That's gotta hurt

Many of Shakespeare's greatest works are infused with violence: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, King Lear, to name but a handful. The playwright knew that a corollary of violence is a life being lived at the edge of hereafter. One enters a world of startling clarity and directness that so often gets lost in the tranquilizing fog of more temperate times.

Illustrators of Shakespeare's works often make effective use of the visceral nature of violence as an attention grabber, as arresting in our twenty-first century as it was in Shakespeare's late sixteenth. Or in Homer's Bronze Age, for that matter.

Pictured above are two superlative book cover illustrations, for Shakespearean plays that are steeped in violence. At top is the work of the late great British artist Paul Hogarth, whose illustration for The Penguin Shakespeare Henry V is, remarkably, as humorous as it is memorable. Many an arrow flew at Agincourt; one can almost imagine a bemused Shakespeare laughing over Hogarth's whimsy, which might have seemed out of place if Henry V had a darker mood, like Macbeth. In this case, it works very well.

The illustration for the cover of the Signet Classic Julius Caesar is by the renowned, New York City-born Milton Glaser, a 2009 recipient of the National Medal of Arts and an exhibitor of one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, and in Europe. In Glaser's depiction of Caesar, the bloody deed has been initiated; some of the co-conspirators can be imagined waiting but for a moment to sink their blades into Caesar's body and share in the guilt of so epic a deed.

Artists and photographers alike refer to images such as these as having a "clean" background, devoid of anything peripheral, clear of any distractions that might cause the eye to wander. Sometimes less is more, and these are two compelling cases in point.

Along with the many posts below, most dealing primarily with Shakespearean book illustration, the reader might also like to visit the Agecroft Hall blog  shakespearetheage.blogspot.com   , and in addition get both a visual and audio feel for the fascinating world of Agecroft by clicking on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxp-NVugSdQ  .

Remorse, regret, revulsion

Agecroft Hall is presently hosting the annual Richmond Shakespeare Festival; the play of the moment is Richard III, one of the premier tales of villainy in all of English literature. In it, we've got plenty to be dismayed about, not the least of which is the volte face of Lady Anne Neville, who does the unthinkable: she marries the nefarious Richard of Gloucester, the very man who killed her husband and his father: Edward, Prince of Wales and the devout but hapless King Henry VI.

Pictured above, from The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare; Illustrated (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1850) is a D.L. Glover stipple engraving of Lady Anne in an appropriately nauseated posture, obviously disconcerted at the very idea of becoming Richard's bride. But to the altar with the up-and-coming Boar she did indeed go, regretting it for the rest of her short, sad life.

As mentioned in an earlier posting, the volumes of this particular set of Shakespeare's works were evidently published with a woman's sensibilities foremost in mind: each play is accompanied by an engraving of a prominent female character. Of all the engravings, none depicts a more emotionally divided, restless soul than Lady Anne.

Grinding friendship to powder

Artists must find it a bit heartrending to depict the one scene in Shakespeare that virtually no one ever wanted to contemplate: the rejection of Falstaff by his erstwhile friend, Prince Hal, now raised to the English throne as King Henry V and in no mood for nonsense.

The two had enlivened Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 1 with their delightful wit. Readers and playgoers can be easily forgiven for harboring hopes that Fat Jack Falstaff would prosper and shine under the protective wing of the new monarch.

But such was not to be: Prince Hal had long since seen the need to

                                           "....imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond'red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him...."

                                                           (Act I, Scene 2)

All this required a renunciation of his misspent, benignly feral youth: it was suddenly time to act like a king and act like a king he would. Prince Hal could no longer let the besotted Falstaff besmirch his kingly dignity, as he made clear during his coronation procession in Henry IV, Part 2: 

"I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester!"

                                                          (Act V, Scene 5)

Shown above is one of the delightfully whimsical illustrations of the artist Jack Wolfgang Beck (1923-1988), "whose curious figures recall the childhood dreamlife" (Village Voice, Oct. 31, 1956).
The Chicago-born Beck, one of the founding exhibitors of The Loft Gallery in Manhattan, depicted the rotund Falstaff as open-armed in anticipation of the royal affection that was about to be heaped upon him, only to have the newly-crowned Hal suddenly turn cold, disdainfully waving away his former boon companion.

Time and fortune can grind everything, including friendship, to powder.   

Fuseli and the Boydell enterprise

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Swiss-born and with a somewhat iconoclastic temperament, had this feather in his cap: he helped raise the stature of Shakespearean illustration with a prolific outpouring of paintings that reflected his own tumultuous inner nature. Fuseli's work unquestionably furthered the genre of theatrical painting as distinct from the type of historical painting that had characterized much of the previous century.

And evidently nothing inspired him to reach for the brush more than Shakespeare: Fuseli was to become a prominent contributor to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London's Pall Mall. The gallery enjoyed a high-profile yet short-lived run, from May 1789 until 1803, by which time the Napoleonic menace had wreaked havoc on a great many British commercial enterprises. At least Fuseli's works were in good company: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, among others, also had contributed paintings on Shakespearean themes to the gallery.

Boydell's overall plan had involved using the gallery not only as a profitable venture in itself, but as a publicity vehicle for the subscription sale of sets of Shakespeare's works featuring fine engravings done from the Gallery paintings. Evidently, some of the engravings turned out to be somewhat less than fine, and the production of the entire set of works slowed to a crawl, creating a great deal of unfavorable publicity for Boydell. Ultimately, the works of Fuseli, Reynolds, and the others were auctioned off in 1805.

Despite the gallery's demise, Fuseli continued to create paintings of Shakespearean scenes; they clearly appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Pictured above is his Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812, oil on canvas, now at the Tate in London). In his younger days, Fuseli had done a watercolor of the famous actor David Garrick in this same scene; the version above shows the interest he developed in the starkly rendered human form. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, he could hardly have chosen a darker moment.