Illustrating Shakespeare by Peter Whitfield (review)

Peter Whitfield is the prolific author of some twenty books on a wide variety of topics, including history, poetry, and literary criticism. His recent books include London: A Life in Maps (2006), A Universe of Books: Readings in World Literature (2007), English Poetry: A New Illustrated History (2008), The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps (2010), The History of Science (2010), and Travel: A Literary History (2012). The former Director of Stanford's International Map Centre in London, Whitfield appears to have succeeded in marking out for himself a place within a particular publishing niche. His intelligently written texts tend to support copious numbers of attractive colored illustrations in books that are beautifully designed and relatively modest in price. Whitfield's Illustrating Shakespeare, like a significant number of his other books since the 1990s, has been published by the British Library and seems marketed toward a popular but educated and informed lay readership. An attractive-looking book that might grace any coffee table, Illustrating Shakespeare invites the casual browser to enter the fascinating world of art based on Shakespeare.

But do not expect ground-breaking research that advances our current state of knowledge, and do not expect analysis that engages rigorously with previous scholarship. Rather, what Whitfield offers is a fast-paced tour through more than three centuries of art inspired by Shakespeare's works. His narrative is free from scholarly apparatus that acknowledges the previous scholarship upon which he is building, or that demonstrates where his opinions and analysis differ from or expand upon what others have done before, or that signals opinions and facts that the author may be placing before the reader for the first time. In contrast to previous scholarly volumes that tend to concentrate on a single facet of Shakespearean art or a single period of time, Whitfield's book, with its mix of commentary and more than one hundred images, attempts within a single 160-page volume to delineate most of the key varieties of art based on Shakespeare from the earliest known images to the present time.

Whitfield begins his verbal and pictorial narrative by touching on key questions concerning the purpose of Shakespearean art. He examines the degree to which artists from the eighteenth century on began to reach toward "some essential inner truth of the plays" (8). He looks at the breaking away from images limited to a reflection of stage performance and the advent of works of art with a life independent of the theater, a development that relates to the emergence of an iconography of Shakespeare. To complete his introductory chapter, Whitfield then cites the work of such outstanding artists as Fuseli, Delacroix, and Abbey as somehow representative of the epitome of this change, arguing that "[w]hat these artists were aiming at was not merely to give a plain, simple, instantly recognisable snapshot from some part of a play, but to create an image that was memorable in itself, that became a work of art in its own right—and that, as it did so, might subtly alter the way we view that play" (14).

Successive chapters then take the reader on a more or less chronological journey, beginning with discussion of two images: Henry Peacham's 1595 pen-and-ink drawing purportedly of a scene from Titus Andronicus, and the unsigned frontispiece engraving of Lucrece's suicide from the 1655 edition of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece. Summarizing only some of the controversy concerning the Peacham drawing, and stumbling somewhat over the Lucrece frontispiece (the engraving is not necessarily by William Faithorne, and the male figure in the engraving is not necessarily Lucrece's husband Collatine), Whitfield moves quickly to Nicholas Rowe's six-volume edition of Shakespeare printed by Jacob Tonson in 1709. This groundbreaking work, with its series of small engravings, one for each play, is commonly agreed to be the starting point for the systematic illustration of Shakespeare's plays. Unfortunately, Whitfield's...