Stuart Sillars. The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 394p. $120 hardback (ISBN 978521878371). LC2008-025988.
This lavishly illustrated book (16 color plates, 150 illustrations) aims to make a contribution to the history of reading through an examination of the major editions of Shakespeare’s plays published between 1709 and 1875. Sillars (University of Bergen, formerly with the University of Cambridge) is also the author of Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge, 2006). That work focused on scenes from Shakespeare as reflected in British art during the long 18th century; the present effort complements the earlier book but focuses on the printed page.
As Sillars points out in his first chapter, for many people, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, the experience of Shakespeare comes via the printed page rather than performance. (This despite the recent attention critics have given to the plays in performance.) Sillars does not deny the importance of this line of criticism, but he wishes to look at play texts as objects in their own right: rather than considering the visual elements of the plays as performed on stage, he wants to examine the book as its own kind of "Theatrum," or arena for performance, parallel to the plays as acted. He is especially interested in considering the way in which the common reader (and not the scholar) might have approached the plays, whether through silent reading, or with companions, and the way such readings might have contributed to the creation of Shakespeare as England’s national (and best?) poet. Illustrations, especially early engraved frontispieces, would have served both as a connection to the play in performance (a memory device), but also as a "theatregram" that revealed the key actions and characters in the play. The placement of these illustrations is significant as well: a frontispiece would immediately shape the reader’s ideas about the play, even before he or she had read a single word, while illustrations placed within the text could affect the pace of reading and the reader’s understanding of the action. One of the most interesting aspects of Sillars’ argument about "illustrated Shakespeares" is how the placement of illustrations on right- or left-hand pages, before or after the action, before or after the plays’ divisions into acts and scenes, could affect the reading experience. Even placing illustrations horizontally rather than vertically on the page disrupts the flow of reading. He points out that the mise-en-scène of the stage gets translated into the mise-en-page of the book.
Illustrations might also affect groups of readers in different ways. What Sillars calls a "new" reader (one who had no acquaintance with the play) might approach a text differently from what he calls a "qualified" reader (one who has some prior knowledge of the play’s actions or themes). The aim of his book, says Sillars, is to look at the way readers decoded the visual in printed editions of Shakespeare. His method is based on a study of particular editions of Shakespeare, from Nicholas Rowe’s octavo of 1709 through the popular mass-market volumes of the Victorian era. The popularity of the nineteenth-century cheap editions was enormous—one publisher claimed sales of 700,000 copies in a two-year period. Their ubiquity, argues Sillars, meant that the illustrated Shakespeare offered a very tangible way to shape a reader’s beliefs and to impose a set of cultural norms.
In his chapter on the Rowe edition, Sillars notes that publisher Jacob Tonson chose a dramatist, not a scholar, to edit the plays, thereby placing Shakespeare in the contemporary world of the theatergoer, not that of an academic editor such as Samuel Johnson or Lewis Theobald. But, interestingly, Sillars suggests that the artist who produced the illustrations, Frenchman François Boitard, was unlikely to have had time to see the plays in performance and so must have created his images based on his reading of the plays. Sillars spends most of the chapter showing how Boitard’s illustrations fell in with earlier modes of illustration, with their use of classic architectural frames, emblemata, drapery, and multitemporal events in the same illustration. He notes that even the choice of which scenes to illustrate had a potential effect on the reader: the frontispiece for Romeo and Juliet, for example, pictures the death of the two young lovers (not the balcony scene), thus privileging that moment, that scene in the play. The illustrations for the second Rowe edition (1714), engraved by Louis du Guernier, displayed a more naturalistic style, presaging the transition in painting to the narrative and the realistic.
Sillars’ chapter on the Theobald edition of 1740 provides close "readings" of the illustrations designed by Hubert Gravelot, who also illustrated Pamela and Tom Jones. The tendency toward naturalism, as evidenced in the rise of the novel, was eventually reflected in the illustrations for Shakespeare; urban scenes and landscapes, not stage sets, became the settings for key moments in the plays. The illustrations for Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare (1864) could have come out of any Victorian popular novel, says Sillars. This connection to a completely different genre, the novel, leads Sillars to suggest that the experience of reading plays was to become similar to that of reading novels. Readers would invest themselves in the action of the plays in the same way that they involved themselves in the cultural concerns of the nineteenth-century novel. Marriage, class, commerce, the British Empire—illustrations reflected these common concerns and provided a link between the popular contemporary genre of the novel and the plays of Shakespeare.
Sillars’ discussion of John Bell’s editions of Shakespeare (1774, 1788) offers a useful snapshot of the publishing industry during the late eighteenth century. Bell published illustrated editions for the masses, and these created, according to Sillars, "an intricate pattern of commercial, intellectual and cultural intersections." The texts were based on prompt-books used in Drury Lane; the plays were issued in weekly parts, as well as in standard volumes; the frontispieces with actors’ portraits in character played to a contemporary cult of celebrity. And, while Bell gave the binder instructions on the placement of illustrations within the volume, book buyers could, and did, create volumes suited to their tastes and needs.
Sillars reports on further developments in the illustrated Shakespeare industry, such as the publication of miniature editions (for women readers) and a print edition of the paintings from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. (See Sillars’ earlier work for more on the Boydell project.) Sillars’ chapter on the publishing phenomenon of the extra-illustrated, or grangerised, edition serves as an example of the perfect "dialogue between reader and text," with the reader creating his or her own personal version of the illustrated plays. (Sillars relies on two copies of such editions from the Folger Library.) In the same chapter, Sillars also traces the connections between illustrations for the history plays and the publication of illustrated biographical histories; this linked Shakespeare and his characters with British royalty, thus guaranteeing his position as the British national poet.
My review thus far has focused on Sillars’ discussion of visual imagery. However, his art-historical approach frequently serves to illuminate the action of the plays as well. His description of an illustration for the ending of Measure for Measure perfectly captures the perplexities of that problem play’s ending. There are many such explications of book illustrations that demonstrate how art can inform one’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays.
The book concludes with Sillars’ review of the current state of illustrated Shakespeare editions. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the market had been saturated, and the cheap illustrated edition "became associated with the least positive aspects of populism." Scholarly editions, for the most part, eschewed illustration, and only luxury editions focused on artwork. The author ventures to say, though, that the ready availability of digital images might lead to a resurrection of the illustrated edition, with every reader free to do his or her own "electronic grangerising."
This absorbing book will be of interest to art historians, students of book history, and literary scholars. I have only two small negatives to offer: there appear to be errors in the references to the color plates, beginning with chapter seven. And smaller college libraries will undoubtedly find the price prohibitive.—Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Indiana University