Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Colour plates
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Play, page and image
- Chapter 2 Spatial narratives and Rowe’s Shakespeare
- Chapter 3 Rococo and Reflection: Gravelot, Hayman and Walker
- Chapter 4 Bell, performance and reading
- Chapter 5 ‘Ornaments, derived from fancy’:1 Illustrating the plays, 1780–1840
- Chapter 6 The growth of feeling: Boydell, Taylor and the Picturesque
- Chapter 7 The extra-illustrated edition
- Chapter 8 Early Victorian populism: Charles Knight and Kenny Meadows
- Chapter 9 Selous, Gilbert and reader involvement
- Chapter 10 Decline and renewal
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Plate Section
Chapter 10 - Decline and renewal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Colour plates
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Play, page and image
- Chapter 2 Spatial narratives and Rowe’s Shakespeare
- Chapter 3 Rococo and Reflection: Gravelot, Hayman and Walker
- Chapter 4 Bell, performance and reading
- Chapter 5 ‘Ornaments, derived from fancy’:1 Illustrating the plays, 1780–1840
- Chapter 6 The growth of feeling: Boydell, Taylor and the Picturesque
- Chapter 7 The extra-illustrated edition
- Chapter 8 Early Victorian populism: Charles Knight and Kenny Meadows
- Chapter 9 Selous, Gilbert and reader involvement
- Chapter 10 Decline and renewal
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
I
At about the same time as the separate parts of Howard Staunton’s edition were being issued, John Dicks began to publish the weekly parts of his Complete Works of Shakspere with a Memoir. Each contained two plays and cost just one penny. The coarse, wood-pulp fascicles were simply sewn together with no cover, and the need to save space reduced the print to surely the smallest point size compatible with the act of reading, the complete text of Hamlet covering a mere thirty-four pages. Despite these constraints, every play was prefaced with an illustration, perhaps to attract prospective purchasers when displayed on railway bookstalls. These images turn the restricted space to their advantage, presenting a single exchange between two characters that, with its locating caption line, reveals a driving force of the play or offers a critical reading of some other kind, as an initial direction, reductive but suggestive, for the reader. Some of the images are signed ‘Ball’, others ‘Williamson’, but most are unnamed: the crude draughtsmanship places them beneath the aesthetic radar of the Dalziels or the more prolific Victorian artists and engravers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 , pp. 324 - 345Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008