I

In 1728, the second edition of Pope’s Shakespeare appeared, using the frontispiece plates designed by Louis du Guernier for the Rowe edition of 1714. In the 1730s, Jacob Tonson began to issue the plays individually, commissioning the French artist Pierre or Peter Fourdrinier to produce new plates of the same Rowe images, presumably because they were now worn out. These editions, little more than fascicles each containing a single play, are now largely disregarded, since they are essentially reprints of Rowe’s edition, and also because few survive. They appeared in the face of strong competition from the editions of Robert Walker, each issued in three or four paper parts costing one penny each. They had no illustrations, but the fact that they were the main competitor in ‘the Tonson-Walker battle’ is significant in defining the place of the illustrated edition in the growth of Shakespeare publishing, linking them with the cheapest editions that were available to all, and thus giving them a lowly rank in the hierarchy of Shakespeare publishing. But the commercial skirmish did have a positive outcome, in that the images of Boitard and du Guernier remained current for many years, raising them to considerable prominence in offering the first visual encounter with the plays for the great majority of new readers.