Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time
- ‘I’ll plague thee for that word’: Language, Performance, and Communicable Disease
- The Language of the Spectator
- Marlowe’s Edward II: Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard II
- Hamlet’s Ear
- Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night
- Shakespeare Rewriting Ovid: Olivia’s Interview with Viola and the Narcissus Myth
- ‘Voice Potential’: Language and Symbolic Capital in Othello
- Household Words: Macbeth and the Failure of Spectacle
- Erring and Straying Like Lost Sheep: The Winter’s Tale and The Comedy of Errors
- The ‘Shakespearian Gap’ in French
- Reading the Early Modern Text
- Shakespeare and the Metamorphosis of the Pentameter
- Rereading Illustrations of the English Stage
- Nietzsche’s Hamlet
- ‘Strange and woonderfull syghts’: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1996
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 1995
- 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Rereading Illustrations of the English Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time
- ‘I’ll plague thee for that word’: Language, Performance, and Communicable Disease
- The Language of the Spectator
- Marlowe’s Edward II: Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard II
- Hamlet’s Ear
- Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night
- Shakespeare Rewriting Ovid: Olivia’s Interview with Viola and the Narcissus Myth
- ‘Voice Potential’: Language and Symbolic Capital in Othello
- Household Words: Macbeth and the Failure of Spectacle
- Erring and Straying Like Lost Sheep: The Winter’s Tale and The Comedy of Errors
- The ‘Shakespearian Gap’ in French
- Reading the Early Modern Text
- Shakespeare and the Metamorphosis of the Pentameter
- Rereading Illustrations of the English Stage
- Nietzsche’s Hamlet
- ‘Strange and woonderfull syghts’: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1996
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 1995
- 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
Playing fast and loose with graphic evidence from the English Renaissance is at least as prevalent, on a statistical basis, as doing so with literary or documentary historical material – pictures, it seems to be felt, offer a wide field for speculative ingenuity. So in September 1995 Eric Sams took up a whole page of the TLS with the claim that the Swan drawing shows a performance of Hamlet, and in 1992 the editors of Theatre Notebook saw fit to publish an article by Evert Sprinchorn in which a woodcut from The Three Lords and Ladies of London is used to support a theory about ‘passing over the stage’. Sprinchorn either did not know or did not care that in the 1920s Alfred Pollard identified this picture as originating from a non-theatrical book published twenty-one years before the play, and the readers for the journal apparently shared his ignorance or indifference.
A distinctly casual attitude to the status of illustrations as artefacts with a precise historical and cultural context has led, for example, to the widespread use of the Lawrence Johnson engraving of Tamburlaine as a representation of Edward Alleyn, a misconception I have attacked elsewhere, or to the acceptance of the Scottowe drawing of Tarlton as the standard icon of that actor, a mistake about which I will have something to say here. In this century two serious attempts have been made to examine categories of visual evidence with some care and rigour: in his Bibliography W. W. Greg included reproductions of most of the illustrated material in dramatic texts, and rather more than ten years ago R. A. Foakes took a wider scope in assembling a variety of visual evidence in his anthology Illustrations of the English Stage 1580— 1642.
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- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 151 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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