The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875 (review)

In this quasi-sequel to his Painting Shakespeare (2006), Mr. Sillars addresses illustrated editions of the plays, as opposed to paintings that stand independently of the text. A study of this kind requires broad knowledge of art history, book history, literary history, and popular and polite cultural studies, as well as a sophisticated critical and epistemological armamentarium. A jack of all these trades and more, Mr. Sillars reads texts and discusses pictures with spirit, tact, and imagination.

He has particularly sharp things to say about how illustrations of the early eighteenth century were created and how they worked, and he argues persuasively that they have had unrecognized long-term cultural consequences. He debunks the widespread assumption that the frontispiece "cuts" after Boitard in Rowe's famous 1709 edition of Shakespeare straightforwardly record scenes from contemporary performances of plays, though they may reflect theatrical conventions and perhaps performances. Boitard's designs contributed to the development of the textual / pictorial Shakespeare that has largely displaced theatrical performance as the primary embodiment of his dramatic art. Mr. Sillars argues that the Boitard cuts are elaborately responsive to such disparate phenomena as Baroque/Mannerist iconography, alternative pictorial languages as those of LeBrun and Bulwer, and post-Shakespearean conventions of set design and costuming. What appears to us to be representational clumsiness stems partly from the semiotic ambitiousness of Boitard's illustrative project, in which very different modes of pictorial expression jostle.

Mr. Sillars appreciates the challenge Boitard faced: illustrating an edition of a playscript is different from illustrating the Bible or a poem. Boitard had to convey a conception of the performed play in a single dense two-dimensional image that could serve as a visual counterpart to Rowe's new kind of Shakespeare text, but he had to do so before that text had been created, often without any guide to the visual aspects of the play other than the much less helpful texts that preceded Rowe. When Louis du Guernier (famous as the illustrator of Pope) created frontispieces for the second edition of Rowe in 1714, he tamed Boitard's unruly semiotics with a naturalism that renders his illustrations much more congenial to the modern eye, but whose placid surfaces mask their complexity.

Reused and reengraved repeatedly in the Scriblerian period, and influential far beyond their original audience, versions of the meta-Baroque Boitard illustrations were eventually replaced by a generation of Rococo illustrations, mostly depicting new scenes. Adeptly negotiating the complexities of competing texts and illustrated editions, Mr. Sillars notes the ways that historical scholarship (especially textual) has distorted their reception. The engravings after Boucher's student Gravelot in the second edition of Theobald's Shakespeare have received little serious attention, in part because that edition is textually insignificant, and also because Rococo art is still regarded as elegant but empty. For Mr. Sillars, Gravelot's designs constitute a major advance, employing a new mode of illustrating texts that he had developed for such novels as Pamela and Tom Jones (in which, I would say, he was influenced by the techniques in Hogarth's novelistic original narratives, techniques which Hogarth had drawn from both Boitard and du Guernier). Francis Hayman's and Anthony Walker's illustrations evolved the form further, merging Rococo presentation with even more sophisticated naturalistic representation, novelistic characterization, and greatly increased emotional engagement and complexity.

From here, Mr. Sillars moves beyond the Scriblerian period, covering Romantic and Victorian visual responses to Shakespearean texts.