Shakespeare’s Lady 8

The printers’ ornament that Richard Field originally used on the title pages of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece brought to Shakespeare’s first publications a meaningful set of associations, and over the next two decades would be affected by Shakespeare’s growing authority. Linked to France and Huguenot print culture, the ornament provides a clue to the aesthetic environment of Shakespeare’s works and the ways in which their heterogeneous content and style pleased his earliest admirers. As what we could call Shakespeare’s “Elizabethan brand,” this ornament offers insight to the cultural, political, and commercial contexts in and through which he was established as an author.