With a jackass' head, you could do stand-up in Vegas

Taking a very brief departure from this blog's usual focus on Shakespearean book illustration, it's worth mentioning that Agecroft Hall's annual summer Richmond Shakespeare Festival is gearing up for productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (June 12th - July 6th) and Richard III (July 10th - August 3rd). As usual, considerable effort will be made to promote the two plays with posters, ads and other "visuals" designed with the hope of attracting attention, at least for a moment or two.

Midsummer and Richard III could hardly be more dissimilar in mood, the former crafted by Shakespeare at the height of his comic sensibilities, the latter presenting the playgoer (or reader) with as iniquitous a character as ever stalked across the Elizabethan stage.

The recent discovery and identification of the bones of Richard III, killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and unceremoniously buried under what would eventually become a modern-day parking lot, gives Shakespearean troupes all over the world a great incentive to put on the play that immortalized Richard's villainy.

Agecroft Hall's conjectural poster for the play takes advantage of the fact that Agecroft has an excellent copy of Richard III's wax seal, which was affixed to virtually all royal correspondence, treaties, and settlements during his reign. The skull is an accurate resin facsimile of the type used in medical study.

Regarding Midsummer, Shakespeare was well aware of one of life's fundamental truths: a man looks hysterically funny if he's wearing the head of a jackass.

This being the case, the enchanted Nick Bottom's beastly but lovable countenance has long since become iconic, and can never be too far off the mark when illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream are called for. The image of blissful contentment above is from a late nineteenth-century set of Shakespeare's plays.

Be sure all trays are in their upright and locked position

The human imagination can take flight with Shakespeare's The Tempest for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the physical ambiguity of two whimsical characters: Ariel and Caliban. On stage, and surely in the mind's eye as well, the bodily forms of these two have been imagined and re-imagined ad infinitum.

How exactly might this spirit Ariel look, flying on errands at the behest of Prospero? Or this fish-like Caliban, so odoriferous to the finely-tuned nose of Trinculo? An artist can slam into a wall here: ambiguity has to be set aside and a specific look assigned to a given character. It's a book illustrator's job and it is often not an easy one.

When illustrating Shakespeare's scenes, artists have frequently latched onto a play's most whimsical moments as a source of inspiration; The Tempest has those in great abundance.

"On the bat's back I do fly" Shakespeare has Ariel sing (Act V, Scene 1). That flight of fancy is captured in this late nineteenth-century illustration (above) by an artist identified in the lower left corner as "Chadon" or "C. Hadon." It is frustrating that the Cassell, Petter & Gilpin edition (London, New York) in which it appears includes no more specific information about this particular artist/engraver.

Depicting the earth-bound Caliban inevitably seems to be more problematic with a great many artists. Since Shakespeare has the character described as "fish-like," that raises the question of how such a creature can be so depicted yet nevertheless be able to converse with humans.

Pictured below is one solution frequently resorted to: Caliban (seen to have thrown himself on the ground to the right of the dog-fleeing Trinculo and Stephano) is given webbed, frog-like hands and outlandish ears but for the most part seems recognizably human. Prospero and Ariel have an ethereal presence in the upper background, in keeping with the magical atmosphere of the entire play.

Perhaps this chaotic scene (from Act 4, Scene 1) with snarling mongrels hot on the heels of the comic trio, was almost as much fun to illustrate as it was for Shakespeare to write.

The initials "HSC" appear in the lower left corner and "JQ" in the lower right, evidently indicating the artist and the engraver, respectively. No further information about them was published in any of the three volumes of the set. They will sadly have to remain anonymous, at least for the time being.

Do we not bleed?

There is probably no other character in all of Shakespeare's dramatic works who, despite making relatively few appearances in a play, calls the reader to conscience with more force than Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:

                                      "..........I am a Jew. Hath not
a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions?  Fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,  
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the
same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick
us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge?.........."
                                                          Act III, Scene 1

Shylock all but steals the show; only Portia can compete with him at such heights of characterization. Book illustrators of Shakespeare's works couldn't help but take notice. Shylock is invariably depicted graphically as a greedy, grumpy, and grasping Semitic curmudgeon. The creation of this iconic literary character came to pass despite the limited contact and experience that Shakespeare could possibly have had with Jewish people: they had been kicked out of England when King Edward I promulgated the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, and weren't officially allowed to return until 1656.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, there were believed to be any number of Jews who stayed in the country by affecting a conversion to Christianity while still practicing the Hebrew faith in privacy. There were also Jewish figures in the upper reaches of the English court, including one Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish physician to Queen Elizabeth who was implicated in a Spanish plot to have her assassinated and was hanged, quite possibly an innocent man, in 1594. Some Shakespearean scholars believe that Lopez may have been the playwright's model for Shylock; The Merchant of Venice is believed to have been written within several years after the Lopez episode.

Shown above are two depictions of Shylock, published nearly a century apart, that vilify the moneylender: the top is from a 1798 copy of Merchant (London, printed by T. Bensley, Fleet St.) that relies to a great extent on Shylock's dark "Jewish gabardine" and dour expression to create a sense of menace. The upright postures of the two figures are typical of Shakespearean illustrations during the 1700's: artists then seemed to put a great deal of stock in hand gestures to convey the essence of any relationship between people. Most stage acting at that time was similarly restrained.

In the second depiction, first published in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the knife-wielding Shylock expresses both surprise and suspicion as he examines the bond in the hands of a disguised Portia, whose lawyerly demeanor is bettered only by the timeliness of her arrival on the scene. Or so would have thought Antonio, who was about to lose a pound of flesh and his life in the bargain. Readers mesmerized by Shylock should be forgiven for forgetting that it is Antonio who is referred to in the title of the play.



                                                                       

Kiss me, you fool

Pictured above is one of the remarkably elegant watercolors of the Edwardian artist Charles Robinson (1870 - 1937), used in this instance in a page illustration of a volume of The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (Gramercy Books, New York, 1991). The distinct influences of the Art Nouveau movement, tinged with the delicacy of Japanese prints (a look that had appealed enormously to Vincent Van Gogh, among other artists) can clearly be seen here. The Pre-Raphaelites' outlook, short-lived but glorious, also had attractions for Robinson.

It would take the cataclysmic events of World War I to all but obliterate the sensibilities that held these styles in the highest regard.

Robinson's work often tended toward the whimsical, making it ideal for the numerous children's books that he illustrated. In the case of Shakespeare's sonnets, Robinson's abilities were well suited to accompany some of the most elevated poetry in the English language.