ABSTRACT

Shakespeare has inspired a vast number of paintings, illustrations, prints, caricatures, cartoons, comics, and sculptures, and has had an enormous impact on visual culture. Since the eighteenth century, many editions of the plays have been illustrated by contemporary artists: sometimes imagining scenes from the plays themselves; sometimes imagining events occurring off stage; sometimes providing illustrations that annotate places and objects mentioned in the text; and sometimes depicting actors in roles or scenes representing actual or supposed theatrical productions. From Nicholas Rowe’s Shakespeare in the early eighteenth century to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) recent edition of Shakespeare’s plays, many editions provide testimony to the ongoing demand for texts to provide visual referents to the plays. Artists have created memorable paintings of Shakespearean scenes. In particular the Boydell Gallery in London, despite its eventual failure, was a serious attempt in the late eighteenth century to capitalize commercially on the contemporary interest in Shakespeare, while also developing a British school of history painting based on representations of scenes from the plays. Alongside these developments, artists began to portray actors in Shakespearean roles as illustrations to edited volumes, in oils for major exhibitions, and in engravings for the burgeoning print market. In time the focus for representing stage performances shifted to photography, which in itself created new approaches to recording scenes from the plays.