I

Between Bell’s ‘Literary’ edition of 1788 and the Victorian illustrated editions, the illustration of the plays developed rapidly, and in several new directions. The largest single enterprise was the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery which, as well as its two elephant folio volumes of 100 prints, offered an edition of the plays with engravings after paintings specially commissioned for the purpose. This venture, and some other treatments of the plays with which it is conceptually and commercially related, will be discussed in the following chapter. Contemporary with it were a number of other editions that approached the plays through different visual techniques and various degrees of success. All have much to reveal about the changing stature of the plays and their place in national and personal cultural life.

The circumstances of this expansion are suggested by a passage from John Stockdale’s 1784 edition of the plays, the first to appear in a single volume since the First Folio:

The growing readership was aided by several factors. The idea of Shakespeare as part of the national heritage, vigorous among an intellectual and social elite in the 1740s, had by now spread through different social echelons, a knowledge of the plays being seen as a duty as well as a cultural accomplishment. Further, with the appearance of the Johnson–Steevens text, it seemed that the search for an authentic text was complete. Its availability outside copyright meant that publishers – rapidly increasing in number, and establishing themselves as independent of booksellers – were offered a way simultaneously to present their cultural credentials and attract a share of this expanding market.