I

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, the most lavish eighteenth-century imperial expedition into the territory of literary painting, had a long preparatory period. Its Prospectus, issued on 1 December 1786, promised a ‘Series of Large and Capital Prints’ and ‘A Most Magnificent and Accurate Edition’ of the plays, but it was not until 1789 that the Gallery opened, with 34 paintings out of the eventual 167. The edition took even longer. Its serial parts began to appear in 1791, but the first engravings came three years later, the whole being completed in 1802. Partly in response to the Boydell venture, partly through other forces driving aesthetic change, the decade and a half that the enterprise took to reach fulfilment saw a number of other approaches to Shakespeare imaging, in illustrated editions, collections of prints, and writings discussing the nature of visual representation.

Because of its sheer scale, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery has overshadowed many of these projects and totally eclipsed others. Their recovery is important, since they reveal the growth of new ways of seeing the plays and their relations to wider aesthetic concerns. Despite their apparent diversity, these works share a fundamental concern: the presentation of the emotions, within fictional or historical narratives, through the conceptual filter of the Picturesque. By implication as much as explicit statement, this exerts a major influence on the invention, style and function of Shakespeare imaging at this period. While the main impact of the Boydell Gallery was through its large paintings, and their reproduction in two elephant folio volumes known as the Collection of Prints, the edition was intended to be a statement of national identity through the authority of its text and the power of its images. In these aims it failed, just as the Gallery failed to establish a national school of history painting. But in departing from these goals it reflected many stances that had developed during the previous decades, responding to new tastes and reading practices, not least concerned with engaging the reader’s states of feeling. Locating Boydell’s edition, and the prints and writings that surround it, within this aesthetic, social and frequently literal landscape, is essential to an understanding of their larger place in the history of Shakespeare imaging, and the change of direction that they mark.