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.