Endless efforts to grab the eye

Eighteenth and 19th-century leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare, including ones that appear in several of the previous postings below, wed beauty with a durability that's seldom matched in our own century. Early publishers, in the days when actors like David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and her brother John Philip Kemble graced the stages of London, at least didn't have to worry about one thing: choosing graphically appealing cover illustrations for their books. There were none.

That is certainly no longer the case, particularly in the realm of modestly-priced paperbacks. Publishers in that market are well aware that an ill-conceived cover can seriously undermine sales of a particular book, so they often look for the fresh, the imaginative, the bold in cover art. Quite simply, they're after something that will stand out when viewed along a row of books. Film makers, in promoting their works, look for the same type of graphic singularity.

Pictured above are three powerfully graphic promotional efforts associated with Shakespeare's works: the top two are Penguin paperbacks, the third is a promotional poster for Ralph Fiennes' excellent 2011 film of Coriolanus, set amidst the kind of violent civil war we all learned of watching Balkan states unravel during the 1990's.

In interviews regarding the film, his directorial debut, Fiennes repeatedly stressed his conviction that Shakespeare's works can be as relevant to us today as they have ever been........ perhaps even more so. The poster makes this clear: the film is modern, the film is violent, and yes, the film's ultimate creator is William Shakespeare.

The illustration for the cover of Hamlet at top is by the late great British artist and illustrator Paul Hogarth. The cover for the New Penguin Shakespeare's Othello uses a 17th century woodcut that illustrates Othello's recalling in his adventurous travels of  ".....the Cannibals that each other eat / the Anthropophagi and men whose heads / do grow beneath their shoulders...."  (Act I, Scene 3).

That remark does have a surprising appeal to the imagination, even today, and it's little wonder that some artist decided such a thing was well worth drawing. It makes for one of the more unusual book covers for a play by Shakespeare.