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Shakespeare & Beyond

Art to enchant: Shakespeare and Victorian illustration

Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive
Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive
Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

A scene from As You Like It, from the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.

In the Victorian period the illustrated Shakespeare edition was, according to Stuart Sillars, an expert on Shakespeare and the visual arts, ‘the broadest channel by which the reading public gained an acquaintance, whatever its nature or intensity, with the plays of Shakespeare’.

These illustrated editions of the Complete Works would have been the first encounter with Shakespeare that many readers would have had. Members of the working class, who may not have been able to experience Shakespeare in the London theatre, would have found these editions more affordable. A consequence of this was that the experience of Shakespeare was often based on these illustrated pages rather than the stage. As such, these editions played an important part in how the Victorian population thought about and constructed Shakespeare.

Such was the importance of images, especially wood-engraved illustrations, during the Victorian period that scholar Brian Maidment compares them to the ‘use of the photograph in contemporary society’. Before the development of wood engraving and the printing technology that allowed for the mass circulation of illustrated books, Shakespeare’s Works often contained just a single frontispiece or a few illustrations per play that were printed on different pages than the text.

From 1840–1870 (the ‘golden age’ of Shakespeare illustration) the illustrated edition became a theater of the book, an Iconoplay, where words and images combine in complex interaction, just as they do on the stage, with the illustrator fulfilling the role of stage director and deciding how best to ‘stage’ Shakespeare’s scenes. With the advent of the Iconoplay, we witness not only more integration between word and image, but also a vast increase in the sheer quantity of illustrations in these editions: each play contains anywhere between 15-30 illustrations.

Comments

I’d like to recommend Alan Young’s new book, Steam-Driven Shakespeare, which focuses on five major Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare.

Nick Clary — October 24, 2017

I have several victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare. Books were being destroyed by the school library which was also the town library. I rescued these. I can send you some scans of the coloured illustrations if you would like them. I’m writing a book about the private 18th century theatre at Wynnstay.

Rachel Bowen — October 24, 2017

This is fascinating. I peaked in on it on my phone and can’t wait to fully jump in on my laptop later so that I can see the images better. Students are going to LOVE this.

Cathy — November 1, 2017