Case VII-VIII: Shakespeare and the Book since the Eighteenth-Century

Audio tour: Curator Alan Galey discusses Case VII and VIII

Printing was a surprisingly conservative industry for much of its early history, with relatively little technological change since Shakespeare’s time, but the industrialization of printing in the nineteenth century radically transformed the ways books were designed, produced, and experienced. The book arts have been responding to those changes ever since, and Shakespeare’s works have provided fertile ground for reimagining the nature of the book, from illustration, to typography, to format, to binding, to other aspects of physical form. The various forms of books have shaped our experience of Shakespeare, and so, in turn, have Shakespeare’s works influenced the forms that books have taken. That mutual relationship between mediation and imagination, as expressed through the history of Shakespearean books, is the subject of the present case.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Scenes from The Winter’s Tale. London: Day and Son, [1865].

The new technique of chromolithographic printing allowed Victorian gift books to employ lavish colour in their design. This volume was illuminated by Owen Jones (1809–1874) and Henry Warren (1830–1911). Shakespeare’s imaginative and spectacle-oriented late romances, such as The Winter’s Tale, supplied rich subjects for colour illustration. In the climactic scene pictured here, the remorseful King Leontes encounters what he believes to be a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had condemned many years before in a fit of misguided jealousy, leading to her apparent death. In this scene of belated remorse and reconciliation, the mysteriously lifelike statue of Hermione descends from the pedestal to forgive Leontes, and apparently to join him again as his wife. Is she real, or is this some kind of magic? Shakespeare leaves us to wonder.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Shakespeare’s Household Words. London: Griffith and Farran, [1859].

While showing off new techniques for colour printing, Shakespeare’s Household Words also continues a much older tradition of anthologizing, digesting, and repackaging Shakespeare’s works into small, quotable pieces. This tradition found new life in Victorian England, where the idea of literature as moral exemplar intersected with the idea of texts as recycled information. Shakespeare’s Household Words is also typical of the genre of Victorian gift-books, which packaged morality as an attractive commodity, and presented quotation-collecting as a viable form of reading.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Sentiments and Similes of William Shakespeare. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851.

This volume’s black papier mâché boards, inlaid with a terra cotta portrait, show how a book’s binding can become an expressive medium. Described as a ‘reliquary’ by its editor and illuminator Henry Noel Humphreys (1810-1879), this volume collects Shakespeare quotations under thematic headings on colourful chromolithographed pages. For modern examples of distinctly Shakespearean book bindings, see Don Taylor’s Illustrations for Macbeth in the next case, and Robert Wu’s Midsummer Night’s Dream on the lower level.

On loan from Massey College, University of Toronto

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The Works of William Shakespeare [The Globe Shakespeare]. Edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1864.

The Globe Shakespeare was an edition for an empire. In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the British Empire, it was the book that English civil servants traditionally brought with them, along with the King James Bible, when they shipped out for India, South Africa, Canada, and the other colonies. The title page reflects these imperial ambitions, showing not Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre but the terrestrial globe itself. Ironically, this particular edition would go on to become the source for the most ubiquitous public-domain version of Shakespeare’s works found on the Web. Though the Globe is not a reliable edition by modern scholarly standards, anyone Googling ‘Shakespeare’ is almost certain to find some digitized echo of this book.

Audio Tour: Curator Alan Galey discusses modernist printing including the Kelmscott Press, the Doves Press and Cranach Press

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The Poems of William Shakespeare. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893.

William Morris (1834–1896) and his Kelmscott Press contributed to the Victorian Gothic revival by returning the design of everyday objects to an aesthetic rooted in medievalism. This copy of The Poems of William Shakespeare is one of a limited run of five hundred copies. (An additional ten were printed on vellum.) The first page of the Sonnets shows several design features that are typical of Kelmscott books, including a text block whose proportions echo those of medieval manuscripts, an ornamented border and initial capital, minimal but effective use of red ink, and the Golden typeface designed by Morris. Oddly, Shakespeare’s lines are broken and wrapped with little apparent regard for the poem’s shape on the page, or for the metrical coherency of the line as a poetic unit. The sonnet is not the star of this page so much as the ornamentation that surrounds it.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Shake-speares Sonnets: Tercentenary Edition. Hammersmith: Doves Press, 1909.

The Doves Press was a private press in the spirit of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but with an aesthetic of its own that anticipated modernism. It was founded by two of William Morris’s associates, Emery Walker (1851–1833) and T.J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922), who in 1899 together designed the type for their new press. Inspired by the fifteenth-century printer Nicholas Jenson, the Doves type embodied a humanistic sense of balance and harmony—qualities that were notably lacking in the relationship of the men who commissioned it. In 1913 the embittered Cobden-Sanderson began secretly to dump the punches, matrices, and eventually all of the Doves type into the Thames River. It took him several years’ worth of late-night trips to a nearby bridge. Many of those types—which were used to print this book—were finally recovered from the river bottom in 2014.

On loan from Massey College, University of Toronto

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616. The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. Edited by J. Dover Wilson; illustrated by Edward Gordon Craig. Weimar: Cranach Press, 1930.

The Cranach Press Hamlet is recognized as a collaborative tour de force of fine printing, and presents Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy in a form that remains unequaled in print. Flanking the Shakespeare text on either side are two of Hamlet’s prose sources. Type was designed specifically for this book by Edward Johnston (1872–1944; known for designing the original London Underground typeface). Eric Gill (1882–1940), another of the great modernist typographers, contributed some lettering, including two ornamental initials. But the stars of this book are the wood-engraved illustrations are by Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), a noted director and scenic designer, and the son of the famous Shakespearean actor Ellen Terry (1847–1928). With his set-designer’s eye he created images that combine form, motion, lighting, and visual motifs to achieve a remarkable synthesis of page and stage.

Audio Tour: Curator Alan Galey discusses Lawrence Hyde

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Lawrence Hyde (1914-1987). Engravings for Macbeth. Toronto: Golden Dog Press, c1939.

This portfolio of wood engravings for a planned edition of Macbeth shows off the remarkable talents of Toronto’s Laurence Hyde. As a young art student at Toronto’s Central Technical School, Hyde was influenced by Lawren Harris’s (1885–1970) paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which he carried into his career as a book illustrator, stamp designer for the Canadian Post Office, and filmmaker at the National Film Board. As a master of the difficult art of wood engraving, Hyde uses the end-grain of the wooden block to give his images an otherworldly texture. The compositions of his Macbeth illustrations often combine two scenes in upper and lower panels, whose juxtapositions hint at sinister connections between the supernatural and the bloody world of Scottish politics.

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Don Taylor. Illustrations for Macbeth. Toronto: Pointyhead Press, 2012.

These copies of Illustrations for Macbeth, made by Toronto bookbinder Don Taylor, show how the binding of a book can be integral to the story it tells as a physical artifact. This beautiful yet enigmatic work pairs quotations from the play with haunting illustrations by one ‘Dechard Rinderpest’, the pseudonym of a local actor who (supposedly) was driven mad by the experience of playing Lady Macbeth. Taylor’s binding for the full-sized edition takes images of Rinderpest’s own 1922 MacMillan edition of Macbeth, apparently annotated in his anxious hand, and covers them with black leather and red highlights—but slashed as if by a murderer’s dagger, with the playtext peeking through the bibliographic wounds.

Two limited editions; the full-size edition on loan from Massey College, University of Toronto.

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Jan Kellett. Storming Shakespeare: An Essay. Qualicum Beach, BC: DeWalden Press, 2012.

Storming Shakespeare is the creation of west-coast bookmaker Jan Kellet. Its three tiny volumes in a triple dós-a-dós (back-to-back) binding were created for a very limited run of only twenty copies. Dós-a-dós bindings were first used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bind New Testaments and Psalters together for convenience. Kellet adapted and extended this unusual binding style to combine three explorations of her theme: an essay on Shakespeare’s use of storms; a collection of storm-themed quotations, and images from Julius Caesar and King Lear; and a similar illustrated set of quotations from The Tempest. The irony of using a tiny, intimate format to explore the elemental power of nature might have appealed to Shakespeare, whose performances often depend upon audiences’ imaginations to transcend the confines of the theatre.

Case VII-VIII: Shakespeare and the Book since the Eighteenth-Century