The Victorian Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Wood-Engraved Editions, 1840-60

Since the birth of illustrated editions of Shakespeare's plays in the 18th century and their unprecedented development in the 19th century, artists have been revealing the maximum aesthetic potential of the text by adding spatial narratives alongside the text of Shakespeare's plays. The visual manifestation of the printed play is actually a factor that blurs the boundary between the text and the reader. Hence, examining the aesthetic importance of these editions is considered essential in the field of visual representation of Shakespeare's works. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to manifest the aesthetic importance of book illustrations in the Victorian editions of Shakespeare's works and to answer the question, "How did the use of wood engraving technique in illustrating Shakespeare's works enhance the hermeneutic understanding of the plays?". It should be noted that this article is a library-based, qualitative, descriptive and analytical research in which the visual representation of the selected scenes of two of the most important editions of this era that had utilised the wood engraving technique and were published between 1840 and 1860 (the peak years of using this technique) are examined. The mentioned editions are respectively attempted by Barry Cornwall and Howard Staunton.
Robert Tyas, a British publisher, issued the highly imaginative three-volume edition of The Works of Shakspere – Comedies, Tragedies, Histories – by Bryan Waller Procter in 1843 under the pseudo-name of Barry Cornwall. The edition is notable for its more than 1000 wood engravings by John Orrin Smith based on the designs by Kenny Meadows, an illustrator and caricaturist who was among the first illustrators to recommend wood engraving to publishers. The print-cultural significance of this over-illustrated edition lies in the implicit reality that printing technologies in the nineteenth century had developed so substantially that publishers could undertake such ambitious projects, thus disclosing the possibility of finding a market for these reading materials which had been cheapened thanks to the lower cost of production.
Meadows began his career by designing illustrations to James Robinson Planche’s work on Shakespeare’s costumes. However, while the experience Meadows gained from his work with Planche was considered as a valuable preparation for the Shakespeare edition, more important is his collection Heads of the People. Published in 1840, this consisted of caricatures of English types, accompanied by short character sketches mostly by Douglas Jerrold, but with contributions from Thackeray and Leigh Hunt. It gave Meadows experience of developing character through exaggeration, established his partnership with the engraver Orrin Smith, and allowed experiment in the placing of images. Hence, what is unique to Cornwall’s edition is that its illustrations are somehow like caricatures. Of course, they are not like the caricatures of the 21st century which we see nowadays, but I do believe that these illustrations, actually, can be regarded as the starting point of drawing caricatures for Shakespeare’s plays.
Then, the next significant edition, Howard Staunton’s edition of Shakespeare’s Works, which was published by Routledge, appeared in monthly parts between November 1857 and May 1860. Staunton’s edition contained over 800 wood engravings and so presented itself as a rival alternative to such illustrated Shakespeare editions as those put out by Tyas. The designs were the work of John Gilbert, a formidably prolific draughtsman who drew directly on wood and whose illustrations of Shakespeare may be the most expressive because they maintain realistic proportions and mise-en-scène while also giving characters a psychological realism that can occasionally be unsettling. Gilbert’s work display a striking sense of the actual and avoids caricature or heavy-handed comedy: as in performance, the comedy is most effective because it is taken seriously and his illustrations demonstrate his talent for constructing believable individuals rather than generic archetypes – the same talent for which the playwright has frequently received praise. His wood blocks were, then, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers, the most influential company of wood engravers of the time.
The status of the wood engraving workshops was significantly altered by the revival of the craft in the 1840s, its gradual refinement in the 1850s, and its pinnacle in the 1860s. To meet the demand for the abundance of illustrated books that characterised the middle years of the Victorian era, large wood engraving workshops developed and the distinctions between ‘gentleman artists’ and ‘artisan engravers’ in terms of labour divisions were formed. To expedite the process and meet the tightening production schedules, publishers no longer had to look for a qualified engraver for their artists; instead, they could send their work to reputable engraving companies to be trimmed to a deadline. Therefore, the names of the engraving companies Dalziel or Swain are often found on blocks from the middle of the 19th century. A system of masters, journeymen, and apprentices supported this mass production. Large white areas were typically left to be routed out at the end by a junior apprentice while a senior engraver started on a new block.
The critical insight of this study is also obtained from Gotthold Lessing's theoretical principles about spatial and temporal arts in order to reach the conclusion that the use of wood engraving technique in producing spatial narratives had the capability to improve the aesthetic effect of the plays in various ways such as designing a high number of images, using vignette, and locating illustrations in the same page as their temporal narratives. Well-worth mentioning that Lessing’s idea is that literature is an art of time, painting an art of space – temporal and spatial. Reading takes place in time; the signs received are uttered or inscribed in time; and the events represented or narrated take place in time. Thus, there is a kind of homology or convenient relation between medium, message, and the mental process of decoding. In accounts of visual art, too, a similar homology operates: the medium consists of forms displayed in space; these forms represent bodies and their relationships in space; and perception of both medium and message is instantaneous, taking no discernible time.
Eventually, however, painting and poetic text should be like two just and friendly neighbours, neither of whom is permitted to take unseemly liberties in the heart of the other's realm, but who practise mutual tolerance on the boundaries and achieve a peaceful settlement for all the minor interference on the rights of the other. Painting is granted certain types of superior power; it makes a beautiful picture from vivid sensible impressions, whereas poetry works with "the feeble uncertain representations of arbitrary signs; it possesses that power of illusion which art possesses above poetry in the presentation of visible objects; and at times when poetry stammers and eloquence grows dumb, painting may serve as an interpreter.