Presenting Shakespeare: 1,100 Posters from around the World by Mirko Ilić and Steven Heller (review)

Mirko Ilić and Steven Heller bring together here over a thousand posters created for international theatrical productions of William Shakespeare’s plays. In a work dominated by images over text, Ilić and Heller present what they refer to as ‘the first ever curated collection of international theatrical posters of Shakespeare’s work on stage’ (p. 15). Ilić and Heller include only a partial selection of their exhaustive survey of posters (numbering over fifteen hundred items), edited from sources from around the globe, and including productions from countries such as Japan, South Africa, Colombia, India, Russia, and Australia. What remains is large and diverse collection of 1,100 posters produced over nearly two centuries, that are arguably ‘historically significant, aesthetically desirable, [and] conceptually intelligent’ (p. 21).

Presenting Shakespeare is divided into twenty-one sections, including a brief preface by famed director, Julie Taymor, an Introduction by Ilić and Heller, and nineteen chapters of posters. Each chapter begins with a short written summary of the posters selected, in which Ilić and Heller highlight notable posters and productions and offer other important curatorial insights. This is followed by reproductions of the posters, covering numerous pages.

In their Introduction, Ilić and Heller trace the history of how Shakespeare’s plays have been advertised, from flags and banners, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century playbills dominated by typography, and onto modern posters incorporating everything from photography to illustration. Ilić and Heller argue that the earliest forms of advertising for Shakespeare’s work emerged in 1599: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men raised a flag featuring the mythical character, Hercules, carrying a globe on his shoulders, to announce the opening of The Globe theatre in London. Flags of different colours were also flown over The Globe to advertise – to a population who were often unable to read and write – the type of play being performed: white for comedy, black for tragedy, and red for history.

The use of a simple ‘visual gesture that represents a production’ (p. 11) is by no means an exclusively early modern advertising trick, but is prevalent throughout the various posters found in Ilić and Heller’s collection. Taymor notes in her preface that the posters chosen by Ilić and Heller offer ‘emblematic clues [found] in Shakespeare’s productions’ (p. 11). For example, motifs are consistently repeated within designs for certain plays, such as daggers for Macbeth, crowns for the History plays, and skulls for Hamlet. While these are obvious examples of designers summarising a play’s themes and intricacies in visual shorthand, not all the posters selected are solely representational or ridden with visual clichés; several posters obviously demonstrate how ‘Shakespeare’s imagery can be metaphorical’ (p. 21) and allow for multiple artistic interpretations.

Some of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are given their own separate chapters, while other production posters are grouped together into chapters titled by genre, for example, ‘The Histories’, and ‘The Tragicomedies’. While obviously some plays are more popular than others and are subsequently adapted to stage more often, the running order of chapters in the contents page is somewhat confusing: it randomly moves from major plays to genres with no suggestion of why this order has been chosen. Perhaps a better solution to organising such a large and diverse selection of posters would have been to sort items by genre and then by play. This certainly would have given more balance to a collection, which while diverse, is dominated by the more frequently produced plays. Additional critical analysis of particular posters, as well as detailed curatorial insights as to why some posters were chosen over others, would have further strengthened the collection.

Presenting Shakespeare contains neither an index, nor a bibliography. The absence of an index is especially frustrating for readers hoping to search for...