day of his Wrath (1850), all of which remain in major public collections. By contrast, his only Shakespearean painting, similarly huge in depicting Macbeth’s encounter with the witches and its consequences (1820), survives only in a small copy,4 suggesting that the subject was falling out of favour. Indications of this were apparent much earlier, not least in the fashion for paintings of scientific experiment and industrial production. Joseph Wright – that he is still known colloquially as ‘Wright of Derby’ reveals his interest, with other members of the Lunar Society, in science and industry – was an early exponent of such painting, most evident in the Lecture upon the Orrery (1768) and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).5 Yet while addressing topics quite new, both use many of the techniques of composition, narrative or iconographic allusion familiar from literary or history paintings, to convey a contradictory and unresolved ambiguity of response to the new forms of knowledge. Later paintings of similar theme operate more immediately upon the viewing imagination. After leaving Drury Lane, de Loutherbourg produced paintings such as Coalbrookdale by Night (1801),6 either a celebration of industrial power or a vision of its destructive potential, and part of a small but significant genre of paintings and engravings of the foundry in operation. The stylistic transformation is clear: the focus is now directly on flame and fire, accentuated by the silhouetted buildings, giving an effect immediate and fierce, with no need for the careful decryption demanded by Wright’s paintings. These were only two of the many artists producing images of the emerging industrial nation at the period, constituting important evidence of a change in social concern and aesthetic taste towards the actualities of experimental science and industrial technology; the writings of Mary Shelley are perhaps the best known, and still most read, examples of related concerns in literature. The intensity and violence of such images might be seen as one symptom of burgeoning Romanticism, later found in the most freely expressive paintings of Turner and Constable and 220

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the poetry of Wordsworth, presenting not so much the landscape itself but the viewer’s emotional reaction to it. Yet we should be careful not to see any of these forms as wholly representing public taste. Alongside them ran other streams, some already evidenced in methods of theatric performance and novel writing. The emotional currents of Garrick’s Lear and its audiences grew and changed course in subsequent years. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, first published in 1771 and reissued in ten new editions by 1830, developed the Rousseauist fashion for emotional responses to the natural world. These matched the strong feelings of Garrick’s audiences, but extended them into the construction of single human figures, the characters of the plays being presented in this way by followers of Hazlitt. While the immediacy of many paintings, the passionately free impasto of Constable in his ‘six-foot canvases’ and Turner’s equal but different energy in depicting light and atmospheric movement, found few immediate supporters, their earlier work and that of many others showing the landscape by developing the techniques of Gainsborough and his contemporaries achieved far wider acceptance. When Constable died in 1837, his close friend William Purton suggested that a painting of his be bought by subscription and presented to the nation, his choice being the six-foot canvas Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831).7 It is one of the later paintings, an innovative composition much looser than earlier versions of the Cathedral. C. R. Leslie describes the response to Purton’s idea: It was thought by the majority of Constable’s friends that the boldness of its execution rendered it less likely to address itself to the general taste than others of his works, and the picture of the ‘Cornfield’ painted in 1826 was selected in its stead.8

The painting referred to9 is more representative of the artist’s early work, derivative from Gainsborough in composition and handling of paint. It leads the viewer gently in through the boy drinking at the stream, to the dog’s head pointing to the mid-distance where the cornfield is shown in strong light set against the foreground shadow. If not quite a rural narrative, it certainly shows a scene apparently familiar – even though the reason the sheepdog is driving sheep towards a cornfield would not be clear to anyone with a rural upbringing. The scene is being shown to a primarily urban audience, the countryside now become a distant aesthetic object, presented and perceived with sentiment, having none of the presence of the Salisbury canvas, nor any of the allusive, emblematic meaning of a grand style history painting. The donation is a sharp indication of the taste of the first half of the century, a taste dominated by feeling 221

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and a need for familiarity, and in this it offers a visual metaphor of the period’s movements in and away from Shakespeare painting. Another aspect of this change is the concentration on character already touched on in previous chapters. The popularity of the novel had much to do with this, readers becoming so involved in the fictive community as to believe in its actual existence and share in its emotional experience, generating a parallel simplification in painting designed for popular viewers in which serious, analytic images of literary topics have little place. That place was not wholly eradicated, however: it found new centre in the illustrated editions that became popular in the 1830s. The simultaneous existence of the school of emotionaldomestic painting and conceptual, interpretive textual illustration is not, I think, contradictory. Shakespeare editions were for cultural advancement, while domestic conversation pieces, in cheap engravings, were for personal and shared enjoyment. That some paintings of the later decades – notably those of the group known as the Cranbrook Colony, especially its main figure Thomas Webster – show children at play or the recreational activities of adults echoes the division between the ardours of high culture and the re-creative pleasures of games and social interaction. Later, the domestic narratives of David Wilkie, and the sentimental animal paintings of Sir Edwin Landseer (the knighthood is revealing), whose Stag at Bay and Dignity and Impudence achieved widespread popularity as engravings, suggest an inward-looking stance in both style and subject that implies a larger isolationism. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that images of this kind came closer, for two or three decades, to a national school than Boydell’s gallery itself. Presenting episodes from the plays that prioritise feeling over idea ennobles both elements, showing Shakespeare’s wealth of human understanding; elevating the emotions of all to their treatment by the national genius represents an ideal coming together of elements otherwise apparently contradictory. Far from being rejected for their simplicity, such paintings should be seen within this view. What follows here is intended more as a suggestive overview than a synoptic account, aiming to show some of the more striking approaches that emerge during the years between the Boydell venture and the more concentrated, and ultimately more influential, work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers.

II Quite what was required of a Shakespeare painting at this time is suggested in the responses of William Makepeace Thackeray who, it should be remembered, 222

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as the illustrator of many of his own novels knew more than most about the relations between word and image. There should, though, be a caveat to this. Writing as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, he retains a distanced persona in his art criticism, the irony apparent in his fiction never far distant. That said, the opinions are valuable in suggesting one approach in print to many of the better known Shakespeare paintings of the late 1830s. He is fully aware of the difficulty inherent in such work: writing of Mulready’s Seven Ages of Man (1835–8),10 he remarks of its series of portraits, ‘but why describe them? You will find the whole thing better done in Shakespeare.’ He continues: ‘the intention is godlike. Not one of those creatures but has a grace and a soul of his own.’11 This would certainly seem to show the evidence of Hazlitt, in echoing the notion of Shakespeare’s ability to construct figures with a complete human identity; but in using the word ‘grace’ as well as ‘soul’ it returns to one of the grand shibboleths of earlier art criticism, although here, when seen in the light of the painting itself, it carries a different weight. This concentration on actual figures within a single location departs from the much older tradition of depiction of the Ages, lacking the geometric presentation in which the figures move to an apogee and then decline, in a triangular diagram of the ageing process often shown over a figure of death in the space beneath.12 Instead of an emblematic moral progression, Mulready’s painting is a treatment of a speech whose maker is not shown, of characters who do not exist except as examples of categories. In this it perhaps owes something to the series of portraits which Robert Smirke designed for Boydell, but whereas those reflect characteristics through emblem and action in episodes developed from Shakespeare’s text, they are brought together by Mulready. The shift from both earlier conventions evidences the new priorities of Shakespeare painting. This kind of presentation is matched in other paintings of the period that assemble characters in groups, going beyond theatrical conversation pieces to suggest imagined family portraits of figures not seen together in the play and thus separate from its action. The quality is most fully defined in a painting by the most prolific Shakespeare painter of the period, C. R. Leslie: The Principal Characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1838: Plate 24).13 Again Thackeray’s response is helpful. It begins by asserting ‘Leslie is the only man in the country who translates Shakespeare into Form and colour’, and then goes further: This picture is executed with the utmost simplicity, and almost rudeness; but it is charming, from its great truth of effect and expression. Old Shallow and Sir Hugh, Slender and his man Simple, pretty Anne Page and the Merry Wives of Windsor, are here

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joking with the fat knight; who, with a monstrous gravity and profound brazen humour, is narrating some tale of his feats with the wild Prince and Poins.14

As the painting’s full caption at the R. A. explained, this is ‘a scene not in the play, but supposed to take place in the first act’. The painting moves beyond the play to present characters but in a manner quite different from Mulready’s Seven Ages, instead grouping the characters in a moment that might be thought to have occurred. Thackeray takes this further by suggesting that Falstaff is discussing events at the Boar’s Head, which occur only in the Henry IV plays. The characters are given a life beyond the play, seen as actualities with independent feelings and human exchanges. In this it is an important marker of the nature of Shakespeare painting of the time, showing its move inside the popular convention of emotional narrative centred on situations and individual figures, literary or invented, that became the most popular feature of English figurative art of the period. Considered from the view of a critical or performative engagement with the play, the painting has little to offer, except perhaps in reflecting some aspects of contemporary costume. The composition is inevitably crowded, with little order or rhythm; the aspect most striking is the use of colour, something for which Leslie was and remains justly valued. But to assess it in terms of a critical reading is to miss the point. It is as a statement about real people and feeling, both stated at a low level of intensity, that it was judged at the time, and should be seen today. Others work in the same way. Related but more expansive in subject is Thomas Stothard’s Shakespearean Characters, exhibited in 1817 (Plate 25).15 This separates character completely from the dramatic current of individual plays by showing many of the most recognised roles in a single group portrait, one of the earliest presentations of its kind, not only with Shakespeare but with any author. Blake’s line engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims16 predates it by seven years, but is different in concept. There, the figures are shown departing from the Tabard Inn, in the space between the end of the ‘General Prologue’ and the beginning of the journey with the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Stothard’s image has no such narrative placement, instead drawing together characters from separate works. In this it began a small tradition of such paintings, with one by John Gilbert, another by Ford Madox Brown, and others including a cartoon in Punch on the occasion of the Shakespeare tercentenary. In all, there is an uncertainty. Do they depict the characters that are invented and depicted by Shakespeare, the magnificent figure of nature who uniquely understood humanity, or are they the artist’s responses to them as real individuals? Regardless of any judgement of merit, the

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image is a valuable metaphoric presentation of how character discussion has progressed. This is not to say that the painting has no value. The very inclusion of some figures and the absence of others suggests something of popular taste; similarly, the costumes may reveal a little of stage practice or suggest an imaginative alternative for it, resting on some kind of historical reference along the lines of Knight’s edition. What is perhaps most interesting is the postures of the figures. This is more than a classical frieze: each figure responds in some degree to those adjacent, the postures suggesting, far more than the facial expressions, a mood or relationship. Stothard’s Boydell paintings are interesting in comparison. His design for Othello (c.1799)17 shows the central character returning after the battle to be greeted by Desdemona, with Iago to one side in shadow. There is an attempt here to show feeling through expression, and a pattern of eye contact suggests their relationship. Yet while it attempts the classical style in the dignity and arrangement of the figures, it fails to achieve the serious tone demanded by its subject. While the procession painting cannot adopt such a style, it does attempt to suggest the exchanges within each play. Effective in suggesting a degree of mild, comedic involvement in some, it does not display a seriousness compatible with the tragedies; but how could it within such a programme? The result is a painting of gentle, undemanding familiarity between painter, characters and viewer, comfortable in the rapport it constructs and allowing the onlooker to relax in untroubled cultural awareness. Doubtless the full decoding of identities and interactions would have been a popular response among viewers; once again, the involvement of readers in the literary lives-made-personal is evident, but now in a form beyond critical review. Other painters followed an approach, hinted at above, seen in less demanding images in the Boydell collection, where an attempt is made at the heroic style but without commensurate force of structure or tone. It is well shown in Imogen Found in the Cave of Belarius by George Dawe (1809: Plate 26).18 The immediate impression here is of a painting in the heroic style of a previous generation. The figures are classically attired and formally posed to display appropriate passions, arranged in a frieze composition that mimics a classical deathbed – Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe,19 one of the best known heroic paintings of the earlier century, seems a clear reference point, its central element of the dying figure closely followed in Dawe’s painting. The earlier style is relaxed in several ways. One is in a hint of the theatre, the dark setting suggesting a painted drop with the addition of a papier maché rock as a stage prop. In this, though not in the disposition of the figures, it recalls earlier theatre 225

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paintings, but the result is neither an heroic history nor a stage record. The figures are wooden, an effect aided by their stereotypical expressions, and the construction of meaning through eyelines far from subtle. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the supposed-dead Imogen through the outer dog, the eyes and forearms of Belarius and Arviragus, in an over-emphatic radiating system, acting to emphasise the supposed corpse and the grief it engenders in both stage persons and the painting’s viewers. In attempting both classical model and direct emotion it fails to convince in either, showing the dangers of modifying an earlier style within a limited technique and revised outlook. The result, however, is clear: the concentration on the figure of Imogen, and the responses of the male figures around her, under the impression that she is dead, demands a direct emotional response, albeit limited by the unsubtle presentation and the enclosed space which gives it almost a domestic air. Comparison with John Hoppner’s painting of the play for the Boydell Gallery is revealing.20 There, the figure is presented outside the cave, offering her sword to Pisanio, her bared breast suggesting vulnerability and adding an erotic charge, the whole within a typically Picturesque landscape. The selection of moment adds suspense, stressing the play’s movement; in comparison, Dawe’s stillness offers itself as a contemplative moment, emphasising sentiment rather than action, with no hint that Imogen will awake. The approach of Dawe’s painting is shared by many others, which approach situations of sickness or death in the plays, easily dismissed as mawkish today but of consolatory value at a time when mourning was a central, and inescapable, actuality and rite. Gilbert Stuart Newton’s Lear Attended by Cordelia and the Physician (1831) takes a similar approach, but so does the much later Death of Cordelia by Paul Falconer Poole (1858).21 Both move away from the monumental force of James Barry’s painting of 1786–8 for Boydell22 towards a greater intimacy. The much later date of the Poole painting should warn against the assumption that such approaches did not easily disappear; the tradition of Victorian genre and sentiment continued well into the period of PreRaphaelitism. Not all paintings moved so clearly beyond the stage. Leslie’s Sketch for Twelfth Night Act I Scene 3 (1841: Plate 27)23 moves towards presenting a scene from performance, continuing the conversation piece tradition, but with an altered viewpoint that gives more direct viewer involvement. The moment shown is near the opening of 1.3, at the entry of Aguecheek: Sir Toby’s outstretched hand suggests that it focuses on his line ‘Accost, Sir Andrew, Accost’ (1.3.45). This, and the eye-line between the two male figures to the exclusion of Maria, place it 226

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before the scene’s wordplay between Aguecheek and Maria. There is none of the darker comedy in the duel scene, which works wholly at Aguecheek’s expense; in this earlier scene Aguecheek might be said to contribute at least adequately to the exchange with Maria. This operates quite differently from the Boydell prints, which included a short quotation to place the scene. If the viewer is familiar with the comic action that follows, the painting functions as a trigger for it; if not, the painting becomes a presentation of people for meditation as individuals. In either case there is little engagement with a moment of some consequence in the play’s action. Character, in short, dominates role; and, although the limited background may suggest a stage set, the lighting might equally suggest a domestic interior, adding to the painting’s intimacy. A different kind of emotional presentation is offered by Leslie’s Queen Katharine and Patience (1842: Plate 28).24 The style mingles a Rubenesque darkness of tone with a composition from the Dutch Golden Age, its soft tonalities matching the mood of controlled melancholy in the scene from Henry VIII when Katharine of Aragon broods on the loss of her husband’s affections. Tone is appropriate here, and so too is the moment selected instead of the trial scene, shown in two theatrical studies of Sarah Siddons, by Harry Andrews and George Henry Harlow.25 Whereas these attempt to record an actual performance, the event shown here is earlier, less forceful and more intimate, conveying a mood within a domestic, and far more accessible setting. On its display at the R. A., Leslie’s painting was given a different title and shown with a text, also printed in the catalogue: Scene from Henry the Eighth, Queen Katharine: ‘take thy lute, wench, my soul grows with troubles. Sing and disperse them if thou can’st; leave wishing’

This inclusion focuses the painting’s mood, important for those unfamiliar with the play without providing fuller details of the plot – although since the story of Katharine was well known among Victorians from popular history, as well as from history paintings and the play itself, few would have needed the detail. Quotation and image combine to present an emotional situation matching the taste for gentler moods, while avoiding direct allusion to the theatre and adopting something of an Old Master tonality, both adding a note of dignity and respectability. Writing of the painting when first shown, the Art Union described it in words recurrent in favourable criticism of paintings of the time: ‘graceful and beautiful and very touching’.26 Now, the plays are presented in a far less challenging, more comfortable and familiar manner, matched in the work of other artists of the period both in Shakespeare paintings and those from other 227

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literary sources. That many formed part of the Sheepshanks Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum again reveals them as popular images of the time. As the theatre moved towards greater realism and illustrated editions made the plays’ events physically accessible as objects within the home, these paintings offered a complementary, balancing order of restrained intimacy – a focus for the viewers’ own feelings, shared within their own circles.

III In other paintings, intimacy takes a different direction, flirting with conventions both social and aesthetic in presenting eroticism acceptably sheltered under Shakespeare’s respectability. Often this is achieved through both implication of mood and a skilfully bawdy intermedial pun, as in Falstaff’s Assignation with Mistress Ford (1830–1: Plate 29).27 The artist, George Clint, was an experienced painter of theatrical conversation pieces showing actors celebrated for their popular comic roles, one of several artists specialising in this area and rarely moving to Shakespeare, echoing the division of tastes evident throughout the theatres’ maturity.28 The interior is avowedly domestic, affecting a Tudor style of furnishing and decoration of the kind found in contemporary stage design. The title points towards a likely reading, the word ‘assignation’ having furtive connotations that belie its formal meaning of a legal transfer of property, quite different from Falstaff’s intent as indicated by his posture behind the curtain. What is perhaps the painting’s main thrust is provided by an intermedial pun on a colloquial usage. Mistress Ford is gazing at a goldfish, ‘fish’ being a widely known derogatory expression for a woman:29 its most familiar Shakespearean usage occurs in 1 Henry IV, where Falstaff remarks ‘She’s neither fish nor fowl, a man knows not where to have her’ (3.3.126–7). This was a play that Clint knew, producing a painting of Falstaff at the Boar’s Head at some time in the 1830s;30 the allusion seems far from incidental. Within what seems to some degree harmless, and for those who know the play a step towards Falstaff’s eventual disgrace, the painting contains its erotic force for decryption by those aware of the verbal play. The working is subtle: Mistress Ford looks innocently at the fish, while Falstaff gazes at her with predatory intent, each glance a metaphor of the other, made powerful by the linguistic allusion that enriches what in the style of the day would have been the scene’s comic effect. A similar linguistic device may perhaps be employed in Romeo and Juliet – Act II Scene V, by Henry Perronet Briggs (1827: Plate 30),31 although its main effect, again bawdily comic, is achieved through different means. The awkward posture 228

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of the Nurse suggests the tiredness to which she confesses at the beginning of the scene, but the depiction of Juliet suggests the Nurse’s words near its close: ‘Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks’ (2.5.71). The Nurse’s expression and pursed lips continue the tiredness motif, as well as exaggerating her comic role; but the dark shadow falling across her face contradicts this by suggesting the play’s conclusion. This is in contrast to the presentation of Juliet in full, brilliant light, her hands clasped in almost a parody of a very Victorian pose of delight at hearing that Romeo is waiting. More direct are the sublimated eroticism of her figure, the sensual texture of her costume, and the neatly pointed feet which continue the sexuality of an earlier period. It also picks up the garden setting of the traditional galanterie, with the serving maid at left and a classical pillar at right. These elements, and the falling shadow, are set against what is surely an allusion to the Nurse’s earlier speech, with its repeated ‘Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit’ (1.3.42 and 56). This is the putto carved in the pillar at the right, perhaps representing Cupid. The erotic suggestion is skilfully integrated into the composition, with the eyes of the Nurse and Juliet being on a straight horizontal with the genitals of the carved figure. It is a skilful rendering of the scene’s subtext, enhanced by the shadow that suggests the play’s ending working alongside Juliet’s posture and her blush. The implied eroticism might be extended by a reading of the brush in the hand of the figure at the left, presumably the Nurse’s attendant Peter. Although the Nurse orders ‘Peter, stay at the gate’ soon after the two enter (2.5.20), Briggs chooses to include him in his depiction of the later events. One reason for this is surely compositional, the figure adding to the painting’s symmetry; another is his expression, which guides the onlooker to read the Nurse as comic. But there may be another reason, related to the brush he is holding. The word ‘brush’ is recorded by Eric Partridge,32 albeit with a later origin, as a colloquial term for the female pudendum. If it is not too perverse to see the figure in this way, it would certainly complete the compositional association between the two central figures and the sculpted Cupid. In this, it is extending the idea of feeling in a manner that reflects the light tone throughout the painting to work against its shadows, balancing the play’s own duality of mood. Not a reading of great textual subtlety, certainly; but an image that reflects one kind of feeling quite representative of its period, in exploring an eroticism of a secretive, perhaps furtive, kind that depends on double meanings made visual, and which opens the way to a rather different dimension of the Victorian imagination. 229

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IV While these paintings, and the others of which some are representative, suggest particular orders of Shakespeare visualisation, other images remain resolutely beyond categorisation. Two are of particular interest in this regard, not least because they make some reference to earlier styles. Francis Danby, today best known for a massive vision of catastrophe, The Deluge (1840),33 also produced a single Shakespeare painting, A Scene from The Merchant of Venice (1827–8: Plate 31).34 The setting is Italianate and, except for the sharply tunnelled recession, might at first recall paintings of the Roman campagna by Claude, or one of their eighteenth-century English imitations. The setting is presumably a terrazzo outside the house in Belmont, seen from one of the lower rooms; the viewer is led beyond Jessica and Lorenzo at left foreground to a classical temple, and beyond to open water, with a glimpse of Venice in the far distance. The foreground is dominated by trees, lit by what Constable would call his ‘dew’, the sprinkle of light on the leaves to present the line ‘How sweet the moonlight creeps upon this bank’ (5.1.54), the beginning of a longer passage that accompanied the painting when first displayed. Lorenzo has laid aside his lute, and the couple are presented in a rather awkward embrace; there seems to be no eye contact, and instead Lorenzo gazes above Jessica’s head towards the temple. In contrast to their darkness, the right-hand side of the image is clearly lit by white moonlight. Is this, then, some indication of Jessica’s mood: ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’ (5.1.69), or perhaps a larger reflection of the scene’s gentle melancholy? Certainly there is nothing of Lorenzo’s heavy-handed explanation of the harmony of the spheres. In many ways exquisite in its handling of paint and construction of light, it remains muddled in composition and, above all, unclear in its relation to the play. William Hodges’ Boydell image of the scene (see Chapter 9), placing it firmly within an English parody of a Palladian villa, seems much more at ease with its own form and the comment it makes on the play. Danby’s commission by Sir John Soane may explain what seems the unease of the treatment; the artist seems to be working beyond his familiar territory here, or perhaps the painting is a victim of its own stylistic anachronism. Unease of a different kind is evident in John Opie’s Portrait of a Lady in the Character of Cressida (1800: Plate 32).35 This shows Pandarus revealing Cressida to Troilus, much as a connoisseur revealing a favourite painting to a privileged visitor. The painting is remarkable in its close resemblance to Lawrence’s Kemble as Coriolanus (see Plate 15). Cressida’s posture, especially the foot extended forwards and the head bent slightly to the right, is similar, suggesting in both

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figures a direct revelation, a posture of self-fashioning in both plays ultimately to prove unsuccessful. The likeness is surely not incidental; Lawrence’s painting was exhibited the year before at the R. A., and it is unlikely that Opie would not have seen it, or one of its copies there or elsewhere. The similarity is sharpened by the differences. Cressida is presented against lush foliage, with steps suggesting a path down to a garden, a feminised counterpart to the military background of the Lawrence setting. Both have a double characterisation: Kemble as Coriolanus, ‘A Lady’ as Cressida. Whereas Coriolanus is in traditional half-face pose, this becomes in Cressida an almost full-face presentation from which only the eyes move towards Troilus, who is shown in a profile recalling a classical medallion. The lack of eye contact furthers uncertainty in character and role; similarly, Pandarus looks straight ahead as he unveils Cressida. The discrepancy between the coloration and size of his face and those of the other two suggests their difference in rank, but also introduces a note dark in mood as well as colour; and this is reinforced by the awkward compositional line of his forearm and Cressida’s. Underlying these elements are the multiple levels of performance in each painting – the Lady and Kemble; the roles that they, as stage persons, adopt or are made to adopt by circumstances; the presentation of the two main characters in parody of classical sculpture, echoed in the medal-portrait of Troilus. The difference lies in the outright assumption of role in the Lawrence; this is an actor in character, and the classical allusions are legitimate extensions of costume and situation. In the Opie, the relation between levels of identity is less clear, and the separation of planes between the three figures, aided by the flattened triangle in which they appear, increases the uncertainty. In this, the painting seems to present itself as a vision of the dark, unresolved relation between characters, but also hints at some kind of parodic relationship with the domestic paintings of its time and, through an apparent simplicity beyond the rhetoric of a Boydell image, to undermine that earlier convention. Ill at ease with both in execution, it embodies the anxieties of its theme. The similar sizes of the paintings make the likeness more striking. The first version of the Lawrence portrait, exhibited at the R. A. in 1798, measured 287 × 179 cm (112 × 70 in). Opie’s image, at 233.7 × 144.8 cm (92 × 57 in), is close in proportion as well as actual dimension. Most of Opie’s paintings, mainly portraits, measure around 76 × 63 cm, in imperial terms 30 × 24 in, a standard-size canvas easily obtainable from dealers. Only a few of his paintings are larger, one being a sentimental narrative The Peasant’s Family.36 His Boydell painting of Timon of Athens follows the same composition as the earlier treatment 231

part two: image, stage and beyond; instances and movement

by Nathaniel Dance, and Romeo and Juliet is a crowded yet conventional treatment along a classical frieze. His Boydell The Winter’s Tale Act II Scene III moves towards greater dramatic intensity in Leontes’ thrusting his sword towards Antigonus while gesturing at the infant Mamillius, yet despite this and the extreme chiaroscuro it retains the classical frieze, and the same combination is true of his 1 Henry VI, showing the confrontation between the Countess of Auvergne and Lord Talbot (2.3). The Boydell painting of Mother Jourdain, complete with dead baby and devil raised by magic, is a venture into Gothic horror, less successful than Fuseli’s detailed mastery of the form, again because of a composition that diffuses energy from the central event. My point here is that, when Opie is given scope for freer treatment, his imagination often overreaches itself in moving beyond convention. The artist’s design of the Troilus image, with its multiple resonances of Lawrence’s Coriolanus, betrays the same quality. Yet for all that, the implied literary-structural equation between the two shows a close awareness of the relation between plays and their forms then rare – a parallel, perhaps, to Turner’s relocation of Romeo and Juliet in Venice. But it is, indeed, a troubling painting.

V Much remains to be said about paintings of this period, Shakespearean and literary in general, as well as the various orders of genre painting produced and avidly devoured through engraved reproductions. The foregoing paragraphs should be seen very much as an opening attempt to chart some of its main directions. Two are, however, missing: both are manifested in paintings by Daniel Maclise, and both relate in different ways to performance. One is titled simply Twelfth Night. Elsewhere, I have chronicled its appearance as oil painting and lithograph, and its influence on early photography, and in this it demonstrates not just the growing popularity of some theatrical images but the rapid development of new forms.37 It may or may not reflect performance, but certainly resembles strongly the actors Walter Lacy, Caroline Heath and Ellen Chapman in key roles; but since they are shown in a photograph dating from 1850, it may exemplify the not uncommon practice of basing a photograph on an already existing painting, and in this demonstrates the expanding commercial arenas in which images would take part in the succeeding years. The other, The Play Scene in Hamlet (1842),38 is remarkable in taking a firmer approach to visualising a text as dramatic currency through details of iconographic reference. It combines this with some reference to performance, in showing the 232

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‘Kean crawl’ of Hamlet towards Claudius, and to some degree resembling Macready’s staging of the play. It achieved wide popularity, with two copies being commissioned as well as an engraving by Charles Rolls, published both in the Art Journal and in Knight’s ‘Imperial’ edition. Similar in some measure to the other images discussed here, the two paintings are also important in prefiguring later forms and techniques. Hamlet is unusual in combining stage allusion with a system of visual codes to the play, held together by detailed compositional direction for the reader. In the former it follows something of the practice of the first half-century: in the latter, it anticipates the approach of a later period, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Twelfth Night shares the concern with production, but is related to the new discipline of photography, something of mounting importance in the later decades both as performance record and as a rival to painting that was often subsumed as a method of preparatory design or, perceived as a rival in naturalism, an impetus for increased detail in depiction. These forces will be absorbed into the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, aiding in their determining the course of Shakespeare painting, and that of many other genres, for several decades. That the original members of the group, and many of their followers now loosely assimilated into its title, are known well beyond the British Isles as a specifically English school, has a special kind of irony. Whereas Boydell set out to create such a national identity, but failed because of the range of style and quality in the Gallery’s works, the first members of the Brotherhood, driven by a zeal as much moral as aesthetic or commercial, achieved a far more lasting international recognition of a very particular kind of English art.

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CHAPTER 11

CONCLUSIONS AND DEPARTURES

Although the preceding chapters have focused on individual plays as a means of revealing patterns and traditions of visual presentation, some larger themes have emerged that deserve further consideration. Individual figures have established themselves as decisive and determinant in ways perhaps unexpected or long overlooked. What might be termed the compositional iconography of François Boitard – his use of formal devices to present narrative and power relations – reveals itself repeatedly as a power of interpretation rare in its operation, but influential at times on the content of later designs and, more importantly, in establishing the medium of the frontispiece as a serious conceptual response to each play. That this rests heavily on a European tradition of religious meditative imagery is ironic in itself; the view of Shakespeare as innately English, developing a little later in the century, dilutes this approach, but remains in the relative dominance of French and Italian engraver-designers until native figures emerge in the 1770s and beyond. Francis Hayman crucially bonds stage painting and experience in the operations of stage blocking with Italianate rococo setting, both focused by his close relationship with Garrick, as surviving letters reveal – the latter in themselves important documents of synaesthetics and operational ekphrasis. The continental European presence parallels the links between Shakespeare’s comedies and varieties from Italy, something too long overshadowed by intimations of bardolatry. Later, the apparent continuity of through-illustrated editions is revealed as highly variable, at times offering consistency of character and circumstance while at others producing diversity that acts variously to emphasise generic variation or to add distance, in all working more as an anthology than a single view. What emerges also is the great range of styles, the febrile disturbance of 234

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Kenny Meadows opposed to the naturalistic restraint of John Gilbert, the more populist sentiment of Selous and the too long overlooked insight and range of The Leopold Shakespeare’s anonymous illustrator. A larger and insistent concern is the variable, often fragile and frequently impenetrable relationships between visual forms of all kinds and the circumstances that surround them. In King Lear the structural configuration following Boitard to present Lear in the storm as the focal point arguably rests on a performance practice, dating from before what might be termed the recovery – or to most present-day scholars the invention – of a notional Shakespearean text. In The Comedy of Errors there is no such continuity, in part the result of the play’s limited performance history; and yet the play’s vicissitudes of style and genre are perhaps no less than those perceived and often rejected by eighteenth-century audiences of Lear. In the latter, the result is a focus on a recurrent primary reading; in the former, the play’s fusions of genre and confusions of action are a constant presence in its visual history – a history that in itself argues for the play’s extreme richness, something confirmed in recent approaches in both production and criticism. Relations to performance are matched by those to the prevailing stylistic and technical forms of each period and each individual artist. The extreme chiaroscuro of Zoffany’s Macbeth painting would surely have been constructed at least in part with the foreknowledge that it would be reproduced in mezzotint. At the time of its execution the art of mezzotint was at its height in England, with Boydell its main publisher and Valentine Green one of its finest practitioners: the technical disciplines thus creatively impinge on the image’s reading of the play through the sweeping darknesses that threaten the passages of brilliant light, both far exceeding possible effects on stage. Together, the two present a visual counterpoint to the relationship between the characters at its centre: Lady Macbeth’s controlling force balanced against Macbeth’s indecisiveness. The very existence of this relationship implies another: the commercial interests within and around all visual treatments, whether for individual paintings, individual reproductive prints or images for illustrated editions. Boydell’s commercial acumen has long been recognised, his description as ‘the commercial Maecenas’ showing the admiration with which he was regarded as holding in balance his accomplishments in aesthetic and mercantile worlds. Yet, up to a point, Lord Copper:1 the handling of the Shakespeare Gallery, with its massive outlay for both canvases and engravings, seems even before the collapse of international trade to have been a venture too far. What would today be termed venture capitalism might well be compared to contemporary exploits of 235

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imperialist privateers. The signature of Warren Hastings, founder of the East India Company, on the Boydell subscription list2 stands in relief as a forceful emblem when thus regarded. Domestic politics are another force that emerges as potent in the relations between stage, image and assimilation of the plays. The price riots of 1763 have much to do with the social divisions separating the two audiences that fundamentally divided the plays’ performances, not simply in Garrick’s retention of Tate’s ending for Lear but in revealing larger events in production history. The adaptations of Coriolanus that continued from the seventeenth century well into the eighteenth suggest a nervousness about its political divisiveness; the shift in The Merchant of Venice from the play’s complicated thematic trajectories towards what in many cases approach mobile souvenirs de voyage offers an acceptance of changing financial circumstances, both actual and aspirational, in the growing mercantilist class. Both are reflected on stage and in library; and the treatment of Shylock is matched by that of Othello, both character and play, raising questions about ethnicity and its social treatment posed, and inevitably not answered, in Chapter 8. Alongside these relations are broader movements. The deep political understanding, configured within acute visual and literary knowledge, of James Gillray is deservedly the best known force in the tradition of caricature after Hogarth, but there are others. Marks’ treatment of Coriolanus is surely only one such demonstration of sharp, and dangerous, political intervention in a small periodical of wide-ranging interests. The broader exploration of such imagery from standpoints aesthetic and literary as well as socio-political is sorely missing in this book and in present-day scholarship in general. Alan Young’s study of Shakespeare in Punch goes a long way towards filling this gap;3 there is a great need for work on the earlier period, a task in which the growing study of printed ephemera and the consequent expansion of its availability online should do much to remedy. Popular reviews such as The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News are important, more precisely uniting stage and image by their reproductive engravings; these are balanced in another form and an earlier period by The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Spectator and other writings of critical and conceptual discussion. Visual treatments of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries are another field of importance that as yet has received little or no attention: the work of theatre historians is important here, with the work of Jim Davis4 an important recent example, but overall the links with Shakespearean illustrations have still to be explored. 236

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Critical and evaluative discussion of forms, techniques and concepts of visualised Shakespeare has in itself a long tradition, revealing in turn the approaches and concerns of its times. The earliest writings were articles in The Connoisseur, largely concerned with portraits of Shakespeare, in Country Life and even, in a series discussing the Boydell Gallery, The Queen.5 The first extended treatment, by M. C. Salaman, appeared in 1916 as a special number of The Studio,6 a magazine concerned as much with current practice as historical discussion. Though largely descriptive, it made available many important works, and some often overlooked, marking the subject’s embrace by the larger world of art history. Individual articles focusing on specific artists became more frequent in the 1930s, one of the most important being Montague Summers’ discussion of the early illustrated editions.7 Their nature and function as an archaeological survey was much extended by T. S. R. Boas’ article on the first two centuries of imaging.8 All treat the images by combining truth to play and some degree of aesthetic description, mingled in some cases with statements of personal response of emotion or judgement of value; the move towards critical treatment of greater interdisciplinarity came a few decades later. Moelwyn Merchant’s Shakespeare and the Artist (1958) is still remarkable in combining literary scholarship with a profound knowledge of art and theatre history, balancing visual analysis with then-current ideas of the plays’ final destination as the stage. Most important, it signalled the acceptance of what the book called ‘visual criticism’ into the broader current of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. A slightly later publication reveals the vigour of contemporary activity in America, detailing the opportunities available for further study in the subject at a time of fine scholarly enquiry.9 My own early work in the area10 sought to present painting and illustration as some kind of critical approach to the plays, too often at the expense of discussions of staging. Many other articles have explored the work of individual artists or contributed to a widening of the scope of art history in later decades by discussing political and social relationships.11 Most recently, Richard Meek has sought to explore the verbal-visual relationship in more theoretical terms, mirroring the concern of more recent scholarship. There are also many studies of individual texts, Alan Young chronicling the visual history of Hamlet12 and others approaching individual character, most notably Ophelia,13 a reflection of concerns with gender as well as part of the developing school of characterology. This brief, incomplete but representative survey makes clear the shifts of focus and direction that both accompany and drive work in this area, a lively parallel to the changes in visual and production styles over the periods the books and articles discuss. 237

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All the above paragraphs reveal another difficulty about writing of this kind: the problem of finding a way through the wandering wood of relationships of all kinds to approach some kind of conceptual grasp on how the process of imaging Shakespeare has functioned in the two centuries of its partial dominance in the plays’ construction and assimilation. The present book’s approach has resembled most closely that of Clifford Geert’s ‘thick description’, in exploring images with a lens including not only verbal text, visual style, iconographic allusion and production technique but commercial, social and political frames, along with contemporary and suggestive or misleading responses to images and editions of all kinds. There are deficiencies in this, not simply for its selectivity but for what may well be the misleading conclusions that it reaches. Yet even in the latter there is a value, since it parallels the variety of responses drawn out by any production, any image, any reading experience. Perhaps its greatest worth is that it continues the process of informed argument and debate, paralleling that which took place in Boydell’s saleroom or, before the long lost paintings of Francis Hayman, in the supper boxes of Vauxhall Gardens.

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NOTES

Unless otherwise specified, the medium of paintings is oil on canvas; size measurements give height first and then width, in centimetres and then inches. Sizes for prints are for image itself, not sheet size.

CHAPTER 1 1. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 33 (8 11⁄16 × 13), published 25 December 1791. 2. Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1966), 487. 3. 65 × 91.5 (25 ⅗ × 36 ⅛) Kunsthaus Zürich; 75 × 90.2 (29 ½ × 35 ½), Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon; 35 × 44.5 (13 ⅘ × 17 ½), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. 4. Very Slippy Weather, etching and engraving, 26 × 20.2 (10 ¼ × 8), published 10 February 1808. 5. London und Paris, translated and edited by Christine Banerji and Diana Donald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22. 6. For a discussion of this see Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1967), 57. 7. Quoted from a speech made in 1733 by Theophilus Cibber in Cibber’s Two Dissertations on the Theatres. With an Appendix, in Three Parts. The Whole Containing a General View of the Stage. . . (London: Mr. Griffiths (the publisher) in Pater-noster Row [1757?]). 8. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 107. 9. ‘Shakespeare’s Popularity in the Theatre, 1751–1800 [and 1701–1800]’, Shakespeare in the Theatre 1701–1800, edited by Charles Beecher Hogan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), Appendix B, II. 715. 10. Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, English Literary History, 64.1 (1997), 41–75; 15. 11. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. (London: Jacob Tonson,

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

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1709); The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Nine Volumes, with his Life, by N. Rowe Esq. Adorn’d with Cuts (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, as they are Now Performed at the Theatres Royal in London, Regulated from the Prompt Books in Each House. With Notes Critical and Illustrative by the Authors of the ‘Dramatic Censor’. 5 vols. with 4-volume ‘continuance’ (London: Printed for John Bell, and C. Etherington at York, 1774–5). The publication history of the edition is complex and its dates uncertain: those dated 1774 may have been issued in 1773: for simplicity I have used 1774 in all references. For a full discussion, see Kalman A. Burnim and Philip Highfill Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: a Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in his Editions by Bell: Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 10–13. These figures, and those given later for the Bell editions, are taken from William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 703–4. Stanley Morison, John Bell, 1745–1831 (Cambridge: Printed for the author at the University Press, 1930), 6. Morison does not cite a source for Bell’s claim, nor does he assess its validity. John J. Lowndes, An Historical Sketch of the Law of Copyright (London: Saunders and Benning,1840), quoted in St Clair, Reading Nation, 705. St Clair gives the lower figure from an advertisement ‘while the series was still not all published, in a copy of Bell’s British Theatre’. The figures are compiled from the subscription list in the first volume of Bell’s initial printing. Burnim and Highfill, John Bell, 14. Knight gives these figures in The Bookseller, 1 July 1868, 41. For further discussions of this claim, see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 83. All from St Clair, Reading Nation, 704–5. The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (Carbonale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), 14–16; quotation (p. 16) from A Treatise on the Passions (London: C. Corbet etc., n.d. [1747]), Sig A2. The figures are given in detail in H. V. Bowen, War and British Society 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11–19. A prominent example is the relation between events in the Crimean War and Charles Kean’s production of Henry V. See my discussion in Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 145–50. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Still the best account of the latter, valuable in its quotations from contemporary writings of all kinds, is The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson (London: Gollancz, 1963).

notes to pages 9–14 25. Shakespeare Sacrificed; or, the offering to AVARICE. Hand-coloured etching and aquatint, with ink and paint, published 20 June 1789. Harry Beard Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The fine range of technique used in the image may be further indication of Gillray’s desire to show himself as an artist skilled beyond the limits of caricature. 26. Important information of this kind, especially the number of those involved in production, is contained in most title pages. For this reason, where practicable the notes give full attributions rather than the more limited ones suggested by style sheets. 27. The fullest discussion of the Gallery and its paintings is Rosie Dias, Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013). 28. The Indicator, I.10 (No II, 20 October 1819); ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ll.337–8, John Keats: The Complete Poems, edited by John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 29. The original subscription list, bearing the signatures of the subscribers, is held at Boston Public Library, Rare Books Collection. Some of the names are given in my discussion of the Gallery in Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 257–8. 30. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709); The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Nine Volumes, with his Life, by N. Rowe Esq. Adorn’d with Cuts (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). 31. The Works of Shakespeare: in Eight Volumes . . . With Notes, Explanatory, and Critical: by Mr. Theobald. The Second Edition. 12 vols. (London: H. Lintott, C. Hitch, J. and R. Tonson, C. Corbet, R. and B. Wellington, J. Brindley, and E. New, 1740). 32. The Works of Shakespear. In Six Volumes. Carefully Rev. and cor. by the Former Editions, and Adorned with Sculptures Designed and Executed by the Best Hands. 6 vols. (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre for the University Press, 1744). 33. Bell’s Edition: Dramatic Writings of Will Shakespeare, with the Notes of all the Various Commentators; Printed Complete from the Best Editions of Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens. 20 vols. [1785–88] (London: Printed for, and under the direction of, John Bell, 1788). 34. The Plays of William Shakespeare, Complete in Eight Volumes (London: Bellamy and Robarts, 1788–91). 35. The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight. 56 parts (London: Charles Knight and Co, 56 monthly parts, 1838–43). Issued as 7 volumes, with an additional supplementary volume containing the life of Shakespeare. Subsequent versions included The National Edition. 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1858); The Works of Shakspere Revised from the Best Authorities with a Memoir, and Essay on his Genius, by Barry Cornwall: and, Annotations and Introductory Remarks on the Plays, by Distinguished Writers: Illustrated with Engravings on Wood, from Designs by Kenny Meadows (London: R. Tyas, 1838–43).

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notes to pages 14–25 36. The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited by Howard Staunton; the illustrations by John Gilbert; engraved by the Brothers Dalziel (London: G. Routledge & Co, 1856–60); Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, authors of ‘Shakespeare Characters’, ‘Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’, ‘Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines’, &c. 3 vols. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1864). 37. The Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall. 8 vols. (London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie and Son, 1888–90); The Leopold Shakespeare, the Poet’s Works, in Chronological Order, from the Text of Professor Delius, with ‘Edward III’ and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and an Introduction by F. J. Furnivall (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1770). 38. For fuller treatment, see my earlier The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For the publishing history of the works in general see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 39. London: Printed by C. H. Reynell for R. Hunter, 1817. 40. See Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare in Hazlitt’s Theatre Criticism’, Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 43–55. For the larger movement, see Brian Vickers, ‘The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–1800’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 11–21 and John Bligh, ‘Shakespeare Character Study to 1800’, Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 141–53. 41. Charles Le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, translated by John Williams (London: J. Huggonson, 1734). The Augustan Reprint Society. Publication Numbers 200–201 (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980). 42. Aphorisms on Man: Translated from the Original Manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, Citizen of Zuric [sic] (London: Berry and Rogers, Hanover-Square, 1790); and Essays on Physiognomy: Calculated to Extend the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, written by John Caspar Lavater . . .; Translated from the Last Paris Edition by C. Moore, Illustrated by Several Hundred Engravings Accurately Copied from the Originals (London: Sold by H. D. Symonds, 1797). The illustrations are by Henry Fuseli.

CHAPTER 2 1. Letter 47, The Letters of David Garrick, edited by David M. Little, George M. Kahrl and Phoebe deK. Wilson. 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1963), I. 81–4; 82–3. The letter is discussed solely as a performance record by Kalman A. Burnim in ‘The Significance of Garrick’s Letters to Hayman’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9.2 (Spring 1958), 149–52: 151–2 and W. Moelwyn Merchant, ‘Francis Hayman’s Illustrations to Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9.2 (Spring 1958), 141–7; 147. 2. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. See Shakespeare in Print and Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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notes to pages 27–49 4. Line references to the plays throughout are to the most recent editions of The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Where quotations are made from earlier editions discussed in the text, the line numbers refer to the equivalent passages in the New Cambridge edition. 5. London: Phaidon, 1960, with multiple subsequent editions. 6. For a fuller discussion of these terms and their implications, see The Illustrated Shakespeare, 22–3. 7. The best introductory study of the workings of such forms is The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England, 1550–1660 by Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979). 8. The best known example is that designed in 1777 by Giovanni Battista Cipriani for Covent Garden. See Theatre Notebook 14.1 (1959), plate 1. 9. It may also be argued that this is very much a reading imposed by a present-day reader anxious for over-interpretation – although, unsurprisingly, this is not a position I share. 10. The full range of his activities is described by Valerie Gray in Charles Knight: Educator; Publisher, Writer (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Knight’s own account of his activities, which should perhaps be approached with caution, is given in his autobiography, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences. 2 vols. (London; Bradbury & Evans, 1864). 11. The title page of the first number reads as follows, revealing the extent of its production and distribution: The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Charles Knight and Co, 22 Ludgate St; New York: William Jackson, 102 Broadway; Boston: J. H. Francis; Philadelphia: Orrin Rogers; Baltimore: W. N. Harrison; Washington DC: James Burchenal). 12. London, edited by Charles Knight. 6 vols. (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1841–4). 13. ‘Advertisement’ to Comedies, Volume 1. 14. This appeared in Volume 7: Doubtful Plays. It also included Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen and other plays at one time suggested as part of the canon – remarkable when most scholarly editions rejected them. 15. The Library Shakespeare Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank and R. Dudley. 3 vols. (London: William Mackenzie, 1873–5).

CHAPTER 3 1. Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2. The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). 3. Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). 4. ‘Pictorial Shakespeare: Text, Stage, Illustration’, Book Illustrated, edited by Catherine J. Golden (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 31–59.

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notes to pages 49–70 5. ‘Performing Shakespeare in Print: Narrative in Nineteenth-century Illustrated Shakespeares’, Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance, edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 47–72. 6. The Illustrated Shakespeare, 111–47. 7. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). 8. ‘Reading as Construction’, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, edited by Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 67–82. 9. The full title of Johnson’s edition is The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, to which are Added Notes by Sam. Johnson. 10. William Shakespeare’s Richard III: A Screenplay Written by Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, Annotated and Introduced by Ian McKellen (London: Doubleday, 1996). 11. The Truth in Painting, translated by G. Bennington and M. Macleod (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987), 156. 12. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013). 13. Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth-Century Editions (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991), 137. 14. The text appeared in Volume I of the edition, which followed the conjectural order of the plays in including Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet and 1 Henry VI. For a summary of the adverse critical reception of Irving’s production, in which he played Romeo and Ellen Terry Juliet, see Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 164–5. 15. 70 × 91 (27 ½ × 35 ⅞), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. 16. Charles Eyre Pascoe, ed., Dramatic Notes: A Chronicle of the London Stage, 1879–1882 (London: David Bogue, 1883), entry for 13 March 1883.

CHAPTER 4 1. 102 × 127.5 (40 ⅛ × 50 ⅛), Garrick Club, London; another version, Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery, Vadodara, India, 101.6 × 127 (40 × 50). 2. I am grateful to Zoe Richards, Assistant Curator and Librarian, Garrick Club Collection, for this information in private correspondence. 3. Mezzotint on paper, 45.4 × 55.3 (17 ⅞ × 21 ¾), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 4. Mary Webster, Johann Zoffany (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 648. See also the list of Zoffany’s prints by medium, 649–52. 5. For a full discussion of the painting see Webster, Zoffany, 204–6. 6. Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, as Described in his Letters and Diaries, translated and edited by Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), 23.

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notes to pages 70–77 7. The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Sybil Rosenfeld (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 164. 8. W. Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), passim. 9. Johann Zoffany 1733–1810, edited by Mary Webster (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1976). For a discussion of Zoffany’s conversation pieces see Jim Davis, Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 14–16. 10. 118 × 127.9 (44 × 50 ¾), Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 11. See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51; 121–3. 12. Oil on board, 16.5 × 21.6 (6 ½ × 8 ½), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 13. The Garrick Stage, 29–30. 14. Macbeth meeting the Witches, 1760; oil on panel, 81.7 × 142.5 (31 9⁄16 × 56 ¼), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. 15. David Garrick and George Anne Bellamy as Romeo and Juliet, 138.75 × 184.15 (54 ⅝ × 72), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, CT. Other versions are at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Stourhead, Wiltshire. 16. R Phené Spiers, The Architecture of ‘Coriolanus’ at the Lyceum Theatre (London: The Architectural Review, 1901). 17. Translated with annotations by Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883). 18. Paris: E. Picard, 1698. A French edition was published in London by David Mortier in 1701; the most influential English edition was A Method to learn to Design the Passions, translated by John Williams (London: J. Huggonson, 1734). 19. Chirologia. Or the Natural language of the Hand, with Chironomia, or the Art of Manuall Rhetorique (London: Printed by Tho. Harper, and are to be sold by Henry Twyford, at his shop in Fleetstreet, 1644); Pathomyotamia or A Dissection of the Significative Muscles of the Affections of the Minde: Being an Essay to a New Method of Observing the most Important Movings of the Muscles of the Head, as they are the Neerest and Immediate Organs of the Voluntarie or Impetuous Motions of the Mind. With the Proposall of a New Nomenclature of the Muscles (London: Printed by W.W. for Humphrey Moseley, and are to sold [sic] at his shop at the Princes Armes in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1649). For a discussion of both, see Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 91–8. 20. The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian. Wherein the Action and Utterance of the Stage, Bar, and Pulpit, are Distinctly Consider’d . . . (London: Printed for Robert Gosling, at the Mitre, near the Inner-Temple Gate in Fleetstreet, 1710), 43. 21. Essays on Physiognomy; Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind Illustrated by More than Eight Hundred Engravings Accurately Copied; and some Duplicates Added from Originals. Executed by, or under the Inspection of Thomas Holloway. Translated from the French by Henry Hunter. 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1788–99); Aphorisms on Man: Translated from the

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notes to pages 78–83

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Original Manuscript of the Rev. John Casper Lavater: Citizen of Zuric (Philadelphia: Printed by William Spotswood, 1790). Anthony Ashley Cooper (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules, according to Prodicus, lib II Xen[ophon] de Mem[orabilia] Soc[ratis] (London: A. Baldwin, 1713). For the second edition, published in 1714, Shaftesbury commissioned a painting from Paolo de Matteis, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and its engraving by Simon Gribelin titled ‘The Judgment of Hercules’. The tradition is discussed by Erwin Panofsky in Hercules am Schweidwege und andere antike Bildstoffein der neueren Kunst (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1930). Translated as Hercule à la Croisée des Chemins by Danièle Cohn (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). Private collection, USA. For a detailed discussion see my earlier Painting Shakespeare, 1–5. Two Discourses: I. An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting. . . . II. An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur (London: Printed for W. Churchill, 1719). Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: With Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art (London: Printed for the Translator, and sold by A. Millar, 1765). See Science of a Connoisseur, 43–7. The Analysis of Beauty, edited with an introduction and notes by Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Ibid., 56. Discourses on Art, edited by Robert R. Wark (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1975). His main practice of portraiture should not be seen as undermining his theory: a practical painter much concerned with his financial and social advancement, he found no immediate difficulty with this, a quality shared with many artists of the period. Commissions for portraits were many; those for grand historical paintings, few. Johann Jacob Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie . . . (Zurich: Conrad Orell und Comp., 1740). Its ideas are explored by discussing Paradise Lost and some of Addison’s ideas, drawing together further important forces in the aesthetic climate of the mid-century in relation to concepts of the grand style. The works of Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime, or, A Treatise Concerning the Sovereign Perfection of Writing, translated by Mr. Welsted (London: Printed for Sam. Briscoe, 1712). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1757). Respectively 332.7 × 421.6 (131 × 166), Tate Britain, London, and 109.9 × 160.0 (43 ¼ × 63), Tate Britain, London. Discourse II, 31. Anecdotes of Painting in England, Advertisement to Vol IV, 1771, edited by Ralph N. Warnum. 3 vols. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1881), I. xvii, n 2. ‘“Borrowed Attitudes” in Reynolds and Hogarth’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, II (1938–9), 182–5.

notes to pages 84–111 39. ‘Reynolds on Shakespeare’, Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, edited by Frederick W. Hilles (London: Heinemann, 1952), 107–22. 40. ‘Cautions in Judging of the Paintings from Shakespeare’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, VIII,2, 3 (September 1778), 778–9; 778.

CHAPTER 5 1. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 58–64. 2. ‘What is Strange about The Comedy of Errors?’ paper delivered at the seminar of the BergenVolda Shakespeare Network Magdalen College, Cambridge, September 2017; quotation from p. 3. I am very grateful to Professor Stanivukovic for kindly sharing with me the text of the paper, and for many helpful discussions about the play. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Menaechmi, or the two Manaechmuses, translated by Paul Nixon. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1917), 371. 5. Sebastian Serly, The Second Book of Architecture, Made by Sebastian Serly (London: Printed for Robert Peake, 1611), Folio 25 verso. 6. For a fuller explication of this composition, its origins and use elsewhere in Boitard’s Rowe frontispieces, see The Illustrated Shakespeare, 38–50. 7. The location of the painting is unknown. The engraving was published on 1 June 1800. 8. The fees for painters and engravers and the prices paid at auction are conveniently tabulated in Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 220–45. 9. The criticism is made by Hildegard Hammerschmidt Hummel in ‘Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and its Role in Promoting English History Painting’, The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, edited by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick (Bottrop: Peter Pomp, 1996), 33–44; 40, who draws on earlier and more general criticisms by T. S. R. Boas in ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 10 (1947), 83–108. 10. The Plays of William Shakespeare . . . 10 vols. (London: F. C. and J. C. Rivington [and 43 others, all in London], 1805), Vol IV part 10. The Prospectus for the edition, and details of its printing and sales, are given in Prints and Engraved Illustrations by and after Henry Fuseli, edited by D. H. Weinglass (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 237–9. 11. Shakespeare, in Seven Volumes, with Two Hundred and Thirty Embellishments (Chiswick: J. Whittingham, 1813–14). 12. Illustrations of Shakespeare; Comprised in Two Hundred and Thirty Vignette Engravings, by Thompson, from Designs by Thurston: Adapted to all Editions (London: printed for Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, Paternoster Row; Leipsic: Ernest Fleischer, No. 80, Peter’s Street, 1825). 13. Menaechmi, 371.

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notes to pages 118–126

CHAPTER 6 1. ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath’ Durham University Journal, 49 (1987), 19–26; later expanded, with the same title, in Lear from Study to Stage, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 135–45. 2. c. 1690–95, 76.2 × 64.8 (30 × 25 ½), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 752. 3. 1690s, 31.9 × 23.8 (12 ½ × 9 ⅜), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D2024. 4. 1690s, 13.6 × 9.3 (5 ⅜ × 3 ⅝), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D16407. 5. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, fourth edition, 2009), 226–9; online material from Shakespeare’s Globe; Vouchers for Drury Lane, 1713–16, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC; cited in Emmett L. Avery, The London Stage: A Critical Introduction 1700–1709 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), cvi. 6. See Anthony James West, ‘The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, edited by Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 71–90. 7. The passage is reproduced, with Hanmer’s directions for all the plays, in Marcia Allentuck, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer Instructs Francis Hayman: An Editor’s Notes to his Illustrator’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 27.3 (Summer 1976), 288–315; 306–7. 8. The Letters of David Garrick, edited by David M. Little and George M. Kahrl. 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1963), Letter 33, I.52–5. Garrick’s use of the word ‘Character’ here about a stage person is a very early usage of the word with this meaning, instancing the growth of character criticism in the work of Hazlitt and others from a performer instead of a critic. 9. The Tragedy of King Lear, as Lately Published, Vindicated from the Abuse of the Critical Reviewers; and the Wonderful Genius and Abilities of those Gentleman for Criticism, Set Forth, Celebrated and Extolled, by the Editor of King Lear (London: Printed by W. Bowyer and J. Nichols; and sold by W. Owen, 1770). The full title reflects the extent of discussions about the play’s textual accuracy and the passions they aroused. 10. King Lear, a Tragedy. Altered from Shakespeare by David Garrick, Esq., Marked with the Variations in the Manager’s Book at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: C. Bathurst [and 29 other publishers, all in London], 1786). The textual changes are discussed in Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 129–33. 11. The first and fullest account of the changes is given in George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth–Century Mind’, Studies in Philology, 45.1 (January 1948), 89–103. Stone also quotes the lines restored or used to replace Tate’s originals, showing Garrick’s sensitivity to the language of the original – a point often overlooked in subsequent discussions. A more general discussion of Garrick’s changes is given in Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 120–35. 12. David Garrick Director (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 141–51.

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notes to pages 126–142 13. The procedure of half-price admission and its relation to Drury Lane’s receipts and attendance figures is given detailed examination in Harry William Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), 26–30. 14. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 57–9. 15. 41.27 × 39 (16 ¼ × 14 ⅜), British Museum, London. 16. 106 × 104 (41 ⅜ × 41), Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal Town Council. 17. 1755; 213.3 × 208.3 (84 × 82), Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. 18. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, edited by James Black (London: Edward Arnold, 1976). Black supports his claim with a citation from the critic John Dennis. 19. For a broader discussion of these images see Painting Shakespeare, 275–8. 20. See also the discussion of Henry Peronnet Briggs’ Juliet and her Nurse in Chapter 10. 21. 285.75 × 360.7 (107 × 144), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is also an oil sketch, 52 × 70 (20 ½ × 27 ½), Detroit Institute of Art. Engraved by William Sharpe, 25 March 1793, 49.5 × 62.5 (19 ½ × 24 ⅝). The painting has also been linked to classical depictions of the Laocöon; see Painting Shakespeare, 187–8. 22. The title by which it is now known is fully descriptive of the events: Edgar, feigning madness, approaches King Lear supported by Kent and the Fool on the Heath, 1772; pencil, ink, wash and white chalk on laid paper, 62.5 × 96 (24 ⅗ × 37 ¾), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. 23. For a more detailed discussion of this see Painting Shakespeare, 98–102. 24. That the image is painted on the reverse of another watercolour, The Prophet Balaam Blessing the People of Israel, may or may not add a further level of allusive force. 25. Line engraving, 18 × 27 (7 × 10 ⅝); published in Recollections of the Scenic Effects of Covent Garden Theatre during the Season 1838–9 (London: James Pattie, 1839), plate 3. 26. Monthly Mirror, XIII (February 1802), 123. 27. David Garrick Director, 150.

CHAPTER 7 1. Shakspeare’s Historical Plays Roman and English. 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1888). 2. Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 277. 3. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Routledge, 1995). 4. Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare Gent (London: Thomas Cotes, 1640), quoted by John Ripley in Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 15, to whose work on all the Roman plays I am indebted. 5. Shakespeare on the Stage, Second Series, 543. 6. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Written by Himself; with Twenty-Six Original Mezzotint Portraits by R.B. Parkes and Eighteen Etchings by Adolphe Lalauze, edited by Robert Lowe. 2 vols. (London: J.C. Nimmo, 1889), I. 103–4.

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notes to pages 142–169 7. On the performance, see Ann Marie Koller, The Theatre Duke: Georg III of Saxe-Coburg Meiningen and the German Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 147–58; on the production history of the play, see John Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1998), passim. 8. The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines: A Series of Studies in Goupilgravure from Paintings by L. Alma Tadema, Sir Frederic Leighton etc. with Stories of the Plays by William Ernest Henley (London: Sampson Low, 1888). 9. 1883; oil on wood panel, 63.5 × 91.4 (25 × 36), private collection. 10. The Works of Shakespeare with Notes by Charles Knight (London: Virtue and Co, n.d.). [1873– 6?]. 11. 183 × 129.5 (72 × 51), private collection. 12. 106.5 × 132.5 (42 × 52 ⅛), Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Liverpool. 13. Thackeray discusses some of Etty’s later work much in this vein, praising the execution but regretting the fulsome nudity. See ‘Second Lecture on the Fine Arts’, Fraser’s Magazine, June 1839. 14. Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 178–89. 15. Famous Roman Women. Plate 3: Veturia and Volumnia begging Coriolanus; 218 × 291 (8 ⅗ × 11 ½), British Museum, Ii,5.172. 16. ‘Coriolanus’s Stage Imagery on Stage’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38.3 (Autumn 1987), 338– 50; 346, and Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 91–2. 17. Etching on paper pasted on card, 22.9 × 26.3 (9 × 10 ⅜), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 18. Mr Quin in the Character of Coriolanus. Hand-coloured etching by unidentified artist, published by Carington Bowles, after 1849, 25 × 24.6 (9 ⅞ × 9 11⁄16), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 19. Image size 17.9 × 27.5 (6 ⅞ × 10 ⅞). See also its placement in A Collection of Prints from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. 2 vols. (London: John and Josiah Boydell, 1803), II, title page. 20. The Leopold Shakespeare, the Poet’s Works, in Chronological Order (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1877). 21. A Scene in Coriolanus – with a Portrait of the late J. P. Kemble as Coriolanus, 1790s, 110.5 × 88.9 (43 ½ × 35), Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Engraving by Richard Earlom, 51 × 64 (20 1⁄16 × 25 ⅛), published by R. B. Evans, 1 October 1798. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 22. 287 × 179 (152 × 70), Corporation of London, Guildhall Gallery; copy by Lawrence, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; copy by Washington Allston, Players Club, New York. See Kalman Burnim, ‘John Philip Kemble and the Artists’, The Stage in the Eighteenth Century, edited by J. D. Browning (New York and London: Garland), 160–200. 23. The Stature of a Great Man or the English Colossus. Etching and engraving on paper, 32.5 × 19.9 (12 ¾ × 7 ⅞), British Museum, London.

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notes to pages 169–177 24. The Young Roscius . . . The Theatrical Caesar! Or Cassius and Casca in Debate. Hand-coloured engraving on paper, 37 × 28 (14 ½ × 11), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 25. Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians, 1820. Hand-coloured engraving, 15.25 × 24.1 (6 × 9 ½), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. 26. 8.9 × 14 (3 ½ × 5 ½) on sheet 23.2 × 18.7 (9 ⅛ × 7 ⅜), Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

CHAPTER 8 1. Thomas Rymer, ‘A Short View of Tragedy’ (1693), The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, edited by Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1956), 134. 2. The Masks of Othello: The Search for Identity of Othello, Iago and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 1971). 3. Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 4. ‘The two texts of Othello and early modern constructions of race’, Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, edited by Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21–36; 29, 33–4. 5. Introduction to Othello by Christina Luckyj. The New Cambridge Shakespeare, edited by Norman Sanders. Revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16. I am indebted to Dr Luckyj and the Press for sight of the introduction at proof stage, and for the valuable material it contains. 6. Luckyj notes this assertion in Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 115–16. See also Vanessa Corredera, ‘ “Not a Moor exactly”: Shakespeare, Serial and Modern Constructions of Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67.1 (2016), 30–50. 7. Letter of 20 January 1601, Elizabeth: Collected Works, edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 400–1. 8. William Van Lennep, The London Stage, Volume 2: 1700–29, edited by Emmett L. Avery, 178. 9. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). See also Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800–1900, edited by Jan Marsh (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2005) and The Oxford Companion to Black British History, edited by David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. 2008). 10. See Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: One World, 2017), and her short summary, ‘The Air of Freedom’, History Today, 68.1 (January 2018), 18–20. 11. Unidentified artist, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, The Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth, 1600–1601; oil on oak panel, 114.5 × 79 (44 ½ × 34 ½), University of Birmingham Collection.

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notes to pages 177–188 12. Performances listed in The London Stage, 1660–1800, edited by William Van Lennep, Volume 12: Index, compiled by Ben Ross Schneider and others, 800–801. 13. The London Stage, Volume 2: 1700–29, 178. 14. See Richmond Bond, Queen Anne’s American Kings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 4. 15. That Hogarth painted several versions of The Beggar’s Opera, each commissioned to show different wealthy patrons on the stage, is the most immediate visual evidence of this. 16. I have discussed this image at greater length in The Illustrated Shakespeare, 83–5. 17. Othello, the Moor of Venice. A Tragedy by William Shakespeare (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1773). 18. See Allentuck, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer Instructs Francis Hayman’, 291–2. 19. Ibid., 300. 20. ‘Constantinople, To –’, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 209. 21. To the Countess of Bristol, 1 April 1717 (O.S.). Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1709 to 1762 (London: Dent, 1906), 112. 22. Munich, c. 1861–1880. 23. See Painting Shakespeare, 67–70. 24. The London Chronicle; or, Universal Evening Post, Saturday 24 – Tuesday 27 July 1762. See John Mullan and Christopher Reid, eds. Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 271–301, on which this section heavily relies. 25. 24–27 July 1762. Quoted in Mullan and Reid, 279. 26. The Public Advertiser, Friday 23 July 1762, quoted in Mullan and Reid, 279–80. 27. Pen and grey wash on paper, 13.2 × 7.6 (5 ⅛ × 3), bound in the extra-illustrated Turner Shakespeare, Henry Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA. The image is reproduced in Robert R. Wark, Drawings from the Turner Shakespeare (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1973), 45–6. 28. Letter to the Countess of Bristol, Letters, p. 61. 29. ‘Ornament and Use: Mai and Cook in London’, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 317–44; 324–5. The quotation from the Westminster Magazine appears in the same essay, on p. 324. 30. Omai, a native of Ulaietea. Oil on canvas, 236 × 144.8 (93 × 57), National Portrait Gallery, London; mezzotint by Johann Jacobé, 1780, 62.0 × 38.4 (24 ⅜ × 15 ⅛). 31. Engraving, 40.6 × 25.2 (16 × 9 9⁄10). The publication details on the image run ‘Sold by E: SUMPTER . . . and all the Print and Book-sellers in London and Westminster’, further indication of the importance of the riots and, by implication, the importance of halfprice admission. For further discussion of the riot in relation to Garrick, see the Victoria and Albert Museum collection website, item number 1868,0808.4276. 32. For further discussion see Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-century England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University

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notes to pages 188–203

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

Press, 1993), 154; and David Solkin, ‘Great Pictures of Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 9.2 (1986). 239 × 147.5 (94 × 58), National Maritime Museum, London. Discussed with relation to its social and historical significance in Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 212–22. ‘The Theatre LXXI’, Town and Country Magazine, February 1776. Quoted at length in Pedicord, Theatrical Public, 56. The Slave Trade. Colour mezzotint by John Raphael Smith, published 1 February 1791, 47.6 × 64.8 (18 ¾ × 25 ½), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, CT. Hand-coloured engraving by W. Sheldricks after a design by E. F. Lambert, early nineteenth century, Gabrielle Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Shakespeare on the Stage: First Series (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1911), 250. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 62.2 (29 × 24 ½), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African: in Two Volumes; to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, edited by Joseph Jekyll (London: J. Nichols, 1782), 1.4. ‘“The extraordinary Negro”’: Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26.4 (2003), 1–14; 4. Harry R. Beard collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The suggestion of Kemble comes from the print’s description on the V&A website for catalogue number S.292–2012. 6.0 × 21.5 (23 ⅗ × 8 ½), hand-coloured etching, published 1 February 1802.

CHAPTER 9 1. ‘Imagining Shylock’, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 144–62; and Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). 2. I have discussed this compositional device, with particular reference to Richard II, in Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 149–54. 3. It had, after all, run for 130 performances in London before Shakespeare’s play was revived. 4. ‘Imagining Shylock’, 145–6. 5. The Grand Tour, or, A Journey Through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France. By Mr. Nugent. The Second Edition, Corrected and Considerably Improved. To Which is Now Added, The European Itinerary (London: Printed for D. Browne . . . et al., 1756); Travels Through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain . . . (London: Printed for A. Linde, Bookseller to her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1756). 6. Master Humphrey’s Clock by Charles Dickens (Boz); to which are added Papers by Mr. Yellowplush (Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co., 1841). The essay’s appearance in France, in the same volume as a work by Dickens, is in itself an intriguing indication of the gradual increase

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notes to pages 205–211

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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in the accessibility of the continent to readers who would now be described as coming from the middle class. Oil on canvas, 89 × 120.6 (35 × 47 ½), collection of Mrs Flora Whitney Miller, New York. St. Mark’s Place, Venice: Juliet and her Nurse. 42.3 × 56.4 (16 ½ × 22 ¼), Tate Britain, London. Oakley St, London SW3 is part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, linking the King’s Road to the Albert Bridge across the River Thames. A row of stately town houses, still standing, was built in the 1850s, but in the 1830s it was a far less fashionable area, as its linking with Lambeth in the passage suggests. Now known as The Grand Canal, Venice, oil on Canvas, 150.5 × 112.4 (59 ¼ × 44 ¼), Huntingdon Art Gallery, San Marino, CA. See Andrew Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his Work of 1804–1812; with Transcriptions by Rosalind Mallord Turner (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). See the catalogue raisoneé of Turner’s works by Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, which also give further excerpts from contemporary reviews of both paintings: The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner. 2 vols. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1977), II. 195–6, 198–9. The direction prefaces 2.2, 2.4, 2.8, 3.1, 3.3 and 4.2 in his edition. See Linda McJannet, ‘ “The Scene Changes”? Stage Directions in Eighteenth-Century Acting Editions of Shakespeare’, Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joanna Gondris (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 86–99; 90–91. Untraced; engraved by John Browne, published 1 December 1795, 49.5 × 63 (19 ½ × 24 ⅘). A copy of the painting made in watercolour by W. Jeayes is in an extraillustrated copy of the 1807 Stockdale edition of the plays in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, call no PR 2752 1802 Copy 2 v3Sh Col; it is reproduced in colour in Painting Shakespeare, Plate 15. c. 1750; 69.8 × 119.4 (27 ½ × 47), National Gallery, London. Quoted in The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. Including a Summary of the English Stage for the Last Fifty Years, and a Detailed Account of the Management of the Princess’s Theatre from 1850–1859 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 263. The Stones of Venice . . . With Illustrations Drawn by the Author. 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851–53). 7 August 1858. The London Theatre 1811–1866. Selections for the Diary of Henry Crabbe Robinson, edited by Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966). Diary entry for 17 August 1858, p. 206. Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883). Originally published in April 1875; quotations from p. 282. Monday 14 June 1858. Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft On and Off the Stage. Written by Themselves, sixth edition (London: Richard Bentley, 1889), 211.

notes to pages 212–224 24. London: Chapman and Hall. The edition discussed here was published by Routledge in 1876, in their cheaper ‘Excelsior Series’, in which it presumably achieved wider currency. 25. ‘Imagining Shylock’, 161–2. 26. The Shakespeare Gallery, Containing the Principal Female Characters in the Plays of the Great Poet. Engraved, in the Most Highly-finished Manner, from Drawings by the First Artists, Under the Direction and Superintendence of Mr. Charles Heath (London: Charles Tilt, 1837). 27. The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines: A Series of Studies in Goupilgravure from Paintings by L. Alma Tadema, Sir Frederic Leighton etc. with Stories of the Plays by William Ernest Henley (London: Sampson Low, 1888). 28. This gained official recognition when made one of the passages introduced as part of the Standard VII examinations of the 1882 Education Act. Presumably this brought back rather less delightful memories for many young women than a sightseeing trip to Venice. 29. Although some have argued the converse. See Shaul Bassi and Alberto Toso Fei, Shakespeare in Venice. Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello (Treviso: Elzeviro, 2007).

CHAPTER 10 1. 167.7 × 134.3 (66 × 52 ½), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. 2. For Woodmason, see Robin Hamlyn, ‘An Irish Shakespeare Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, CXX (1978), 151–29; for the others see T. S. R. Boas, ‘Macklin and Bowyer’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXVI (1963), 148–77. 3. See the figures in Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 220–45. 4. 50.1 × 71 (19 ¾ × 28), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. 5. A Philosopher Giving that Lecture upon the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, 147.3 × 203.2 (58 × 80), Derby Art Gallery; and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 182.9 × 243.9 (72 × 96), National Gallery, London. 6. 68 × 107 (27 × 42), Science Museum, London. 7. 1537 × 1929 (605 × 759 ½), National Gallery, London. 8. C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable Composed Chiefly of his Letters, [1843], edited by Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, rev. ed. 1980), 267–8. 9. 1826, 143 × 12 (56 ¼ × 48), National Gallery, London. 10. 90.17 × 114.3 (35 ½ × 45), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. I have discussed this in a different context in Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians, 62. 11. ‘Strictures on Pictures’, Fraser’s Magazine, June 1838, reviewing that year’s R. A. exhibition. Reprinted in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray in Twenty Six Volumes, 25: Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews (London: Smith, Elder, 1879), 25, 101–112; 103. 12. For a full study of this see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). 13. 93.3 × 133.2 (36 ¾ × 52 ½), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Another version of the painting, now unlocated, was shown at the R. A. in 1831. 14. ‘Strictures on Pictures’, 105.

255

notes to pages 224–235 15. Oil on paper, 267 × 930 (105 × 366), Tate Britain, London. 16. 35.3 × 94.2 (18 9⁄10 × 37), British Museum, London; other copies elsewhere. 17. The Return of Othello. 165.15 × 210.9 (65 × 83), Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratfordupon-Avon. Another version, oil on paper on canvas, 20.95 × 26.05 (8 ¼ × 10 ¼), Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. 18. 100.3 × 127 (39 ½ × 50), Tate Britain, London. 19. 151 × 213 (59 × 84), National Gallery of Art, Ontario. 20. Private collection, engraved by Robert Thew, published 4 June 1801. Reproduced in Pape and Burwick, The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 278. 21. Respectively private collection, London; and 144.2 × 187.4 (56 ¾ × 73 ¾), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 22. King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia, 302.6 × 405 (119 × 159 ½), Tate Britain, London. 23. 24.7 × 29.3 (9 ¾ × 11 ½), Tate Britain, London. 24. 58.3 × 50.7 (23 × 20), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 25. Respectively The Trial of Queen Katharine, 1817, RSC Collection, Stratford-upon-Avon; and The Trial of Queen Katharine, 1831, RSC Collection, Stratford-upon-Avon. 26. Art Union, 1842, 122. This and other critical responses are quoted by Ronald Parkinson in Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820–1860 (London: HMSO, 1990), 169–70. 27. 76.8 × 64.1 (30 ¼ × 25 ¼), Tate Britain, London. 28. Clint’s work is discussed in Davis, Comic Acting and Portraiture, 112–21. 29. ‘A girl or woman, viewed sexually; especially, a prostitute’, Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Dent, revised 1969), 106. 30. Falstaff relating his Valiant Exploits, c. mid-1830s; 88.3 × 119.5 (34 ¾ × 47), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. For a full account of the painting see William L. Pressly, A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: ‘As Imagination Bodies Forth’ (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 40–1. 31. 88.9 × 69.8 (35 × 27 ½), Tate Britain, London. 32. ‘Brush’, 6, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, fifth edition, revised (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 98. 33. 284.5 × 452.1 (112 × 178), Tate Britain, London. 34. 69.8 × 89.1 (27 ½ × 35), Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 35. 233.7 × 144.8 (92 × 57), Tate Britain, London. 36. 153.7 × 183.5 (60 × 72), Tate Britain, London. 37. Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians, 67–9, 73–4, 263. 38. 152.2 × 274.2 (60 × 108), Tate Britain, London.

CHAPTER 11 1. The phrase occurs repeatedly in Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop (London: Chapman & Hall, 1938) when journalists find themselves unable to contradict their megalomaniac proprietor.

256

notes to pages 236–237 2. Boydell Shakespeare Subscription List, Boston Public Library, Rare Book Department, RBD 366 Ms.G.164.2. 3. Punch and Shakespeare in the Victorian Era (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 4. Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 5. ‘Boydell and his Engravers’, The Queen, CXVI (1904), 178–9, 328–9, 444–5, 524–5, 794–5, 1002–3. 6. ‘Shakespeare in Pictorial Art’, The Studio, special number, 1916. 7. ‘The First Illustrated Shakespeare’, The Connoisseur, CII (1938) 305–9. 8. ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, X (1947), 83–108. 9. William S. Heckscher, ‘Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts. A Study in Paradox’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 13–14 (1970–71), 5–71. 10. Painting Shakespeare. 11. One example among many is John Sunderland, ‘Mortimer, Pine and some Political Aspects of English History Painting’, Burlington Magazine, CXVI (1974). 12. Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709–1900 (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 2002). 13. The Afterlife of Ophelia, edited by Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

257

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Orgel, Stephen. Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Osborne, Laurie. The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1996. Panofsky, Erwin. Hercule à la Croisée des Chemins translated by Danièle Cohn. Paris: Flammarion, 1999. Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, fifth edition, revised. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. London: Dent, 1969. Pedicord, Harry William. The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1954. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993. Powell, Jocelyn. Restoration Theatre Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Pressly, William L. A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: ‘As Imagination Bodies Forth’. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Reynolds, Joshua. ‘Reynolds on Shakespeare’, Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, edited by Frederick W. Hilles. London: Heinemann, 1952, 107–22. Sir Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art, edited by Robert R. Wark. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Richardson, Jonathan. Two Discourses: I. An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting. . . . II. An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur. London: Printed for W. Churchill, 1719. Ripley, John. Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ‘Coriolanus’s Stage Imagery on Stage’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38.3 (Autumn 1987), 338–50. Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African: In Two Volumes; to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, edited by Joseph Jekyll. London: J. Nichols, 1782. Scharf, George. Recollections of the Scenic Effects of Covent Garden Theatre during the Season 1838–9. London: James Pattie, 1839. Serlio, Sebastian. The Five Books of Architecture. London: Printed for Robert Peake, 1611. Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors, edited by Kent Cartwright. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Bloomsbury. The Tragedy of King Lear, as Lately Published, Vindicated from the Abuse of the Critical Reviewers; and the Wonderful Genius and Abilities of those Gentleman for Criticism, Set Forth, Celebrated and Extolled, by the Editor of King Lear. London: Printed by W. Bowyer and J. Nichols; and sold by W. Owen, 1770.

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Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, authors of ‘Shakespeare Characters’, ‘Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’, ‘Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines’, &c. 3 vols. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1864. The Leopold Shakespeare, the Poet’s Works, in Chronological Order, from the text of Professor Delius, with ‘Edward III’ and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and an Introduction by F. J. Furnivall. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1870. The Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall. 8 vols. London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie and Son, 1888–90. Sillars, Stuart. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Stone, George Winchester Jr. ‘King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth-Century Mind’, Studies in Philology, 45.1 (January 1948), 89–103. Tate, Nahum. The History of King Lear, edited by James Black. London: Edward Arnold, 1976. Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray in Twenty Six Volumes, 25: Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews. London: Smith, Elder, 1879. Thurston, John. Illustrations of Shakespeare; Comprised in Two Hundred and Thirty Vignette Engravings, by Thompson, from Designs by Thurston: Adapted to all Editions. London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, Paternoster Row and Leipsic: Ernest Fleischer, 1825. Webster, Mary. Johann Zoffany. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Wilton, Andrew. Painting and Poetry: Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his work of 1804–1812; with transcriptions by Rosalind Mallord Turner. London: Tate Gallery, 1990. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art, translated by Henry Fuseli. London: printed for the translator, and sold by A. Millar,1765. Wind, Edgar. ‘ “Borrowed Attitudes” in Reynolds and Hogarth’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, II (1938–9), 182–5. Winter, William. Shakespeare on the Stage. Series 1–3. New York and London: Blom., 1911–16.

263

INDEX

Abrams, M. H. 77 accuracy, historical, in Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere 39–43 acting, eighteenth-century, and ‘natural’ style 78 actors, cult of 58 in Bell 1774 edition 59 actors in character, engravings of 4 All’s Well that Ends Well 26–28 allegories, in Bellamy and Robarts 38–39

through-illustrated editions 151–153 Waterhouse images of, selection of event in 146–155 individual images of 155 Architectural Review, on naturalistic staging 76 Arne, Thomas 188 see also Artaxerxes Artaxerxes 188 see also Thomas Arne

allusion and likeness, in Shakespeare painting 84

Art Journal 153

Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, Meeting of Antony and

Art Union, review of Leslie Queen Katherine 227

Cleopatra 151 Anon., Macbeth at Drury Lane 73–74

As You Like It, and Mulready painting 223 audiences

Anti-Corn Law League, and Coriolanus caricature 170 Antony and Cleopatra, Bell 1774 edition on 53 illustrations and editions Alma-Tadema Fig. 52

in eighteenth-century theatre, compared with readership 6–7 for Garrick’s Lear 126–127 from lower social ranks 4 in Shakespeare’s theatres 4

‘barge she sat in’ speech 148–149 Bell 1788 147–148 Bellamy and Robarts 34–39 Cornwall 152 Cowden Clarke 151–152

on Coghlan as Shylock 211 on Merchant of Venice 211

Edwards and Grignion 146–147

Barry, James, Lear Weeping over the Dead Cordelia 226

Etty, William 154–155

Barry, Spranger, as Lear 136

Gérôme, Jean Leon 153–154

Bartolozzi, Francesco, Antony and Cleopatra 1788

Gilbert 152

264

Baer, More, on theatre prices 127 Bancroft, Squire

148

Gravelot 1740 146 Knight, Pictorial Shakspere 149

Bassi, Shaul and Alberto Tosi Fei, Shakespeare in Venice 216

Knight, US editions 149–151

Bate, Jonathan 49

index

Bate, Rev. Henry, Blackamoor Wash’d White 193 Beaumont, George, and Haydon’s Macbeth 217 beautiful, concept of 83 see also Hogarth, William Bell, John, ‘Acting’ edition 1774 advertisement, 51–54 critical discussions of 49–50 double frontispieces in 31–34 on Garrick

Bell, John, ‘Literary’ edition, 1788 13, 32–34 Antony and Cleopatra 147–148 Coriolanus 159 Julius Caesar 142–146 King Lear 129–131 Merchant of Venice 201–202, Fig. 75 Othello 184–186, 190–191 Bellamy and Robarts edition 13

as Hamlet 57–58

allegorical frontispieces 38–39, Fig. 8

as Macbeth 53

Antony and Cleopatra 34–39, Figs. 5–7

in Romeo and Juliet 53 illustrations in actor portraits and extra-theatrical scenes 50 actors in character 9, 11–12

Bellamy, Anne, in Romeo and Juliet 75 Benjamin, Walter 72 Betterton, Thomas expressive qualities 77 portraits of

aspects resembling staging 49

as Cassio in Othello 177

by Edward Edwards 54–58

as Lear 118–119

of individual plays

as Othello 176

Antony and Cleopatra 53, 146–147

Bewick, Thomas 105

Comedy of Errors 96–97, Fig. 22

Bickham, George, caricature from Julius Caesar 169

Coriolanus 158–159, Fig. 56 Hamlet 58–59

binding, importance of, in illustration placing 33–40, 60

gravedigging scene, 57–58

Black, James 132

King Lear 128–129, Fig. 41

Blackamoor Wash’d White (Bate) and Othello 193

Macbeth Fig. 15

Blake, William, Canterbury Pilgrims 224

Merchant of Venice 200–201, Fig. 74

Boas, T. S. R. 237

individual play introductions 53 Hamlet 58–59

Boitard, François 12–13 and Catholic iconography 91–93

King Lear 53 Macbeth 54–57

compositional iconography 234 illustrations to Rowe 1709

Ophelia 58–59

Comedy of Errors 91–93, Fig. 20

Richard III 53

Coriolanus 156–157, Fig. 54

Timon of Athens 53

Julius Caesar 140–142, Fig. 45

Titus Andronicus 53

King Lear Fig. 37

Twelfth Night 53

links with theatre 118–119

Two Gentlemen of Verona 53

and Nahum Tate 118

Winter’s Tale 53 notes as performance reading 53–54 and novel illustration 60 and performance 55–57 and prompt books 49 ‘royal paper’ printing 60 sales of 5 and scholarly tradition 49 subscription list 5–6 title page declaration 50–51, Fig. 14

Merchant of Venice 198, Fig. 73 Othello 174–176, Fig. 64 Winter’s Tale 26–27, Fig. 1 and Lear performances 126 Boitard, Louis Phillipe, Drury Lane riots broadsheet 188, Fig. 71 book production 9 techniques of, nineteenth-century 39 borrowed attitudes, in Reynolds 83, 188–190 Bourgeois, Peter Francis, Coriolanus 165, Pl. 14

265

index

Bowyer and Nichols, Othello 180–182

Illustrations to Bellamy and Robarts

Bowyer, Robert, Hume History gallery 218

death of Antony Fig. 5

Boydell, John, print shop 3

death of Cleopatra Fig. 6

Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 132–133

death of Cleopatra, second version Fig. 7

anonymous essay on 85

Burnim, Kalman A., on King Lear 136

artists and works Barry, James, Lear Weeping over the Dead Cordelia

and Philip Highfill, on Bell editions 49, 58 Byrne, W., Merchant of Venice, Bell 1774, 200–201,

226 Damer, Ann, Coriolanus 159–160, Fig. 57

Fig. 74 Byron, Lord, Child Harold’s Pilgrimage 210

Dawe, George, Cymbeline 225–226, Pl. 26 Hodges, William, Merchant of Venice, 207, Fig. 78 Hoppner, John, Cymbeline 226 Stothard, Thomas, Othello 225 auction 98

captions with quotations, for Shakespeare paintings 227 Boydell Gallery prints and paintings 100 Garrick on 23

financial difficulties 218–219

Carey, Brycchan, on Sancho 195

national school and grand style in 219

caricature

rivals of 218 subscription list 12

importance of 236 ownership of 3–4

Boydell-Steevens edition, illustrations in 100

Cartwright, Kent, on Comedy of Errors 90

Briggs, Henry Perronet, Romeo and Juliet 228–229,

Chapman, Ellen, in Twelfth Night 232

Pl. 30 Browne, Gordon, Henry Irving Shakespeare illustra-

character, use of term 14–15 criticism 54

tions 14

discussion of, in Bell 1774 59

Coriolanus 162–163, Fig. 60

identification with, by audience and reader 222

Romeo and Juliet 61–66, Fig. 16

illustration of actors as, in Bell 1774 58–59

closing tableau Fig. 18

paintings of groups in single play 223–224

and Irving’s performance 62–66

paintings of groups in several plays 224–225

‘Queen Mab’ speech 63 tomb scene 64, Fig. 17 Browne, John, Merchant of Venice engraving 207, Fig. 78 Bulwer, John on body postures 15 Chirologia 77 gesture in Rhamberg, Julius Caesar 144–145, Fig. 48 on hand gestures 15 Pathomyotamia 77 Burdett, Francis, and Cruikshank, Coriolanus caricature 169–170, Pl. 16

studies of Ophelia 237 see also Hazlitt, William Cherokee Embassy, in London 183 Cherokee visits to London, 1760s 183–184 choice of Hercules trope, in painting 78–79 in Wootton Macbeth, 78–79 see also Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl Cibber, Colley, on Julius Caesar 142 Cibber, Susanna, Van Bleeck’s Mrs Cibber as Cordelia 131–132, Pl. 9 Cibber, Theophilus, Two Dissertations 11–12 Clint, George, Falstaff’s Assignation with Mistress Ford 228, Pl. 29

Burke, Edmund, Sublime and Beautiful 82–83

Coghlan, Charles, as Shylock 211

Burney, Edward

Comedy of Errors, 16

illustrations to Bell 1788

266

Capell, Shakespeare edition 6

and commedia grave 91

Antony and Cleopatra 147–148, Fig. 50

difficulties of illustrating 89–91

Henry V 32–34, Fig. 4 King Lear 129–130, Fig. 42

generic complexity of, in Bell 1774 97–98 in later illustrations 105–116

index

illustration and painting

domestic scene, in Quin 157–158, Pl. 13

Bell 1774 96–97, Fig. 22

Earlom, Scene in 165, Pl. 14

Boitard frontispiece 91–94, Fig. 20

Henry Irving Shakespeare Fig. 60

Cornwall edition 108–109, Fig. 29

Leopold Shakespeare 161–162, Fig. 59, Figs 61–3

Cowden Clarke edition 109–114, Figs. 30–35

Lawrence, Kemble as Coriolanus 165–168, Pl. 15

Dunstall portrait 97 Fuseli 100–102, Fig. 24

Marks caricature 170, 236, Pl. 17 Staunton 160, Fig. 58

Gilbert 107–108, 113–116, Figs. 27–28, Fig. 36

Universal Magazine engraving 157, Fig. 55

Gravelot 94–95, Fig. 21

contrast with Bourgeois image, 165

Howard 102–103, Fig. 25

paintings compared, 168

Meadows 108–109, Fig. 29

political caricatures 169–170

Rigaud painting 98–100, Fig. 23

rhythms of, and images 168–169

Staunton edition 107–108, 113–116

Coriolanus and Plebeians, Cruikshank 169–170, Pl. 16

Thurston 103–105, Fig. 26 Wheatley 100

Cornwall, Barry, edition 14 Antony and Cleopatra 152

and Italian theatre 91 long absence from stage 89

Comedy of Errors 108–109 costume 23, 132

metatheatric qualities 91

Boitard Othello 174–176, 178–179, Fig. 64

mingled genres in 89–90

Garrick as Macbeth 69–70

staging models, absence of 235

Garrick as Othello 183

connoisseur instructions for, Fuseli 80–81 Richardson on rules for 79–80 Connoisseur, The 237

illustrations, as record of 58 Moorish, in Hayman 1740 Othello 182, Fig. 68 Omai (O’Keefe) 192 Taylor 1788 Othello 185–186, Fig. 69

connoisseurship, theory of 76–77

Country Life 237

Constable, John

Covent Garden Theatre promptbooks, and Bell

Cornfield 221–222 Salisbury Cathedral 221

1774 49, Fig. 14 Cowden Clarke, Charles 14

contemporary theatre of Shakespeare, images of

Cowden Clarke, Mary 14

236 conversation pieces and domestic interiors, from

Cowden Clarkes’ edition Antony and Cleopatra 151–152

1830s 222 Cook, Dutton, on Bancroft Merchant of Venice 211 Cook, T., Merchant of Venice, Bell 1788 201–202, Fig. 75

Comedy of Errors 109–114 Cruikshank, George, Coriolanus Addressing the Plebeians 169–170, Pl. 16 Cymbeline

Cooke, William, on Garrick’s Lear 125–126

Dawe painting 225–226, Pl. 26

Copia, Renaissance concept of 83

Hoppner painting 226

copying in art, Reynolds on 83 see also borrowed attitudes

Dabydeen, David 176

Coriolanus

Damer, Ann, Coriolanus 159–160, Fig. 57

illustrative tradition from Poussin 155–158 in painting and engraving, 165–169 Bell 1774 158–159 Bell 1788 159

Danby, Francis, Scene from Merchant of Venice 230, Pl. 31 Davenant, William, heath scenes in Macbeth and King Lear 118

Boitard 156–157, Fig. 54

Davis, Jim, illustrations of comic acting 236

Bourgeois 165, Pl. 14 Damer Fig. 57

Dawe, George, Imogen in the Cave 225–226, Pl. 26

267

index

de Loutherbourg, Philip James 32–33, 75–76 illustrations for Bell 1788 Coriolanus 159 Henry V 32–33, Fig. 4 King Lear 130–131, Fig. 43 Merchant of Venice 201–202 Othello 190–191, Fig. 72 paintings

Elizabeth I, Queen, letter to Sultan Mahumet Cham 172–173 proclamation on ‘Blackamoors’ 172–173 emblematic elements, in Zoffany’s Garrick and Mrs Pritchard 72 ‘emblematical devices’, Shaftesbury on, in paintings 79 emotion

Avalanche in the Alps 83

Bell 1788 King Lear frontispiece 129–130

Coalbrookdale by Night 220

expression of, in art and theatre 221

stage designs at Drury Lane 52 O’Keefe’s Omai 192 Omai maquettes 75–76, Pl. 7, Pl. 8 Derrida, Jacques 56–57 Diderot, Denis, Paradox of Acting 76

responses to Garrick’s Lear 125–126 engraving on copper 14 costs of 3–4 display of 2–4 on wood 14

Digges, Leonard, on Julius Caesar 142

Erne, Lucas 25

discussion, eighteenth-century, in social settings

eroticism in Shakespeare painting 132

238 domestic art as national style 222 Dramatic Notes, on Romeo and Juliet tableau 65 Drury Lane riots broadsheet, L. P. Boitard 188, Fig. 71

through verbal puns 228–229 see also Briggs, Henry; Clint, George; Etty, William Etty, William, Arrival of Cleopatra 154–155, Pl. 12 expression, in eighteenth-century acting 77

Drury Lane Theatre promptbooks, and Bell 1774 49, Fig. 14 du Guernier, Louis 13

fashionable forces on imaging 236 fees, for artists and engravers 218

illustration to King Lear, Theobald 13, Fig. 38

Franklin, Colin 59–60

illustrations to Rowe 1714

French Revolutionary War, economic conse-

Comedy of Errors 91–94 Julius Caesar 141–142, Fig. 46 Othello 178–179, Fig. 65 Richard III 30, Fig. 3 Duncombe’s Miniature Caricature Magazine 170, Pl. 17 Dunstall, John, in Comedy of Errors 97

quences of 218 frontispiece as advertisement, 30 definition and function 29–30 double 32–34 placing of, in eighteenth century 31–34 Fuseli, Henry

268

Earlom, Richard, Scene in Coriolanus 165, Pl. 14

anatomical distortions in 78

easel paintings, forms of 6–8

iconographic references in 83

economic factors, and Shakespeare imaging 235–236

Instructions for the Connoisseur 80–81 lectures on Renaissance art 81

economic forces, for artists and engravers 9

Milton Gallery 218

Edwards, Edward, illustrations for Bell 1774, 54–58

paintings and illustrations

Antony and Cleopatra 146–147

Edgar, Feigning Madness 133–134, Pl. 11

Comedy of Errors 132, Fig. 22

Comedy of Errors illustration 100–102,

Coriolanus 158–159, Fig. 56 King Lear 128, Fig. 41

Fig. 24 Lavater illustrations 77–78

Macbeth 56–57, Fig. 15 Merchant of Venice 200–201, Fig. 74

Macbeth and the Armed Head, 218 Weird Sisters, Gillray 1–2, Pl. 1

index

Gainsborough, Thomas Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews 207–209 portrait of Ignatius Sancho 194–195

tomb, in Knight’s London 40, Fig. 9 in Knight’s Pericles 40, Fig. 10 Grand Tour 202–212

Galle, Philips, Coriolanus 156–157

Grangerising (extra-illustrating) 105

Garrick, David 15

Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines 213–215

in Bell’s English Drama 128–129 costumes and movement 70

Gravelot, Hubert 13 All’s Well that Ends Well 26–28, Fig. 2

and Lear audience 126–127

Antony and Cleopatra 146, Fig. 49

letter to Hayman on Lear 124–125

Comedy of Errors 94–95, Fig. 21

letter to Hayman on Othello illustration 21–24

novel illustrations 38

posture of recoil 186

Othello 179–180, Fig. 66

revisions of Tate’s Lear 125–128

Greek art, influence of 80–81

roles and productions

Green, Valentine, Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in

Hamlet, Bell 1774 on 57–58 King Lear 52 emotional effect of 125–126 Macbeth 68–72

Macbeth 68–69, Fig. 19 Grignion, Charles Merchant of Venice, Bell 1774 200–201, Fig. 74 Reddish as Edgar 128–129

Bell 1774 on 53

Guest, Harriet, on Omai 186–187

Othello 183

Guinness, Alec, modern dress Hamlet 70

Romeo and Juliet 75

Gurr, Andrew 120

Bell 1774 on 53 on visual tradition 23–24 Gascoygne, George, Supposes, and Comedy of Errors 91 Geertz, Clifford 238 Gentleman, Francis, and Bell 1774 49 advertisement to 51–54 on Othello 186

half-price tickets 4, 126 Hamilton, William, fee for Boydell painting 218 Hamlet, Bell 1774 on 57, 58–59 illustrations of, 237 Hanmer, Thomas, 13 illustration instructions

Gentleman’s Magazine 236

King Lear in 1740 edition 122–124

George III, King, as Coriolanus in Cruikshank caricature 169, Pl. 16

Merchant of Venice, 182 Titus Andronicus, 182

Gérôme, Jean Leon, Cleopatra and Caesar 153–154, Fig. 53 Gilbert, John, illustrations in Staunton edition 14 Antony and Cleopatra 152 Comedy of Errors 107–108, 113–116, Figs. 27–28, Fig. 36 Coriolanus 160, Fig. 58 Merchant of Venice 212 see also Morgan, Aaron Richard II 43–46, Fig. 13 effect of page-opening position 43–46 Gildon, Charles, on Betterton and expression 77 Gillray, James 1–4 Minions of the Moon Pl. 1 Tales of Wonder 196 Very Slippy Weather 3 Gower, John, Confession Amantis 41

Haydon, Benjamin Robert Macbeth, 217 Romeo leaving Juliet, 217 Hayman, Francis 13 illustrations for Hanmer 1740–4 King Lear 122–125, Fig. 39 Othello 21–24, 180–182, Fig. 68 illustrations for Jennens 1770 King Lear 124–125, Fig. 40 Othello 180–182, Fig. 67 rococo design in 234 Hazlitt, William 54 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays 14–15 and Lavater 77 Heath, Caroline, in Twelfth Night 232 Heckscher, William S. 237

269

index

Henry IV, and Weird Sisters 1–2 Henry V 32–34, Fig. 4

marking pivotal moments in plays 57–58 as notes, in Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere 39–43

Henry V, double frontispiece in Bell 1788 32–34

income, importance of, for artists and actors 24

Henry VIII

individual figures, importance in Shakespeare

and Charles Knight, History of London 40 Leslie, C. R., Queen and Patience 227–228, Pl. 28 trial scene, paintings by Andrews and Harlow

imaging 234 Irish Shakespeare Gallery, Woodmason’s 218 Iroquois visitors at Macbeth 178

227 Henry Irving Shakespeare 14, 61–66 as acting edition 61–62 Coriolanus 162–163, Fig. 60 and Irving performance 61–66

Jekyll, Joseph, Letters of Ignatius Sancho 195 Johnson, Samuel Shakespeare edition 6 usage of ‘illustration’ 50

multiple identities of 66

Jonson, Ben, Masque of Blackness 177

prospectus for 61–62 Romeo and Juliet final tableau 65–66

journalism, illustrated, and Shakespeare illustration 46

Romeo and Juliet tomb scene 63–64

journals, popular, as critical sources 236

as scholarly edition 66

Julius Caesar

see also Browne, Gordon

Beerbohm Tree production 142

heroic style, unfulfilled 225–226

Brutus and Cassius confrontation 142

Herrick, Robert 132

images of 139–146

history painting, ideas of 80

Boitard 140–142, Fig. 45

Richardson on 80 Hodges, William, Merchant of Venice V.I. 207,

du Guernier 141–142, Fig. 46 and performance 142

Fig. 78 Hogarth, William

and political caricatures 169 Ramberg 1788 142–146, Fig. 47

Analysis of Beauty 81

rejection of stage practice in 139–140

black servants in paintings by 176

Rhamberg 1788 144–145, Fig. 48

Holland, Peter 49–50 Hollis, George, engraving of Turner, Juliet and her Nurse 205–206, Pl. 21 Hopkins, William, Drury Lane prompter 51 Hoppner, John, Cymbeline 226 Howard, Frank, Spirit of Shakespeare 102–103 Comedy of Errors in 102–103, Fig. 25 Hull, Thomas, ‘The Twins’ in Comedy of Errors 97

Kean, Charles 32–33 historical episodes 64 Merchant of Venice 209–211 fly-leaf, 209–210 Kean, Edmund ‘Kean crawl’ in Hamlet 233 as Othello, 193–194, Pl. 19

Humphrey, Hannah 3–4

Kemble, John Philip 32–33

iconographical reference, in paintings 83 see also allusion and likeness; Boitard; borrowed

Keysler, Johann, Travels through Germany 202 King Lear 16

as Coriolanus, 158

attitudes; copia; Fuseli; Reynolds illustrated editions

Barry, James 226

disciplines involved in 25–26

Fuseli, Henry 133–134, Pl. 11

readership of 5–6

Newton, Gilbert Stuart 226

and Shakespeare interpretation from 1830s 222

Poole, Paul Falconer, 226

Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News 236 illustrations marking climax of plays 57

270

artists and paintings

Romney, George, 131 Runciman, Alexander 131 Runciman, John 131

index

Scharf, George, Macready 134–135, Fig. 44

and eighteenth-century acting, 77–78

Van Bleeck, Pieter 131–132, Pl. 9

and Hazlitt 77

West, Benjamin 132–133, Pl. 10 Bell 1774 on 53 editing and audience demands 235 Garrick and 52, 124–125 illustrators and editions Bell 1774 128–129

Physiognomy 77–78 Lawrence, Thomas, Kemble as Coriolanus 165–168, Pl. 15 and Opie, Lady as Cressida 230–232, Pl. 32 Le Brun, Charles 15 on passions 77

Bell 1788 129–131, Fig. 43

Leney, William, Coriolanus 159–160

Boitard 118–120, Fig. 37

Leopold Shakespeare 14, 160–165

Hayman 1740 122–125, Fig. 39 Hayman 1770 124–125, Fig. 40 Rowe 1714 121–122, Fig. 38 images and heath scene 117–118 images and performance 135–136 lightning in performances 120 staging, text and images relation 117 and Universal Museum 136 Kirkall, Elisha 12–13 Kneller, Godfrey, portraits of Betterton as Lear 118–119 Knight, Charles 6 History of London 40, Fig. 10 Penny Magazine 40 Pictorial Shakspere 14, 39–43 different forms of 42–43

Coriolanus 161–162, Fig. 59, Figs. 61–63 return of women in 163–165 rhythm of images and text 164–165 Leslie, C. R., 221 Characters in Merry Wives 223–224, Pl. 24 Queen Katharine and Patience 227–228, Pl. 28 Sketch for Twelfth Night 226–227, Pl. 27 Lessingham, Jane, as Ophelia in Bell 1774 58–59 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, on Garrick posture 70 lighting, in stage paintings 72 literature, and painting 79 London Chronicle on 1761 Cherokee visit, 183 on 1762 Cherokee visit, 183–184

frontispieces as embellishments 40

London und Paris 3, 8

images from other publications 40

Longinus, on Sublime 82

images of plays in

Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘Blackamoors’ in 177

Antony and Cleopatra 149 Merchant of Venice 202–205,

Luckyj, Christina, on race in Othello 172–173

Figs. 76–77 Pericles 40–42, Figs. 10–12 US edition Alma-Tadema, Antony and Cleopatra 151, Fig. 52 and stereo plates 12 Waterhouse, Cleopatra 151, Fig. 51 ‘Imperial’ edition, Antony and Cleopatra in 153–154, Fig. 53

McArdell, James, Garrick as Lear mezzotint 130 Macbeth in Bell 1774 edition Fig. 15 performance notes in 54–57 illustrations and paintings of Gillray caricature 1–2, Pl. 1 Haydon 217 Wootton 78–79 Wright 74 Zoffany 68–72, Pl. 3

Lacy, Walter, in Twelfth Night 232 Lambert, W., Kean as Othello 193–194, Pl. 19 Landseer, Edwin 222 Lavater, John Caspar Aphorisms 77–78

Zuccarelli 74 Macbeth, character of, in Bell 1774 54–57 Macbeth, Garrick as, in Bell 1774 53 Macbeth at Drury Lane, anonymous painting 73–74, Pl. 4 accuracy of representation in 73–74

271

index

McKellen, Ian, Richard III 52

Juliet and her Nurse, 205–206, Pl. 21

Mackenzie, Henry, Man of Feeling 221

Woods, Henry, Portia in Graphic Gallery

Macklin, Charles, as Shylock 200 Macklin, Thomas, Poets’ Gallery 218 Maclise, Daniel 232–233 and photography 232 Play Scene in Hamlet 232–233 ‘Kean crawl’ in 232–233 and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 232–233 Twelfth Night painting 232 Macready, William Charles 32–33 Malone, Shakespeare edition 6

213–215, Pl. 23 Kean, Charles, production 209–211 Crabbe Robinson on 211 Orgel, Stephen, on Shylock 213 recent criticism of 197 separation of characters from play 213–215 social and political attitudes towards 197–198 Merchant, W. M. 49, 71, 237 on Coriolanus illustration tradition 155–156 Merry Wives of Windsor 223–224

Marcus, Leah, on concept of racism in Othello 172

Clint, Falstaff and Mistress Ford 228, Pl. 29

Marks, John Lewis Coriolanus 170, Pl. 17 contemporary costume in 170

Leslie, C. R., Characters in Merry Wives 223–224, Pl. 24

Othello 196, Pl. 20 Martin, John apocalyptic paintings 220 Macbeth 220

metatheatre, in Shakespeare’s plays 91 mezzotint 69 as influence on painting styles 235 Midsummer Night’s Dream 91

Master Betty, in Julius Caesar caricature 169

Millais, John Everett 153

Meadows, Kenny

moment, selection of, for visual treatment 70

Comedy of Errors illustrations 108–109, Fig. 29

Montagu, Mary Wortley 182–183, 185–186 Moor, various meanings of term 187–188

Merchant of Venice illustrations 212

Moorish Ambassador to Elizabeth I, portrait 177

Measure for Measure illustration, Bell 1774 57

Moreau le Jeune, Antony and Cleopatra 148, Fig. 50

Meek, Richard 237

Morgan, Rev. Aaron, Mind of Shakespeare 212

Meiningen Theatre 142

Morland, George, The Slave Trade 193–194, Pl. 18

Merchant of Venice, as aesthetic entity 202–212

Morning Post, on Turner, Juliet and her Nurse, 206

approaches in 1774 and 1788 editions 202

Mulready, William, Seven Ages of Man, 223

changing visual treatment of 16 Coghlan, Charles, as Shylock 211

multiple illustration, in nineteenth-century editions 105–107 see also through-illustrated

early stress on trial scene, 199 in illustrated editions

editions Murphy, Andrew 25

Bell 1774 200–201, Fig. 74 Bell 1788 201–202, Fig. 75

Newton, Gilbert Stuart, Lear Attended by Cordelia 226

Boitard 1709 198, Fig. 73

Nicoll, Allardyce 73–74

du Guernier 1714 199 Knight Pictorial Shakespere, 202–205, Figs. 76– 77 Staunton 212 individual images of Danby, Scene from 230, Pl. 31

on Garrick costume 70 novel illustration 38 and Bell 1774 edition 60 mediated naturalism of 55 novel-reading, popularity of 222 Nugent, Thomas, The Grand Tour 202

Heath’s Shakespeare Gallery 213, Figs. 79–80 Hodges, Act 5 Scene 1 207, Fig. 78 in Morgan, Mind of Shakespeare 212 Turner, Grand Canal, 206–207, Pl. 22

272

O’Keefe, John, Omai 75–76, 191–192, Pls. 7–8 costumes for, 192 Ogden, James, on King Lear performance and image 118

index

Omai, discussion of origins 187–188 visit to England 186–193 Westminster Gazette on 186

expression of, in visual art 77–78 representation of, in Bell 1774 58–59 Pavis, Patrice 50

Omai, portrait by Reynolds 188–190, Fig. 70

performance, varieties of 235

Opie, John

Performance at a Country Barn, Wright 74, Pl. 5

and imagination overreached, 231–232 Lady in the Character of Cressida 230–232, Pl. 32 and Lawrence, Kemble as Coriolanus 230–232, Pl. 15 rare in output 231 Orgel, Stephen 197 on Shylock 213

performance reading definition of term, 48–49 and Bell 1774 Macbeth 60–61 see also Henry Irving Shakespeare performance records, in less formal genres 74 performance and scholarly editing, relation between 49

Osborne, Laurie 49

Pericles, in Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere 40–42

Othello attitudes to race in 16, 171–173

perspective, as narrative force 94 see also Comedy of Errors; Boitard; du Guernier

Garrick on illustration of 21–24

Peters, Julie Stone 49

illustrations and paintings of

Peters, Rev. Matthew William 132

Boitard 174–176, Fig. 64 de Loutherbourg 190–191, Fig. 72

photography, and Maclise, Twelfth Night painting 232

du Guernier 178–179, Fig. 65

picturesque, concept of 83

Gravelot, 179–180, Fig. 66

placement of images within editions, 34–39, 46

Marks, J. L. 196, Pl. 20 Taylor, Isaac 184–186, Fig. 69

Plautus, Menœchmi, and Comedy of Errors, 91 Pointon, Marcia, 58

Kean, Edmund in 193–194

political caricatures, and Shakespeare

Luckyj on 172–173

Coriolanus 169–170

Marcus on 172

Julius Caesar 169 see also Gillray, Minions of the

performance for ‘ladies of Quality’ 176 performance for Moroccan Ambassador 177

political factors in imaging 236

race and rank in 171–173

polyscenality, in frontispiece design 93

Rymer on 171 Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserved, 199

Moon

Poole, Paul Falconer, Death of Cordelia 226 Pope, Elizabeth, Antony and Cleopatra 147–148 portrait engravings, Betterton as Lear 120–121

painting, Shakespeare

portraiture, and Shakespeare painting 80

aesthetic independence of 70–71

posture, in eighteenth-century acting 77

and connoisseurship 67–68

Poussin tradition, in Coriolanus imaging 160

differences from acting, 85

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as English school of

differences from prints 67–68 early nineteenth-century 16 as performance record 72–76 and theatrical portraits 67–68 Parkinson, T. Merchant of Venice 1774, 200–201, Fig. 74

painting 233 price riots 126–127 prints popular, significance of 157 production and sale 12 Pritchard, Hannah, as Lady Macbeth 68–72 Public Advertiser, on 1762 Cherokee visit 184

Partridge, Eric, on word ‘brush’ 229

Punch 236 Purton, William, Constable memorial 221

passions, acting, in 15 depiction of, on stage 22–23

Pyne, W. R., Performance at Country Barn Theatre 74, Pl. 5

Reddish as Edgar 128–129

273

index

Queen, The 237

on portraiture 80

Quin, James, as Coriolanus 157–158, Pl. 13

Science of a Connoisseur 79–80 Theory of Painting 79–80

race and rank, in Othello 171–173

Richter, Adrian Ludwig, Comedy of Errors illustra-

Ramberg, J. H. Julius Caesar 1788 142–143, Fig. 47 Merchant of Venice 1788 201–202, Fig. 75

tion, Fig. 34 Richter, Henry James (?) ‘Allegory’ Fig. 8 Rigaud, John Francis, Comedy of Errors painting

rank and race, attitudes to, in eighteenth-century art, 176–177 readers

new price 74, Fig. 71

first, of illustrated editions, 28–29

as social force influencing images 236

new 29

Ripley, John, on Julius Caesar 137–139

‘Qualified’ 29

Rivington Shakespeare, Fuseli Comedy of Errors in

reading experience, in later illustrated editions 114–116 reading practices in Bellamy and Robarts 39

100–102, Fig. 24 Robinson, Henry Crabbe, on Kean’s Merchant of Venice 211 role, as distinct from character 14–15

circumstances of 59–60

Rolls, Charles, Play Scene in Hamlet 232–233

as construction of play, in Henry Irving

Roman plays 16

Shakespeare, 66

new tragedic form in 137–138

in illustrated editions 26–27

political images from 169–170

in Knight’s Pericles 40–42 range of, in illustrated editions, 46

problems in visual treatment 139 special conflicts in 138

skills in, for early readers 2 see also performance reading

romance, Comedy of Errors seen as 90 Romeo and Juliet,

Reddish, Samuel, as Edgar 128–129

Briggs painting 228–229, Pl. 30

Regency crisis, and Gillray, Weird Sisters 1–2

Garrick in 53

reproduction of paintings, effects of 72

Henry Irving Shakespeare 62–66

Reynolds, Joshua

Queen Mab speech 63

paintings Apollo Belvedere 188–190 Augustus Keppel 188–190 Omai portrait 188–190, Fig. 70 writings

Wilson painting 75, Pl. 6 Romney, George, Lear in the Tempest 131 Rosenberg, Marvin 171–173 Rowe, Nicholas 1709 edition 12–13

Discourses on Art 81

Comedy of Errors 91–93, Fig. 20

essay on Shakespeare 84

Coriolanus 156–157, Fig. 54

on Sublime 82

King Lear 121, Fig. 37

Rhamberg, Julius Caesar 144–145, Fig. 48 Richard II, in Staunton Library Shakespeare 43–46 Richard III Bell 1774, on 53 frontispiece, Rowe 1714, 30 and Knight’s History of London 40 McKellen, Ian, film script for 52 Richardson, Jonathan on history painting 80 on painting and literature 79–80

274

98–100, Fig. 23 riots

Merchant of Venice 198, Fig. 73 Othello 174–176, Fig. 64 Winter’s Tale 26–27, Fig. 1 1714 edition 12–13 King Lear 121–122, Fig. 38 Merchant of Venice, 199 Othello 178–179, Fig. 65 Runciman, Alexander, Lear on the Heath 131 Runciman, John, Lear in the Storm 131 Ruskin, John, Stones of Venice 210

index

Ryder, Thomas, fee received from Boydell 218 Rymer, Thomas, on Othello 171

Sheldricks, W., Kean as Othello 193–194, Pl. 19 Siddons, Sarah 32–33 in Blackamoor Wash’d White 193 in Henry VIII paintings 227

Salomon, H. C. 237

Simonet, T. B. Merchant of Venice, Bell 1788 201–202

Sancho, Ignatius in England 194–195

Skinner, Quentin 197 slavery, abolition movement 193

letters of 195

Smirke, Robert 218–219

portrait by Gainsborough 194–195

Smith, John Raphael, The Slave Trade 193–194,

Scharf, George, Macready as Lear 134–135, Fig. 44

Pl. 18

science and industry in paintings 220–221

Smock Alley, and Coriolanus 158

Scott, Clement, on Bancroft’s Merchant of Venice 211

social factors, in textual revision and illustration

Selous, Henry Courtney 14 Antony and Cleopatra 151–152 Comedy of Errors 109–114, Figs. 30–33, Fig. 35 sensibilité Fig. 8 see also allegories sentimentality, of Garrick 156–157 sequential images, Leopold Shakespeare Coriolanus 162–163 Serlio, Sebastian, Architettura 198 comedy 93–94 tragedy 92–93

236 social issues, in treatment of characters 236 social unrest, eighteenth century 9 Southerne, Thomas, Oroonoko 177 Spectator, The 236 stage design, changes in 74–76 stage right and left, importance of 22 Stanivukovic, Goran, on Comedy of Errors 90 Staunton, Howard, Shakespeare edition 14, 43–46 Coriolanus, 160

Seven Years War 127

Library Shakespeare and image-text relation 43–44

Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of, Historical Draught 78–79

multiple viewpoints in 44–46

Shakespeare Gallery, Heath’s 213, Figs. 79–80

Stone, George Winchester 125

Shakespeare, William

Stothard, Thomas 218–219

plays, publication of, in lifetime 24–25 possible portrait in Turner’s Grand Canal Venice 207, Pl. 22 Shakespeare images and changes in stage design 74–76 character and situation, later preference for 217 compositional forms 74 critical discussions of 237 decline of interest in 217

Othello, for Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 225 Shakespearean Characters 224–225, Pl. 25 Studio, The 238 special numbers 237 styles and techniques, influence on Shakespeare imaging 235 Sublime, Burkean 82–83 and English painting 82 see also Longinus

earlier nineteenth century 16

Sublime, shift from Longinian to Burkean, in

eighteenth century 74–76 and European forms 74

painting, 219–220 Sultan Mahumet Cham 172–173

and mid-Victorian taste 227–228

Summers, Montague, 237

and naturalistic staging 76 stylistic change in 9, 10–11 Sharpe, William, Lear engraving 132–133 fee from Boydell for 218 Sheepshanks Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum 228

Tate, Nahum, version of King Lear 118–120 influence of, 136 revised by Garrick 125–128 Taylor, Isaac, Bell 1788 Othello 184–186, Fig. 69

275

index

Telbin, William, designs for Irving’s Romeo and Juliet 63–64 Tempest, illustration, Bell 1774 57

Vaughan, Virginia Mason 171–173 Vauxhall Gardens 4

Terry, Ellen, as Portia 211

Very Slippy Weather, Gillray 3, Pl. 2

Thackeray, William Makepeace

visual criticism, paintings as 71

as art critic 222–223 review of Leslie, Merry Wives 223–225 review of Mulready, Seven Ages of Man 223 Yellowplush Papers 203 Theobald, Lewis, 1740 edition

Walpole, Hugh, on Reynolds’ ‘borrowed attitudes’ 83 war, in eighteenth century 8 Ward, James, Gordale Scar 83

Antony and Cleopatra 13, 146, Fig. 49

Ward, Sarah, as Portia in Julius Caesar 144

All’s Well that Ends Well 26–28

Waterhouse, William, Cleopatra 151, Fig. 51

Comedy of Errors 94–95

Webster, Mary 69

Othello 179–180, Fig. 66 theories of painting, eighteenth century 76–85

Webster, Thomas, and Cranbrook Colony 222 Weird Sisters, Gillray, engraving 1–2, Pl. 1

Thompson, John, Comedy of Errors engraving

West, Benjamin 218

103–105, Fig. 26 through-illustrated editions new range of structure and style in 234–235 operations and failings 152–153

Death of Wolfe 225 King Lear 132–133, Pl. 10 Boydell fee for 218 Westminster Gazette, on Omai 186

Thurston, Comedy of Errors 103–105, Fig. 26

Wheatley, Francis, Comedy of Errors illustration 100

Times, The, on Turner, Juliet and her Nurse 205–206 Timon of Athens, Bell 1774 on 53

Wilson, Benjamin Garrick and Bellamy in Romeo and Juliet 75

Titus Andronicus 138 Bell 1774 on 53 Todorov, Tzvetan 50 Tree, Beerbohm, Julius Caesar, production 142

Garrick as Lear 130–131 Romeo and Juliet 190–191, Pl. 6 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, on Greek art 80–81

Troilus and Cressida

Wind, Edgar 83

Opie, Lady as Cressida 230–232, Pl. 32 Turner, J. M. W., Grand Canal, Venice 206–207, Pl. 22

Winter, William

Juliet and her Nurse 205–206, Pl. 21 Twelfth Night Bell 1774 53, 57

on Julius Caesar 142 on Kean as Othello 194 Winter’s Tale Bell 1774 on 53 Boitard illustration 26–27, Fig. 1

Leslie Sketch 226–227, Pl. 27

Woodmason, James, Irish Shakespeare Gallery 218

Maclise painting 232

Woods, Henry, Portia 213–215, Pl. 23

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Bell 1774 on 53

Wootton, John, Macbeth and Witches 78–79

unexpected, importance of in great art 81–82

and Shaftesbury 79 Wright, J. W., portraits of characters in Merchant of

unified effect, of image and text 46–47 Universal Magazine, Coriolanus engraving 157, Fig. 55

Venice 212 Wright, John, Performance at a Country Barn (Macbeth) 74, Pl. 5

Universal Museum, on Barry as Lear 136

Wright, Joseph, science paintings 220

Van Bleeck, Pieter, Mrs Cibber as Cordelia 131–132,

Young, Alan

Pl. 9 Vandergucht, Gerard 13

276

Vandergucht, Michael, engraving of Betterton 119

on Hamlet 237 on Shakespeare and Punch 236

index ‘Young Roscius’, in Julius Caesar caricature 169

as conversation piece 71–72

Younger, Joseph, Covent Garden prompter 51

and stage action 70 and Zoffany’s other work 71–72

Zoffany, Johann Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in Macbeth 68–72, Pl. 3, Fig. 19 compared with Boitard Othello 174

George Prince of Wales 71–72 preference for mezzotint reproduction 69 Zuccarelli, Francesco, Macbeth 74

277