HENRY FUSELI’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BOYDELL
SHAKESPEARE GALLERY: THEIR PLACE IN THE
HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATION

Thesis [for the Degree of M. A
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
D. BROOKE JOLLJFF
' 1976

ABSTRACT

HENRY FUSELI'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BOYDELL
SHAKESPEARE GALLERY: THEIR PLACE IN THE
HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATION

BY
D. Brooke Jolliff

This study is an attempt to place the Fuseli
paintings for the Boydell Gallery both in the context of
their time and in the history of Shakespeare illustration.
Very little has been written in this area and there is no
systematic study of Shakespeare illustration before the
Boydell Gallery save for T.S. Boase's excellent but brief
article. This seems to be symptomatic of an approach which
tends to divorce any illustration studied from an art
historical point of view from the text involved. My own
research on Shakespeare illustration has depended largely
upon the resources of the Florence Rathbun Private Collec-
tion and has approached the works as they have reflected
the textual changes in Shakespeare editions. This approach
seems particularly necessary when dealing with the Fuseli
illustrations, as he was a literary scholar in his own
right as well as an accomplished artist. Only in this way
can one do justice to these paintings in an iconographical

study. By examining the contemporary texts and critical

D. Brooke Jolliff

climate, it has been possible to suggest that Fuseli was
in large part inspired by and dependent on the literary
rather than the artistic establishment of his day.
Scholarly research concerning these paintings is
far from nearing its conclusion. I hope that this study
has underscored the need for an organic approach to these
and like works with the kind of vigorous iconographical
scholarship that one finds in Medieval and Renaissance

studies.

HENRY FUSELI'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BOYDELL
SHAKESPEARE GALLERY: THEIR PLACE IN THE

HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATION

BY

ff"
.‘ (VI-L"
~o,

DI Brooke Jolliff

A THESIS

Submitted to
. Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
' for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department of Art

1976

DEDICATION

TO

FLORENCE MANN RATHBUN

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Dr. Eldon VanLiere for the breadth
of vision which characterizes his unique perception and
which has been an enormous impetus to my own studies. Dr.
VanLiere's approach has enriched the time I have spent in
this field and his teaching will serve me as an invaluable
resource in the future. I am also grateful for his
patience and the freedom he afforded me inthe preparation
of this thesis. I extend to him my most heartfelt thanks.

I am also grateful to Dr. webster Smith and Dr.
Molly Smith who read this work and suggested useful edi-
torial changes.

Finally, without the support and encouragment of
my parents, Malcolm and Edna Jolliff, this thesis would
have been a much more difficult undertaking. I thank them

and all those who have been supportive of my work.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS . . . . . . . . . . v
Chapter
I. THE BOYDELL GALLERY . . . . . . . . . 1

II. A SHORT HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATION
UP TO AND INCLUDING THE BOYDELL GALLERY . . 17

III. HENRY FUSELI . . . . . . . . . . . 42
IV. FUSELI'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TRAGEDIES . . 51
V. FUSELI'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE COMEDIES . . 63
VI. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . 76

VIII. ILLUSTRATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . 80

iv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration Page

1. King Lear. Act I. Scene I. Painted by
Henry Fuseli. Engraved by R. Earlom.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 80

 

 

2. King Lear. Act III. Scene IV. Painted
by B. West. Engraved by W. Sharpe.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 81

 

3. King Lear. Act I. Scene I. Painted by
R. Smirke. Engraved by W. Sharpe.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 82

 

4. Macbeth. Act I. Scene III. Painted by
H. Fuseli. Engraved by J. Caldwall.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 83

 

5. Macbeth. Act IV. Seene I. Painted by
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Engraved by R. Thew.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 84

6. Hamlet. Act I. Scene IV. Painted by
' H. Fuseli. Engraved by R. Thew.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 85

7. King Henry V. Act II. Scene II. Painted by
H. Fuseli. Engraved by R. Thew.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 86

 

8. Midsummer Night's Dream. Act IV. Scene I.
Painted by H. Fuseli. Engraved by P. Simon.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 87

 

9. Midsummer Night's Dream. Act IV. Scene I.
Painted by H. Fuseli. Engraved by T. Ryder.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 88

 

10. Midsummer Night's Dream. Act II. Scene I.
Painted by H. Fuseli. Engraved by J. Parker.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints) . . 89

 

Illustration

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II. Scene II

 

Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Engraved
by L. Schiavonetti. (Photo: The Boydell
Shakespeare Prints) . . . . . . .

 

The Tempest. Act I. Scene II. Painted by

 

H. Fuseli. Engraved by P. Simon.

(Photo:

The Tempest. Act I. Scene III. Painted by

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

 

G. Romney. Engraved by B. Smith.

(Photo:

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

The Tempest. Act IV. Scene I. Painted by

 

J. Wright of Derby. Engraved by R. Thew.

(Photo:

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

King Henry IV, Part II. Act III'.Scene IV.

 

Painted by H. Fuseli.

(Photo:

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

vi

Engraved by W. Leney.

Page

90

91

92

93

94

 

CHAPTER I

THE BOYDELL GALLERY

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was one of the most
lavish enterprises in the history of English painting: an
entire building was dedicated to the exhibition of new
paintings based on Shakespeare's works which was opened to
the public "on the site of Mr. Dodsley's House" in Pall
Mall in 1789.1 In addition to the Gallery and the
especially commissioned paintings, the Boydell venture was
responsible for two landmarks in the history of English
publishing: the nine-volume folio "National" edition of
the complete dramatic works, edited by George Stevens and
published in 1802 in a magnificent format designed and
executed by the great typographer, William Bulmer, and a
huge atlas folio volume consisting of one hundred engraved
prints after paintings in the gallery, published in 1803
as "A Collection of Prints from Pictures painted for the
purpose of illustrating the dramatic works of Shakespeare
by the Artists of Great Britain."2

All one hundred plates remain in the Collection of

Prints, taken from the larger paintings in the Gallery, as

well as the one hundred separate engraved prints in the

1

nine'-'v01ume edition of the plays, all of which were based
on smaller paintings. The original Gallery of paintings
is now dispersed and of the approximately two hundred
drawings and paintings in the collection, no more than
forty can be positively identified today and many of these

3 The surviving engraved prints are

are in poor condition.
the only adequate record of the Gallery and, because of

the unique importance of the Gallery, a record of the
achievements and limitations of much of English art at

the end of the eighteenth century. They give one an in-
valuable insight into the tastes and attitudes of the art-
conscious public and, within the limitations of the
engraving medium, they reveal the aesthetic techniques of
almost every recognized artist of the day. The Boydell
prints are an indication of the impact of Shakespeare

on the imagination of English artists and consititute a
chapter in the long history of efforts to create a pictorial
counterpart to the familiar characters and scenes in the
plays.

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and the two publi-
cations that came from it were an extraordinary combination;
at once a business venture, an assertion of national pride,
and an artistic declaration of independence. It was John
Boydell's heartfelt wish that his Gallery would inspire a
great national school of painting, a uniquely English

school, on inspiration drawn from that inexhaustible source

of sublime moral ideas, the great national poet,
Shakespeare; and not only to have this school inspired

by his English genius, but to have its very thematic
material based directly on his immortal text.4 This, iirwas
hoped, would be the perfect union of two arts and evidence
that England's painters were worthy of the international
renown already accorded the poet. The project unfolded
with a display of energy and fanfare that captivated atten-
tion and that still leaves one with questions about the
complex motivation of its originators. Sponsored by John
Boydell, the most successful and honored and generous pub-
lisher and patron of English engravers, fed by the talents
of the acknowledged master artists (and many of the minor
ones) of the time, the entire venture had a largeness of
imagination that intrigued the public and aroused the
greatest of expectations.

It was readily made known that Boydell would com-
mand (and pay well for the privilege) the services of Sir
Joshua Reynolds and Romney and Benjamin West and a host
of others, most prominent among them Northcote, Opie,
Matthew Peters, iFranci’s~ Wheatly, and Fuseli.5 And if
Boydell could capture painters by the dozens, he certainly
could do the same for engravers. From the opening exhibi-
tion in 1789 to the end of the venture in 1805, the paint-
ings and the engraved prints were looked at, were argued

over in gossip column and Academy discussion, were praised

and condemned, and even caricatured with an interest that
kept surprisingly alive for almost two decades.6 The num-
ber of years during which the Gallery was in existence
meant, of course, that it would live inevitably through a
change in artistic tastes. Those who viewed the paintings
at the end of the period and in the next generation would
look upon the praise of the past decades as unfathomable
and find the paintings decidedlyrxn:to their taste.7 The
honorable and altruistic motives of the Gallery's founders
would be questioned and the merciless James Gillray would
design an apocalyptic vision showing a greedy Boydell pre-
siding over the sacrifice of Shakespeare's works, a sacri-
fice to the god Money-Bags, with several of the Gallery's
most popular paintings readily identifiable in the smoke.8
And, of course, there would be the resistance of those
romantics, Charles Lamb at their head, who thought any
effort to grasp the ineffable genius of Shakespeare in
paint sheer effrontery.9 To these, of course, the Gallery
was a failure from its conception.

But most of this criticism took shape late in the
Gallery's career. In the beginning, the venture met with
wide approval. The paintings were commissioned and dis—
played, engravings made and sold, the vast undertaking of
the National edition of the plays carried on, and the
monumental atlas edition of engraved plates created: all

with an assured and stately pace in keeping with the grand

ideals and lofty ambition that had inspired the Gallery's
creators. The audacity of the whole undertaking is in-
escapable; the attempt to create at one blow a tradition
that had taken decades to mature on the Continent, and to
guarantee success by providing liberal commissions and

10 Full exposure could thus

commodious exhibition space.
be given to a school created by the great collection of
engravings and by the National edition, itself well illu-
strated. Seen purely as advertising, the name of Shake-
speare could hardly be improved upon. It was expected

that after the great success of the Gallery English artists
would rise to the occasion and soon prove themselves
capable of the final test of genius-painting composed
according to the rules of the great art capitals.

Boydell and his fellows were certain, as were most con-
temporary connoisseurs, that historical painting was the
challenge that had to be met. Only here would those awful
and sublime emotions, made fruitful through a wholesome
didactic purpose and well ordered by the most rational
rules of composition, create intimapercipient the response
proper to great art. The moral intentions of historical
painting were in no way impaired when it was found that

the word "historical" could be rather loosely interpreted.
Since Benjamin West's successful application of the canon
of historical painting rules to a relatively contemporary

event (in his painting of the death of General Wolfe,

exhibited in 1771), the artist began to look closer to
home for his subject matter. West had been historical,
he had, of course, been "correct" in his composition, but
more important, he had put modern dress on his figures and
even included an Indian or two for authenticity. He showed
that nationalism, or at least national interests, could
live harmoniously (and without disguise) with the ideals
of classical composition. To the serious and Academy—
trained artist, the Boydell Gallery prOvided an excellent
chance for experimentation. With West's great triumph in
mind, suddenly the artist was offered Shakespeare. The
connection was not as remote as it at first might seem.
Shakespeare was primarily a national poet, a treasure of
historical scenes, patriotic sentiment, an authentic
national character. He was a convenient bridge between the
artist and a national school of historical painting. Philo—
SOphically, of course, Shakespeare, along with Milton, Homer,
and Ossian, was already on those Kantian heights towardvfiflrfll
historical painting struggled. In certain of the comedies,
where the moral might not be too much in evidence, there
was still a wealth of narrative detail that was extremely
useful, since narrative was a valued part of the desired
good painting.

There were other reasons why Shakespeare was the
inevitable choice for those looking for the cornerstone
of a national school. Throughout the eighteenth century,

the growing adulation accorded the poet had taken many

forms, the most commendable of which was the labor spent-
in creating a reliable, accurate, and clear text--a1though
it did not seem contradictory to their aims to include
contemporary revisions of the plays commensurate with con-
temporary taste. From the first commentary of Nicholas
Rowe in 1709, throughtflmaprogressively more scholarly

and critical editions of Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton,
Steevans, COpell, and Malone, the poet absorbed the atten-
tion of the best English scholars.ll Accompanying this
effort to establish a text was the task of finding visual
counterparts of the great scenes and characters. The
public appetite for an "illustrated" Shakespeare had been
fed by publisher after publisher: Tonson's 1714 edition,
the 1744 edition of Sir John Hanmer, Bell's low-priced
1773 and 1785 editions, and the Picturesque Beauties of

Shakespeare with 40 plates by Smirke and Stothard, pub-
12

 

lished in 1783. The Englishman's preferred version of
Shakespeare was an edition with pictures, pictures that
kept pace with the changing trends in drama and stage de-
sign as well as in aesthetic ideas and artistic techniques.
The Boydell paintings, a novel enterprise for the time,
thus had roots in the tradition of Shakespeare illustration
throughout the century. The total project, Gallery, text
edition, and prints, epitomized several streams of thought

in the century: the glorification of Shakespeare the

great national poet, the concern for a sound text presented

appropriately illustrated, the search for an English
tradition in painting, and the attitude toward historical
painting.

Although the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery failed
to unite the different forces at work in English art into
one school which would follow the recognized tradition of
historical painting, the Gallery had several immediate
benefits for the artist. Gallery-going was an essential
feature of London cultural life in the 1780's and the
galleries provided the artist with the opportunity to con-
front his public and to be confronted by it. The kind of
commission the Boydell Gallery gave allowed the artist a
wider field of experimentation than he usually had. This
was still the era of the portrait, and for many English
artists the average commission was for a likeness. With
the Boydell commissions came a chance to draw upon a myriad
of characters and a range of dramatic events of every de-
gree of emotional intensity. The possibilities for compo-
sition, for expressive gesture and mood were endless. The
paintings in the Gallery could be faulted on many points,
but few critics have ever denied their variety. For more
than fifteen years the Gallery displayed a series of can-
vases that showed what the English artist would attempt if
he had freedom from the economic necessity of portrait
painting. The importance of this aspect of the Gallery

can be appreciated when it is realized that the main body

of recognized English artists of the period worked under
its commission at one time or another.

Boydell matched this chance for experimentation
with a wide range of thematic material with generous
stipends. His liberality to the engravers who had made
his print publishing firm the foremost supplier of English
engravings gave him an unrivaled reputation as a patron of
the arts. He was, in the words of Edmund Burke, "England's

Commercial Maecenas."13

No historian of the Boydell enter-
prise has failed to note how unusual for the time were
these generous stipends. Benjamin West and Sir Joshua
Reynolds were given 1000 guineas for each of their contri-
butions and in the lower brackets, artists were paid 600
guineas per painting in most cases. Boydell said that the
entire operation--Gallery, text edition, paintings, draw—
ings, and the copperplates--had cost 300,000 pounds of
which 42,666 were spent on paintings alone.14 It was an
unprecedented amount of money to be expended on one artis-
tic venture by a private group and certainly an extra-
ordinary sum to be spent with such little restriction on
the artist's freedom. Northcote summed up the attitude
of many of the Gallery's painters when he wrote: "Boydell
.did more for the advancement of the arts in England than
the whole mass of the nobility puttogether."15
The origin of the idea of the Shakespeare Gallery

has been disputed. Romney and the printer and bookseller,

10

George Nicall, both claimed the idea as their own.16

Henry Fuseli insisted that he had first thought of the
plan and Northcote claimed that he had provided the im-
pulse to set the venture going by his own successful career
as an historical painter. What is certain amid these
claims and conjectures is that the ideas for a grand series
of Shakespeare paintings in the historical manner was the
topic of conversation at a dinner given in November of 1786
by John Boydell's nephew and partner, Josiah.l7 When one
of the guests congratulated Boydell on his successful
efforts to give English engravings an international repu-
etation, he is said to have replied that "Old as he was he
would like to wipe away the stigma which all foreign coun-
tries threw on this nation, that we have no genius for
historical painting."18
Boydell saw the low repute of English painting as
,the kind of challenge he had met when he first began to
publish engraVings in the middle of the century. Then the
art of the engraver was at its lowest ebb and England was
importing thousands of pounds worth of French prints
annually while exporting none of her own. By 1786, mainly
as a result of Boydell's enterprise, exports of English
engraved prints had climbed to 200,000 pounds annually
while imports had sunk to 100 pounds.19 Boydell had proved
"to the French nation that an Englishman could produce a

20

print of equal merit." The Shakespeare Gallery idea

11

offered an opportunity to crown with the title of founder
of English historical painting his secure reputation as
the first and greatest of fine arts publishers in England.
When the scheme was broadened to include plans for a folio
edition of the plays, there cameaanother opportunity; to
showiflmanation and the world a superb example of English

typography and book design.21

The Shakespeare Gallery

and the two published memeorials to it--the folio edition
of the plays and the volume of one hundred prints--were to
be the summation of a lifetime spent in fostering English
art at home and abroad.

But the Gallery failed to create a national school.
of painting and, of more immediate consequence, failed to
become economically viable. The lavish spending that went
into the various projects and the length of time it took
to produce the text and plates left Boydell poorly pro-
vided for the unexpected. When the prolonged conflict with
France closed that market for the Gallery engravings, he
was placed in straitened circumstances. Close to bank-
ruptcy, Boydell petitioned Parliament for a National
Lottery to raise money on the Gallery and its paintings.
About 45,000 pounds were realized through the sale of two
guinea tickets and when the lottery was held, it was won
by a Mr. Tassie, a famous maker of cameos and medallions

in wax. Tassie, in turn, sold the paintings at auction in

1805. A mere 6,181 pounds were all the paintings could

12

fetch, a depressing end to such noble expectations.22 This
sad conclusion has perhaps cast its shadow over the entire
history of the Boydell enterprise. The dispersal of the
paintings and damage done by time to the few that can be
positively identified today have joined with the hostility
to "historical" painting in general to prejudiceifluacase
against the Gallery and have made it somewhat difficult to
gauge its real position in the development of English
painting.

An evaluation of the Gallery is, of course, ham-
pered by the loss of so many of its paintings. It is,
therefore, to the engraved prints that one must turn, for
here the Gallery exists almost in its entirety. From 1789
to almost the end of the venture, large folio proofs and
prints were being published in a uniform size of 20 by 27

23

inches. The original plan for publication had called

for seventy-nine smaller prints to illustrate the text
volumes, a number later increased to one hundred.24 The
separate folio volume of prints after the larger paintings
was a connoisseur's book, elaborately designed and priced
at sixty guineas. In creating the prints, Boydell ran
into unexpected delay and difficulties. Many of the best
engravers were already engaged and he could not draw upon

25 As a result the engravings contain few

their services.
examples by such acknowledged masters as BartOlozzi and
Schiavonetti. The bulk of the work fell to less prominent

but generally competent craftsmen, among them Robert Thew,

13

J. Peter Simon, James Parker, and Thomas Ryder.26 The

choice of engraving technique, the stipple method, has

been criticized frequently on several counts. The engraver,
John Landseer, whom Boydell had not employed on the
Shakespeare prints, insisted that the art of engraving had
suffered as a result of the popularity of stipple, a popu-
larity that came out of its use in the Shakespeare prints.27
The stipple engravings have also been criticized for the
dullish blurred results evident in a number of prints.2

But when varied with line engraving as frequently happened,
stipple proved highly effective.

In spite of the weakness of a number of the prints,
many, particularly those after paintings by Northcote,
Fuseli, Benjamin West, Peters, and Smirke, are excellent.
Often the engraving seems to be more successful than the
original painting or at least more successful than the
age-ravaged examples of the originals. This is particularly
true of Fuseli where faulty coloring or poor choice of
pigments has darkened the original and obscured the dynamic
relationship of line and overall pattern that is so telling
a quality of Fuseli's work.

The entire collection of prints, for all the
defects of execution and limitations of technique, offers
a panorama of. billiant scenes and fully realized charac-
ters. They are to twentieth century taste a bit "dramatic"

in the worst sense of the word and when they err it is on

14

the side of the overblown and one feels, inane. But the
best of them are illuminating comments on the plays and
on the contemporary state of Shakespeare criticism. Even
if the paintings as a group failed to create a unique style
in the visual interpretation of Shakespeare, their impor-
tance in the history of Shakespeare illustrations cannot

be denied.

NOTES - CHAPTER I

1Lawrence Thompson, "The Boydell Shakespeare; An
English Movement to Graphic Arts," Princeton University
Library Chronicle, 1, 1940, 9.

2

 

 

The Boydell Shakespeare Prints, New York, 1968, l.

 

3T.S.R. Boase, "Illustrations of Shakespeare's
Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Journal
of the Warburg Institute, 10, 1947, 105.

4Thomas Bolston, "John Boydell, Publisher: The
Commercial Maecenas," Signature, 8, 1948, 118.

 

5Boase, 190.

6M.C. Salaman, Shakespeare in Pictorial Art, London,
1916, 19.

7J.N. Tolfourd, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb,
London, II, 1848, 108.

 

 

8Sadakichi Hartman, Shakespeare in Art, Boston,
1907, 56.

9

 

Tolfourd, 108.

10Thompson, 12.
11Boase, 81.

12W. Moelwyn Merchants, Shakespeare and the Artist,
London, 1928, 85.

 

13Bolson, 116.

14Thompson, 14.

15J. Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
London, 1813, 330.

16Thompson, 17.

 

17Ibid., 17.

15

16

18Bolston, 117.

19Algernon Graves, "Boydell and His Engravers,"
The Queen, July-December, 1904, 251.

201bid., 251.

 

211bid., 253.

22Hartman, 77.

23Thompson, 18.

24Ibid., 13.

25Graves, 253.

26Ibid., 253.

27Ibid., 254.

281bid., 254.

CHAPTER II

A SHORT HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ILLUSTRATION UP TO

AND INCLUDING THE BOYDELL GALLERY

The Elizabethan religious settlement, for all
its carefully-steered middle course, had no half measures
in its condemnation of religious paintings. Ecclesia—
stical patronage of the visual arts ceased abruptly
with the English Reformation and with its demise there
was no sufficient demand to stimulate the production of
historical paintings drawn from other fields. More and
more, native English painting limited itself to portrai-
ture or landscape and was content to leave the grand
manner to the continent. The first folio of Shakespeare
came from the press in 1623 unillustrated as did the

1 From 1700 onward

next two folios of 1633-4 and 1685.
the number of editions increased geometrically as the
interest in and critical acclaim for Shakespeare in-
creased. Most of them, however, were not illustrated
and were even without a portrait of Shakespeare--the
common accompaniment to the earlier texts. A vignette,
a head or tail piece, was all the share the illustrator
had in most of these editions. There were, however,

notable exceptions which reflected the great effort of

17

18

emendation and commentary of the Shakespearian text to
which the eighteenth century devoted so much pain and in-
genuity. The attempt to find appropriate visual images
followed on a much smaller scale the immense skill that
was being given to the establishment of a sound and intel-
ligible text.

The Tonson edition of 1709 had a frontispiece en-
graved by Michael van der Gucht showing a portrait of
Shakespeare in a roundel, supported by Tragedy and Comedy,
while above Fame blows her trumpet. Van der Gucht signed
the plate but it was not an original design. It was, in
fact, lifted bodily from a 1660 edition of Corneille's
plays and was originally meant to be a portrait of that
author.2 The first plate illustrating a scene from The
Tempest is a scene of thunder and hobgoblins which owes
nothing to continental models and must go back to some
simple, popular work. Certainly it can represent no stage
effect of the time. Most of the others, however, are
largely renderings of the scenes as played in the contem-
porary theatre. Troilus and Cressida are frankly taking
a curtain call and Isabella kneels as an eighteenth cen-
tury dame before a periwigged Angelo (and singularly fails
to convey any of the passionate intensity of the scene).
In the same costumes Hamlet and his mother play the closet
scene, Hamlet having overthrown his chair as he leaps
up at his father's apparition--a piece of traditional

staging, possibly invented by the great actor,

19

Betterton, who helped with the Tonson edition and toured
Warwickshire seeking information about Shakespeare.3 In
some of the later plays, Pericles and those following, a
somewhat different and rather more SOphisticated treatment
prevailed and suggests another hand. Tonson was clearly
not satisfied by the standard of the whole production, for
in 1914 the edition was reissued with extensive modifica-
tion of the plates which were considerably modernized.4
LouischrGuernier was the artist called in to supervise the
revision. He repeated the frontispiece, altering the por-
trait head, and many of the plates were completely changed.
Du Guernier designed sixteen new ones which he signed him-
self, sometimes illustrating the same scene as in the pre-
vious editions, sometimes choosing a different episode with
altered backgrounds and more modish costumes. Five plates

are substantially unaltered. King John and Antony and

 

 

Cleopatra are signed E. Kirkall and resemble the more

 

elaborate plates of the first edition of the later plays.
Kirkall was an experimenter in engraving techniques and

was the first pirater of Hogarth's Harlot's Progress.

 

LouischiGuernier had a conventional French style, on the
whole somewhat unimaginative in execution and invention.
For the primitive goblins of the first edition Tempest,
Guernier substituted a stately Prospero pointing out
Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess to an elegantly posed

and immaculate group of courtiers with a classical pediment

20

rising above the trees in the background. In Richard II,

 

a lively murder scene in the prison is replaced by the more
dignified incident of the surrender of the crown. The
overturned chair disappears from the closet scene and
Hamlet and his mother assume more stylish and up-to-date
clothes.

Tonson's editions were the first great attempt to
fully illustrate an edition of Shakespeare. They did not,
however, produce any final solution to any of the problems.
No character was visualized so aptly as to become a per-
manent and recognized figure. Falstaff, so well recognized
by sight today or in the nineteenth century, was haltingly
treated. The first edition has a vaguely Elizabethan
figure, paunchy and characterless. IfiiGuernier drew a
bewigged and clean-shaven Falstaff climbing into the buck-
basket. There is no agreed convention, no awareness of a
character so very nearly real and alive by virtue of so
many idiosyncrasies. T.S.R. Boase puts this failure to
the exclusive use of foreign artists. I think it might
better be put to a corollary cause; there is no reason to
suspect that any of Tonson's artists had read through the
plays and understood them. Each of the plates depict
scenes isolated from their significance as a whole. With-
out the written titles it is often impossible to identify
plays from the visual evidence, much less the act, scene,
and specific characters as is often possible with the

Boydell paintings, particularly Fuseli's.

21

In 1740, the edition of Theobald's Shakespeare

 

appeared with a new set of plates, new but not very novel.5
They were designed by Hubert Francois Gravelot and en-
graved by himself or by Gerard van der Gucht, Michael's
son.6 Gravelot had come to England in 1732 to help Claude

du Bosc on Tim: English edition of Picart's Ceremonies

 

Religieuses. His Shakespeare scenes make no departure from

 

the accepted French manner and might be transferred without
much difficulty to many other subjects. They are

curiously similar to the illustrations designed by the same
artist some thirty years later for a French edition of
Corneille.7 The French style with its soft lines, somewhat
blurred hatching and slight elegant figures can be pretty

enough in As You Like It or in the garden scene from

 

Richard II with its version of Windsor Tower, but it is too

 

trivial a manner to cope with the banqueting scene from
Macbeth.
Another important edition was the illustrated

version of Shakespeare for the Sir John Hanmer folio pub-

lished by Oxford University Press in 1744.8

"Since therefore," says the preface, "other nations
have taken care to dignify the works of their most
celebrated poets with the fairest impressions
beautified with ornaments of sculpture, well may
our Shakespeare be thought to deserve no less con-
sideration: and as a fresh acknowledgement hath
lately been paid to his merit, by erecting his
statue at a public expense; so it is desired

that this new edition of his works which hath

cost some attention and care, may be looked upon
as another small monument designed and dedicated
to his honour."9

22

The statue lately erected was William Kent's
memorial figure in Westminster Abbey, and an engraving of
it by Gravelot is the frontispiece to Hanmer's Shakespeare.
Kent's long career, with its various occupations of history
painting, architecture, sculpture, laying out of gardens,
designing of dresses and furniture, was now drawing to a
close. Much mocked by Hogarth and others, he had struggled
to popularize history painting in early eighteenth-
century England. At Kensington Palace are two scenes from
the life of Henry V which might give him some claim to
consideration as a Shakespearian painter, but they follow
in detail the history of the reign rather than the scenes

10

of the play. Henry V's bust, however, figures promi—

nently on the pedestal of the statue in Westminster Abbey
and is placed immediately below the poet's feet.11
Hanmer's six volumes were described as "adorned

12

with sculptures by the best hands." In fact, with the

exception of five or six plates by Gravelot, they were all

designed by one artist, Francis Hayman.l3

In 1744, Hayman
was aged thirty-six and had been trained as a scene painter.
His main paintings, decorations for Vauxball Gardens,

were carried out in the forties and fifties. They in-
cluded four Shakespearian subjects, among them Lear in the
storm and the play scene from Hamlet. The best of his

work went into the ephemeraI vauxhall decorations where

it had hard treatment and frequent restoration. Some of

23

the paintings, scattered after the sale of 1841, when they
were nailed to boards and went for about one pound apiece,
still survive but the Shakespearian pieces have disappeared.
Much of his output was for the engraving of the Hanmer
edition and it is here that his style can be most charac-
teristically seen. He accepted the elegant conventions

of the French style; his interiors are the graceful rooms
of the period where some comedy or tragedy of manners is
enacted. In a charming Georgian interior, Mistress Page
and Mistress Ford put a clean-shaven Falstaff into the
basket. The same type of setting serves for Desdemona's
terrible scene with Othello. But the figures are more
substantial inventions than anything that Gravelot and

du Guernier produced. Expression is restrained and limited,
but the groupings, the visual interrelationships of the
characters are often portrayed with some real sense of
narrative. His Katherine and Petruchio starting off on
their ride to Padua is a very pretty farmhouse idyll.
Constantly in his figures and fields and woodlands there
is a feeling of naturalness; a sense of pose which is
found in the early groups of Gainsborough. There is a
strong English feeling in his use of French mannerisms,
and it is in his art, widely known and popular as it was,
that English painting and draughtsmanship absorbed and
transformed to its own purpose the continental style.

Shakespeare illustration had moved from a pallid imitation

24

of Corneille to a style befitting not yet Shakespeare but
perhaps Fielding or Jane Austen.
Hayman remained much in demand for Shakespeare

illustration.l4

In 1770-74, he was again providing
frontispieces for single volume editions of the plays, but
now there is a greater period sense and some attempt to
provide appropriate historical costume. It is a mode

less suited to his genius. His earlier Shakespearian
scenes, his lively illustrations to Smollett, and some

small engravings, almost pure landscape, that he made in

1744 for Edward Moore's Fables for the Female Sex remain
15

 

his happiest inventions.
Hayman marks: the meeting place of two schools, the
continental and the English. His achievement required not
only the French example but also that of Hogarth, with his
direct approach to the play itself, his paintings of the
actual theatre, with the gestures and facial expressions
of the acting of the time exactly rendered, not convention-
alized by any formulas of elegance. As Hogarth himself
stated in his moral tales, his Marriage 5 la Mode, Harlot's
Progress, and Two Apprentices, he sought the technique of

16 They are

the theatre to make his narrative points.
painted novels, and now the novel itself in a sudden
maturity of power was opening new fields to English illu-

strators. Pamela appeared in 1740 and within four years

Highmore, basing his art on Hogarth's examples, was

25

17

producing paintings in illustration of it. Clarissa

followed in 1748 and Tom Jones in 1749.‘ "My general bill

 

of fare," wrote Fielding, "is human nature," though he will
in places "hash and ragoo it with all the high French and

18 No words could more

Italian seasoning of affectation."
aptly describe the English position in the arts at this
half-way point of the eighteenth century, and it was a
position held with a new confidence. The sudden and
immense continental reputation of Richardson, with all
civilized Europe sentimentalizing over Pamela, the transla-
tion into every language, brought a prestige to English
culture only equalled in the days of Scott and Byron. And
at the same time the continent was discovering Shakespeare
while England continued its great work on his textual
criticism. Richardson and Shakespeare, probably in that
order, were the cultural exports of the day. With a new
self-reliance English painters sought to conquer for
themselves something of the international position the
authors had achieved--even if it meant riding their coat-
tails.

Meanwhile the stage itself was not inactive or
irresponsive to changing taste. In 1741, at the outlying
theatre at Goodman's Field, David Garrick had made a
reputation in a night with his rendering of Richard III.19

From then till his death in 1779 he was the commanding

figure of the English stage and probably the single most

26

dynamic force in all of English theatrical history. It is
impossible here, except in a most summary fashion, to
analyze the far-reaching effects of his career. His acting
broke down the old conventions largely surviving from the
Restoration stage and endowed visual imagination with a
whole repertory of new gestures, half borrowed from the
grand manner of continental style, half a spontaneous
naturalistic invention. In his later years, with the aid
of Loutherbourg, he carried out a similar revolution in
stage settings.20 His cult of Shakespeare invested the
bard with a new and splendid grandeur. Garrick's pavilion
at Chiswick enshrining Roubiliac's statue, his Shakespeare
obelisk at Hendon Hall, Gainsborough's portrait of the
actor standing beneath the poet's bust, and above all the
lavish, highly allegorical, slightly ridiculous jubilee
celebrations at Stratford in 1769: all are indicative of
a new position assigned in popular estimation to
Shakespeare. Garrick's own estimation kept close pace.
Not least of his achievements was his own social status.
Shakespeare was a god and Garrick his highly respectable
priest, a friend of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds,
received everywhere, no more a vagrant stroller. Reynold's

Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1760) with its adapta-

 

tion of a high classical theme marks the transit of the
English stage from the age of Hogarth to that of Sir
Joshua, with the awareness of being part of a great tradi-

tion no longer marked by provincialism.

27

With the fame of Garrick, paintings and prints of
the great actor and his fellows in Shakespearian or other
roles became so numerous as to form almost a branch of
English art, a special type of conversation piece.
Zoffany's famous painting of the murder scene from Macbeth

21 Here the actors are still in

dates from the sixties.
contemporary costume. Apart from the Gothic hall, there
is no attempt at locale or period color. But a change

was at hand. In the season of 1762-3, HenrypV, Richard III,

 

and Rowe's Jane Shore were produced in costume, "in the

habits of the time."22 The English historical plays were

 

beginning to receive a more historically accurate treat—
ment, a movement which has links with historical study
generally and a growing tendency to want to discover dis-
tinctly English traits through the perusal of history and

literature. The painting, Death of Wolfe, by Benjamin West

 

was revolutionary in its historically accurate treatment
of a subject and it affected the later Shakespearian illus-

23 It was gradually to exert an in-

trations of Hayman.
fluence over the whole pictorial illustration of the plays.
But it was far from immediate in its effects, and the
paintings of Garrick's earlier career are a last glorifica-
tion of the old tradition. As a splendid example, the
portrait of Mrs. Cibber as Cordelia may be taken. This

large painting (81 Lfl4inches square) shows the actress, in

approximately eighteenth-century costume, against a

28

background of storm and heath treated romantically and
with a scope quite beyond any mere recording of stage
effects. This is a real visual invention to elaborate and
intensify the feeling of the scene, which is character-
istically enough not actually Shakespeare's but is from

the Nahum Tate version of King Lear where Cordelia and her

 

confidante are rescued by Edgar from ruffians sent by
Edmund to assault her. The lines portrayed are singularly
unShakespearian.
Cordelia: What e'er thou art, befriend a wretched
virgin
And if thou oan'st direct our weary'
search.

Arante: Alack, Madam, a wandering lunatic.24
The painting however rises above the feebleness of its text
and is of the finer and more imaginative renderings of a
Shakespearian scene to date. It was painted in 1755 by
Pieter van Bleeck, a Dutchman who came to England in 1724
and who was mainly occupied in making engravings after the
Old Masters of theatrical subjects.25
The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw the
business of illustrating Shakespeare in full swing. An
enterprising publisher, John Bell, in defiance of many of
the conventions of the older established houses, began to
popularize the classics at reasonable prices and with

. . . 26 . . .
copious illustration. He was a pioneer in an area in

which he was to have many followers. The preface to his

29

1773 edition of Shakespeare's plays set the tone of his
endeavour. "We have earnestly consulted correctness,
neatness, ornament, utility and cheapness of price." All
"glaring indecencies" have been carefully removed.27 The
plates were by Edward Edwards, Isaac Taylor and John
Sherwin and are rather clumsy, undistinguished works.
Their main interest lies in their attempt to show some kind
of period costume. Hamlet and Horatio have the trunk hose
of Jacobean fashions, not any suggestion of the
Scandinavian setting of the play. It should be noted that
that is the common meaning of "historically accurate" when
speaking of Shakespeare illustration; that the artist more
nearly approaches the costuming as it might have appeared
in the Elizabethan productions rather than reproducing an
historically accurate costume of subjects treated in the
play. One might gather, therefore, that this increased
interest in the historical was prompted as much by a
national need to establish an English heritage as it was
by antiquarian zeal.

Bell's second edition of Shakespeare (1785-7) shows

28 The straightforward, rectangular

a change in taste.
plate gave way to a more ornamental design of circles or
ovals set in elaborate frameworks. The prints themselves
have a new softness and prettiness, a new sentimentality

quite foreign to the earlier feeling of the century. Hero

fainting in the church is all gentle feebleness, with the

30

scene cleverly adapted to the page as a whole. It is un-
signed but looks very like an early work of Stothard's, a
young engraver who became one of the foremost illustrators
of the turn of the century. Sherwin has a really terrible
piece where Ferdinand and Miranda gaze in rapture at the
Prince of Wales' Feathers, the artist's recently acquired
privilege, in a kind of cloud burst at the top of the page.
More interesting are the plates of famous actors in
Shakespearian roles. Here we have a Falstaff still far
from visually convincing, but in some of them there is

the élan of an authentically great performance. Mrs.
Siddons' sweeping movements as Isabella belong to a dif-
ferent world from the staid grieving of the 1709 Tonson
edition. The whole of Garrick's career lies between them.
This type of edition reaches its climax in one published
by Bellamy and Robarts in 1791. It was illustrated by
ovals from the hands of various somewhat hack artists of
the period and rejoiced in allegorical frontispieces such
as Shakespeare Entering the Realms of Terror and Pity or
an even more remarkable subject, Shakespeare Holding up

the Mirror to Dignified Guilt. The actual pages were en-

 

livened by the characters of Shakespeare "personified by
ifants," where a bloated cherub apes the bulk of Falstaff
and a degenerate putto, brandishing a dagger and wearing a
kilt, acts Macbeth. Besides the actual editions, there

were also picture books of plates only, such as the

31

Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare with forty plates by

Smirke and Stothard (1783).29 In 1782, R.E. Pine held an

exhibition of a series of paintings from Shakespeare.30

The Worcester porcelain factory produced a neo-classical

tea pot with a scene from Cymbeline on either side.31 Such

 

were the trivialities of what was rapidly becoming the
Shakespeare industry and such was the state of the art when
John Boydell launched his Gallery.

Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery was easily the most
important and artistically successful venture into the
realms of Shakespeare illustration to date--although cer-
tainly uneven. The painters,~faced with a demand such as
they had never hoped for, sought in the most varied ways
to expand their powers to meet it. If only a limited
aesthetic pleasure is to be found in the bulk of them,
there is nowhere a more instructive panorama of English
taste and English aesthetic theory. Burke, writing to
Reynolds about this "very extraordinary undertaking,"
elicited the following reply:

"It is so, I confess. It surprises me. I am
sensible that no single school at present in
Europe could produce so many good pictures and
if they did they would have a monotonous
sameness; they would be all Roman or Venetian,
Flemish or French: whereas you may observe
here as an emblem of the Freedom of the country,
every artist has taken a different road to

what he conceives to be excellence, and may
have obtained the goal."32

These different roads fall under two main headings: the

Italian school of those who had visited Italy and were

32

dominated by the theories of Reynolds and who generally
considered themselves the aristocrats of the trade, and
the others who were largely following in the footsteps of
Hayman, men who had worked at Vauxhall or who had done
interior decorations for the Adam brothers or other fashion-
able architects, who were supplying the bulk of book illus-
tration at this time and who had never had the means for
foreign travel--in short, the men whose works could be
obtained for smaller prices than the kind of figure asked
by West and Reynolds.

Reynolds himself, ageing and worried over his
sight, had not been particularly enthusiastic about the
Gallery. It was only with difficulty and a large payment
in advance that he had been won over to contribute to it.33

.But it was to his doctrine and instruction that many of

the artists turned for advice. His famous Twelfth Dis-

 

course had been delivered in 1784 with its admonition that
"the daily food and nourishment of the mind of an artist

is found in the great works of his predecessors" and its
advice that "hints may be taken and employed in a situation
totally different from that which they were originally em-
ployed."34 In the same year he had illustrated his own
maxims by his portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse,
with its pose borrowed from Michelangelo's Isaiah and one

of the supporting figures from the Angel of Jeremiah. Many

 

33

artists faced with this problem of Shakespearian painting
were very grateful for "hints" from the past.
In the collected volume of plates, the opening

piece was Romney's Infant ShakeSpeare Nursed by Nature and

 

the Passions. "Very Corregiesque" Romney considered it,
35

 

and its source of inspiration is easily discernible.
But the main work that Romney contributed, one that he was
already engaged upon when the Gallery was first planned,

was his scene from The Tempest. The painting of it caused

 

him much trouble. Originally designed as comprising only
Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand, be expanded it to include
the shipwreck, with Prospero uttering his incantation on
one side of the large canvas, balanced by Ferdinand leap-
ing from the vessel on the other. Romney had been to Italy
from 1773-5 but he found his memories too faint. He went
to Windsor to study the Raphael Cartoons, to carry out "a
new research into the merits of Raphael."36 These cartoons,
the greatest Renaissance work in England, exercised a pro-
found if perhaps not always beneficial influence on

English art. Sure enough, in Romney's Tempest, the bil-
lowing cloaks, blowing up around bending figures, recall

a characteristic Raphael usage, and the whole rhythm of

the straining group on the sinking ship recalls the central

group of the Sacrifice at Lystra. Boydell paid him 600

 

guineas for the picture but it was not enough. Romney was

slighted because Reynolds and West were each offered 1000

34

guineas.37 This, in one form or another, was a constant
complaint among the contributing artists.

Another artist who chose a scene from The Tempest

 

and who rated on the 300 guinea level was Joseph Wright of
Derby.38 He had made the Italian journey in the early
seventies and with such thoroughness that he is said to
have permanently injured his health by lying for too long
a period on the floor of the Sistine Chapel. His main
interest in Italy, however, seems to have been in the
eruption of Vesuvius, a subject well adapted to his love
of violent contrasts of lighting. His Prospero with
Ferdinand and Miranda shows little Italian influence in the
figures, which are perhaps marred by excessive gesture and
expression, but the vista through the cave and the whole
lighting of the picture is finely composed. As an engrav-
ing by Thew, it has much atmospheric quality.

Most Italinate of all was Henry Tresham, who had
spent fourteen years in Italy and was a member of both the

39

Roman and Bolognese academies. His Antonypand Cleopatra

 

borrows the traditional Paris and Helen type. His Death of

Cleopatra has, considering the subject, disconcerting re-

 

collections of a Pieta and the weeping Magdelen. It is
dry academicism at its worst but was admired at the time,
and in the sale of 1805 his pictures fetched reasonable
figures and were much commended in the catalogue for their

A
"truly fascinating" and "classical" beauty.‘0

35

Among the home school of more humble artists and
hacks, Robert Smirke stands out as most prolific. He and
Stothard, as mentioned previously, had already made a pic-
ture book of Shakespearian scenes. Stothard also contri-
buted to the Gallery but his illustrations to Shakespeare
have little invention and are considered to be inferior to

41

his illustrations of the Canterbury Tales. Smirke

 

Specialized in the comic scenes and had a ready sense of
caricature and type. He and Fuseli really created the
appearance of Falstaff whom Smirke painted constantly and
Falstaff emerges from his plates a complete and recogniz-
able personality. There is no trace of Italian influence.
Through the window of Juliet's room (and typical of Smirke
it is a study of the nurse rather than of Juliet) can be
seen a good English Gothic building, an example of that
adherence to Gothic that tended to stamp the native school
as opposed to the followers of the grand tour. Smirke's
twenty-six pictures are a fairly consistant attempt to
deal with one part of the problem, the illustrating of
Shakespeare's comic characters.

: There remain a few names that are difficult to
classify: Mather Brown, the American; James Durno,
assistant to Benjamin West and also in demand as a decora-
tor, whose two renderings of Falstaff scenes Fuseli de-
scribed with characteristic tact as in "the meagre Gothic

42

method." There is James Downman whose As You Like It is

 

36

as frankly a contemporary episode as any in the collection,
and, finally, Josiah Boydell, John's nephew and a rather
painstaking artist in the grand manner who really owes his
place in the Gallery to a lucky accident of birth.

The three artists that stood in general estimation
at the head of historical painting in England were James
Barry, Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds. Barry painted
no special work for Boydell, but the latter purchased for

the gallery his Lear and Cordelia, painted some years pre-

 

viously in 1774. As always with Barry, it is a somewhat
frigid work, but it is expertly designed and there is real
mastery of grouping. The pose of the king with his
daughter's corpse, an echo of many late Renaissance works,
has a dignity and genuine feeling which made this one of

the more lasting and familiar of alltjmaBoydell works. It
is one of the most commonly reproduced of the illustrations.
Benjamin West's Lear in the Storm for which Boydell paid
1000 guineas and which the catalogue describes as "that
truly grand and capital picture, a most astonishingpmoduc-

43 is a turbu-

tion, matchless in composition and drawing"
lent affair, dramatic and somewhere half way between West's
grand manner and his sublime period. His other picture,

Ophelia-before the King and Queen, is less successful; the

 

frankly lunatic expression of Ophelia suggests a study out

of Lavater.

37

Reynolds' three paintings for the Gallery were the
most admired and discussed of all the exhibition. His

Robin Goodfellow is a typical Reynolds child, character-

 

ized only by pointed ears and seated on a toadstool. The
story went that Boydell had admired a child painting in
the President's studio and that Reynolds had converted it

into Puck.44 Macbeth Visiting the Witches is a much more

 

grandiose affair. It is 144" long by 108" high and is, as
Hazlitt called it, "a very elaborate and well—arranged in-

ventory of dreadful objects."45

It is quite overwhelming
in its host of symbolic detail. Reynolds has Macbeth
straddling the foreground with an ineffective vehemence.
Reynolds was working on the picture when he died and his
executors had a law case with Boydell to secure the full

46

payment of 1000 pounds. Most celebrated of all was the

Death of Cardinal Beaufort. The memoirs of the time are

 

full of talk about this picture which contemporaries re-
garded as Reynold's final achievement. The talk Was not
all favourable. There was gossip about his coal-beaver
models and the lack of historical dignity in the characters.
A long debate arose as to the fittingness of Reynold's
having inserted a small devil behind the Cardinal's pillow,
a detail that was omitted in the engraving. A contem-r

porary critic complained that it was "too like The Death of

 

Germanicus by Poussin to claim the distinction of an ori-
47

 

ginal composition." It seems rather surprising that this

38

major piece should have illustrated as early and obscure a

play as Henry VI, Pt. 2, but the historical plays enjoyed a

 

great popularity in this period of English expansion and
conquest. The three parts of Henry VI were much more
familiar then than now, and from an early date the death of
the Cardinal had been a much appreciated passage. Rowe
singles it out in his introduction to the 1709 edition.

"There is a short scene in the 2nd part of Henry

VI_which I cannot but think admirable in its

kind. Cardinal Beaufort is shown in the last

agonies on his deathbed, with the good King

praying over him. There is so much terror in

the one, so much tenderness enui moving piety

in the other as must touch anyone who is

capable of either fear or pity." 8
From then onward, it was always the scene chosen to illus-
trate. In the Hanmer edition of 1744, Gravelot dealt with
it in a design which bears little relationship to that of
Reynolds except that the outstretched hand of the Cardinal
is already a prominent feature. For his grouping, Reynolds
borrowed (as has already been mentioned) a vertical design
composed only of four characters. Fuseli's design (for
an 1805 edition of Shakespeare) is a re-interpretation of
that of Reynolds in a much flatter and very linear con-
ception instead of a highly colouristic one and has a thin,

grotesque horror more fearful than any effect obtained by

Reynolds.

NOTES - CHAPTER II

1T.S.R. Boase, "Illustrations of Shakespeare's
Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Journal
of the Warburg Institute, 10, 1947, 77.

2

 

Ibid., 78.

3M.C. Salaman, Shakespeare in Pictorial Art, London

1916, 22.

 

4Boase, 81.

5"The First Illustrated Shakespeare," Connoisseur,
CII, 1917, 305-9. '

6

 

Ibid., 306.

7Boase, 85.

8John Hanmer, Compleat Works of Shakespeare, Oxford,

1744, Preface.
9

 

Ibid.

10A. Cunningham, Lives of the Most Current British
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, London, II, 1830, 279.

ll

 

 

Ibid., 279.

2Hanmer, Preface.

13Ibid.

'14J. G. Southworth, Vauxhall Gardens, New York, 1941:

 

42.

lsIbid., 42.

16Boase, 87.

l7Ibid., 87.

lBIbid., 87.

39

40

l9Salaman, 23.

201bid., 23.

21Boase, 89.

221bid., 89.

231bid., 89.

24David Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth

Century, Oxford, 1928, 23.

255. Colvia, Early Engravers and Engraving in
England, London, 1905, 57.

26

 

 

Ibid., 60.

27John Bell, The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare,

London, 1773, 27.

28John Bell, The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare,
London, 1785, 28.

29Boase, 89.

3OSalaman, 24.

 

 

3lIbid., 24.

32Thomas Bolston, "John Boydell, Publisher: The
Commercial Maecenas," Signature, 8, 1948, 118.

33J. Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
London, 1813, 337.

34Ibid., 288.

 

 

35J. Romney, Memoirs of George Romney, London, 1830,

 

151.

36Ibid., 155.

37Ibid., 161.

38Lawrence Thompson, "The Boydell Shakespeare: An
English Movement to Graphic Arts," Princeton University
Library Chronicle, 1, 1940, 23.

39

 

 

Ibid., 24.

41
4OIbid., 24.

41Boase, 99.

42Eudo C. Mason. The Mind of Henry Fuseli.
London, 1951, 146.

43

 

Boase, 104.'

44Northcote, 340.

45Ibid., 342.

46Ibid., 342.

47Ibid., 342.

48Boase, 104.

CHAPTER III

HENRY FUSELI

Henry Fuseli made nine contributions to the Boydell
Gallery. These nine paintings have elicited the least
uniform Opinions among the historians of Shakespeare
illustration. T.S.R. Boase refers to the Fuseli paintings
as the most "puzzling of the whole business" and relegates
his style toar"peculiarly Germanic violence with a sur-
realism of outlook that is familiar enough today, but
which is hard to place in the eighteenth century."1
Sadakichi Hartmann admits that Fuseli had an excellent
understanding of northern folklore but ventures no further
explanation than to say that he was "powerful but per—
verse."2 What is initially confusing is the lack of easy
categories and precedents from which to make a visual
account of the man's work. His true peers were literary
and his inspiration both in subject matter and stylistic
terms is most often found in literature. If it is dif-
ficult to account for Fuseli in the company of Landseer
and Reynolds, it is easy to see his acceptance in the
circle dominated by Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and

Oliver Goldsmith.

42

43

Johann Heinrich Fassli was born and bred in Zurich
and began his career as a poet and writer and only much
later, in England, took up painting professionally. It is
important to remember that the cultural background of his
youth was the incipient Sturm and Drung movement which
originally started in criticism, mainly in Switzerland, and
soon expanded into Germany and into fiction. Most famous
and most representative of the products of this movement

is Goethe's Sorrows of Werther.. The Storm and Stress was

 

a proto-romantic movement that was characterized by a mania
for Shakespeare and Ossian and the quest for intensity,
originality and freedom of self-expression. Contemporary
with the explorations of theories of the Sublime taking
place in England, the Sturm and Drung movement pursued
essentially the same ends but with a greater naivete. It
is important only because several of its representatives
grew up to achieve artistic maturity as internationally
renowned poets and dramatists. Fuseli was a young disciple
of Bodmer, the premier aesthetician of the Sturm and Drung
who held court in Zurich while Fuseli was growing up.

Bodmer's Aesthetics, although highly emotional and elemen-

 

tal, included a great amount of rationalism which was held
in rather a mystical conjunction with the rest.3 This was
the position Fuseli himself adopted and held successfully

for the rest of his life.

44

One of the first translaters of Macbeth into German,
Fuseli also was the first to translate Winckelman into
English.4 While a young man in London, Fuseli translated
Rousseau into English and published his own defense of
Rousseau's doctrines against the attacks of Voltaire. He
was simultaneously a friend of David Hume, the arch
supporter of experiential objectivity, and an intimate of
William Blake who was content to create the universe out
of his own head. Fuseli was, in short, at the intellectual
pivotal point of his age and was first and foremost a
scholar of contemporary philosophy and literature and was
appropriately lionized as such in London. His creations on
canvas, combining exquisite use of line and composition
with a penchant for the bizarre, the violent, and the per-
versely erotic, were understood as a visual equivalent to
the debates of the literary elite. It is to this same
literary elite that he directs his work and to whom he is
largely indebted for his respected position in the con-
temporary art world. While the popular press was labeling
him as "Shockingly mad, mad, madder than ever" and
"painter ordinary to the devil,"5 he moved steadily up into
the hierarchy of the English art world to his election as an
R.A. to his final status as Professor of Painting.

In 1764, Fuseli arrived in London at the age of
twenty-four with a modest but impeccable reputation earned

in the literary circles of Berlin. He soon entered the

45

intellectual first circle of London, moving in the literary
crowd dominated by Samuel Johnson as well as becoming inti-
mate with such men as Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin.6
Fuseli's background in scientific matters was nearly as
extensive as his literary one. His family included a num-
ber of recognized biologists and his brother became a
rather renowned entomologist. Entomology became a sort of
hobby for Henry Fuseli as well, and his collection of in-
sects, particularly moths and butterflies, was quite
extensive.7 Fuseli came to London with a scholar's grasp
of German, English, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He
executed translations from all of them and wrote bad poetry
in most of them. Between 1764 and 1767, Fuseli published
his translation of Winckleman's first book, some works of

Rousseau, and his own anonymous Remarks on the Writings and

 

Conduct of J.J. Rousseau which was rather flatteringly

 

attributed to Smollet.8 He spent much of his free time at
the theatre where he became a devotee of Garrick, the great
Shakespearian actor and producer.9 Garrick brought con-
siderable vigor into the productions of his day and was
particularly noted for combining exquisite tableau-like
arrangements of characters and scenery with life-like move-
ments and delivery in the broken rhythms of natural speech
that seemed to his admirers the most perfect metamorphosis
of life into art. Fuseli observed that his friend, the

actress Mary Ann Yates, in the role of Hermione made "no

46

insignificant leap, as from Nature into a portrait."10

Certainly it must have rounded out Fuseli's education to
have seen Shakespeare played as he had seldom if ever seen
it before. It can be assumed that he knew the texts of
many of the plays by heart. As mentioned earlier, he had
translated Macbeth while in Zurich. But to actually see
so many familiar scenes enacted on stage must have driven
home to Fuseli the visual potential of the Shakespeare
texts. It would have required, therefore, no great intui-
tive leap to picture such scenes, and it is impossible not
to regard the contemporary theatre as a source for many

of Fuseli's compositions, especially those illustrating
the tragedies. Garrick, who owned many engravings and
paintings and who was a patron of contemporary art, based
many of his scene positions on the compositions found in

11 It is likely

paintings with which he was acquainted.
Fuseli had "legitimate" art historical sources for many com-
positions he borrowed from the theatre; such was the blur-
ring of the borders of the arts at that time.

In 1778, for reasons that are far from clear,
Fuseli gave up his career as a literary figure for one as
a full-time artist. Up until this time, he had been little
more than a weekend artist, trying his hand at illustrating
friends' books but seldom if ever moving beyond his

sketches. Popular myth has it that Reynolds, catching a

glimpse of some of Fuseli's drawings, ordered him to

47

abandon writing and to begin working in oils immediately.12

The reality may have been something very like that for
Fuseli was able to leave for Rome within the year through
the patronage provided him by way of Reynolds' connections.
With these commissions and through sales to visitors,
Fuseli financed his stay in Rome for eight years. During
his sojourn, his primary influences were not Italian but,
oddly enough, English and German. He read and re-read
Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe and worked on a twenty-six
scene series based on the Sistine Ceiling but with
Shakespearian instead of Biblical subjects. In 1774, he
made his Royal Academy debut with a pen and wash drawing

of The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, a scene from Henry IV,

 

Part II, about which Dr. Johnson had remarked in 1765.

"This is one of the scenes which have been

applauded by the critics and which will con-

tinue to be admired when prejudices cease,

and bigotry give way to impartial examina-

tion. There are beauties that rise out of

nature and truth; the superficial reader cannot

miss them, the profound can imagine nothing

beyond them."13
Fuseli chose to illustrate the scene in a manner that would
have appeared obscure to any but the literary sophisticate
and he continued to turn out works that would have their
greatest appeal to the scholar.

Fuseli returned to London in 1779, a late starter

at thirty-eight in the art world dominated by Reynolds,

West, and Barry, and by the taste for glamorous portraits

48

and rather fatuous classical subjects. All of this
appeared inane to Fuseli who gave vent to his opinions in
a poem written shortly after returning to London. The

following extract from his Dunciad of Painting (1780-89)

 

gives a fair idea of his stance:

"Where London pours her motley myrieads, Trade

With fell Luxuriance the Printshop spread:

There as the wedded elm and tendril'd vine

Angelica and Bartolozzi twine. . .

Love without Fire; Smiles without Mirth;

bright Tears

To Grief unknown; and without Beauty, Airs;

Celestial Harlots; Graces dressed by France;

Rosy Despair and Passions taught to dance

Irradiate the gay leaf-the charm struck crowd4

Devoutly gaze, then burst in raptures loud."
Fuseli was never to stoop to what he considered this
frivolity and was in consequence never taken to the hearts
of the critics nor the greater part of the buying public.
He was always to be dependent upon his own loyal circle of
patrons and admirers, most of whom stemmed from his ori-
ginal literary clique.

In November, 1786, Alderman Boydell gave the
famous dinner party at which the project for a Shakespeare
Gallery was first considered. In none of accounts is
Fuseli named as being present although it is likely that he
was responsible for the idea in an indirect way. Romney
was present and it seems probable that he acted as
Fuseli's mouthpiece in this affair. Romney's stay in Rome

had overlapped Fuseli's and while in Italy he had made many

drawings of Shakespeare subjects as Fuseli had done,

49

although never with the same thought of a cycle. When
Romney broached the subject of a Shakespeare Gallery at the
Boydell dinner party, Lord Thurlow remarked, "Romney,
before you paint Shakespeare, do, for God's sake, read
him."15--a piece of advice that might have been given to
all of the Boydell contributors save Fuseli. It seems
unlikely that Romney would have been capable of conceiving
such a scheme had it not been for Fuseli's extensive ground
work.

Fuseli was the largest contributor to the first
stage of the Boydell scheme and probably would have pre-
ferred to be the only contributor, could he have found the
backing. He was the highest paid after Reynolds, West,
and Barry and was, without question, the best prepared for
the project. Nowhere was Fuseli's erudition and dependence
on literary patrons more in evidence than in his paintings

for the Boydell Gallery.

NOTES - CHAPTER III

lT.S.R. Boase, "Illustrations of Shakespeare's

Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Journal
of the Warburg Institute, 10, 1947, 103.

2Sadakichi Hartman, Shakespeare in Art, Boston,

1907, 148.

3Frederick Antal, Fuseli Studies, London, 1956, 12.

 

 

41bid1, 21.

‘5Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli,

New York, 1972, 32.

6Anta1, 14.

7Eudo C. Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, London,

1951, 123.

8Anta1, 15.

 

9John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli,
Esq. M.A.R.A., London, 1831, 81.

loTomory, 15.

llIbid., 15.

12Knowles, 110.

13Anta1, 79.

l4Tomory, 32.

lSIbid., 37.

50

CHAPTER IV

FUSELI'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TRAGEDIES

Fuseli painted three scenes from Shakespeare's

tragedies for the Boydell Gallery: King Lear, I, i,:

 

Hamlet, I, iv.,; and Macbeth, I, iii; and one from the
histories, Henry V, II, ii. Each of these paintings shows
Fuseli's penchant for the heroic and outsized and his
tendency to place the percipient in a frog's-eye view with
respect to the figures on the canvas. Far from a mere
eccentricity on the part of the artist, or a Freudian com-
pensation for his short stature as has been suggested, this
heroic distancing has the very real and important function
of signalling to the observer that the artist is not deal-
ing with real life. Rather he is depicting characters‘and
actions of mythic proportions, not truth itself but grand
generalizations and allegories of truth. Among the other
artists of the Boydell Gallery, it is usually difficult on
viewing alone not only to distinguish which play is being
illustrated but if it is an illustration at all and not a
contemporary portrait or idyll in fancy dress. Fuseli's
paintings announce themselves as illustrations with such

accuracy that it is always possible to quote scene and

51

52

verse at a glance. They also are often complex and
sophisticated comments upon the texts of the plays, requir-
ing considerable scholarship from the observer for full

appreciation. Fuseli's King Lear, c.1786-89, is a parti-

 

cularly good example of the artist's ability to include a
large amount of significant iconographic detail in a read-
able fashion that does not overwhelm the composition as a
whole.

Fuseli's King Lear illustrates Act I, Scene i, from

 

verse 108 to verse 137. More specifically, the lines being
uttered are:
Kent: Good my liege,-
Lear: Peace, Kent!
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
I lov'd her most, and thought to set my
rest
On her kind nursery. Hence, avoid my
sight!
At the center of the composition is the adamant Lear, arm
outstretched in the process of denouncing Cordelia, his
youngest daughter. The map of the realm is unrolled,
stretching out toward Cordelia, the rightful heiress, but
Lear cancels out her legacy by placing his foot in the
middle Of the scroll. Kent, half kneeling in his plea,
stretches an arm across Lear to stop the unjust condemna-
tion of Cordelia. This pair occupies the center of atten-
tion in the composition just as they occupy the center of

the action for the next five acts, seldom missing from any

scene. On each side of Lear are lined up the crucial

53

characters by allegiance. On the observer's right, Lear's
left, are aligned the forces for evil; on Lear's right is
the company for good. A shadow moves across the scene from
Lear's left and has just moved past the center point of
Lear's throne, coinciding with the pivotal point in the
action as Lear makes his disastrous decision to disinherit
Cordelia and turn his kingdom over to her wicked sisters.
The figure of Kent not only gestures on behalf of Cordelia
but compositionally occupies space between Lear and the
characters bent on his destruction. This is the role that
Kent will act throughout the play, a buffer for the de-
throned King. To the right and behind the figure of Kent
stands a courtier holding the coronet mentioned in line I,
i, 137 which Lear has just given to Goneril and Regan as a
symbol of their sovereignty. To the right of the courtier
is a helmeted guard pointing off into the distance at the
gathering gloom foreshadowing the wars and deceptions to
come. Next to him is the Duke of Cornwall, conferring with
his wife, Regan.‘ Goneril stands next, watching the pro-
ceedings with a wicked glee. Last, and behind Goneril, is
her husband, the Duke of Albany, who looks on perplexed, an
unwilling participant in his father-in-law's ruin, and who,
by his very position in the painting, shows his domination
by Goneril.

Fuseli's use of light and dark symbolism is most

signficant for it reflects the dominant symbol system in

54

Shakespeare's text: light and darkness, blindness and
sight. Shakespeare's second most common image concerns
clothing: luxury vs. rags; natural man vs. the unnatural;
and Fuseli has dressed Cordelia's hair with flowers and
Goneril's and Regan's with satin, feathers, and pearls.

On Lear's right, on the brighter side of the com-
position, is a curious triumviratecxfa.swooning Cordelia,
supported by Edgar, and a stooping King of France who bends
to pat a dog. The animal has an air of wounded loyalty,
tail between its legs and looking up for reassurance. We
know that it is the King of France for Cordelia's finger is
pointing out the Fleur-de-lis attached to his cloak. What
appears odd to modern eyes is the presence of Edgar in this
scene and the decidedly secondary position of the King of
France. In the texts currently in use and in the original
Shakespeare quarto, Edgar does not enter the play until
Scene 2 and Cordelia exits in Scene 1, affianced to and
supported the King of France. In the eighteenth century,
however, King Lear was always played and all the superior
editions printed with the Nahum Tate revision of the text.1
Tate's version, perpetrated in 1680, concocted a love
' affair between Cordelia and Edgar, ending the play in their
marriage and the restoration of Lear to his throne. This
version held popular sway until 1838 when the tragic ending
was restored and the Fool brought back on stage.2 Nahum

Tate's revision was respected by the finest minds of the

55

eighteenth century who saw it as the necessary improvement
to a brilliant but uneven and unjust plot. Samuel Johnson
was so shocked by Cordelia's death in the original quartos
that for many years he refused to read any but the Tate
version.3 This indignation at cruelty coupled with the
eighteenth century habit of revising and updating a past
artist's work when it seemed advisable produced the climate
in which many versions of the plays thrived. Fuseli would
have never seen any other version of Lear performed nor
would he have heard any other approved in the literary set
he frequented. Although he certainly was exposed to the
original, he probably shared Dr. Johnson's opinions as he
did in most other literary matters. Samuel Johnson was one
of the few men who maintained that the Ossian legends were
a forgery from the beginning and a shoddy piece of writing
as well.4 Henry Fuseli, premier illustrator of epics
though he was, never painted a single scene nor made a
sketch from Ossian. Whatever Fuseli's private thoughts on
the Tate revision, he had the good sense to work from the
text that the Boydell prints were ultimately going to illus-
trate, the National edition printed in 1802. Oddly enough,
neither Benjamin West nor Smirke, in their paintings of

King Lear, used the contemporary text but worked from

 

either the old Folios or from hearsay and ended up with

scenes at odds with the National edition text.

56

Though less complex than his Leeg painting,
Fuseli's Macbeth shows an equal knowledge of the text and
an understanding of the play. Like the Leap painting,
Fuseli's Macbeth illustrates the pivotal moment in the play
from which all action evolves and shows the tragic figure
at the moment of fatal decision. Macbeth is shown on the
heath with Banquo at his first meeting with the three
witches in Act I, Scene iii, verses 49 to 54.

First Witch: All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee,
Thane of Glamis!

Second Witch: All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee,
Thane of Cawdor!

Third Witch: All hail, Macbeth; that shalt be
king hereafter.

Macbeth is revealed at the moment he is being tempted by
ambition or at the moment when his secret fantasies become
conscious, depending on one's preference for the literal or
psychological interpretation. Banquo dodges this tempta-
tion but Macbeth is struck fully in the face and chest by
the force emanating from the three weird sisters. Fuseli
has effected a small revision of the text with his depic-
tion of the severed head which is seen under the arm of
the witch at the right. Fuseli maintained that Macbeth
simply meeting the witches on the heath was not suffi—
<=ient1y terrifying when portrayed on canvas although it
Irepresented the most psychologically and philosophically

important scene.5 That is why Fuseli transformed it into

57

a visionary night scene and added the head rising out of
the darkness.

Fuseli had begun work on sketches illustrating
Macbeth while he was still in Italy and continued to exe-
cute works on that theme when he was finished with the
Boydell commission.6 It was one of his favorite plays and
it is to be remembered that he translated it into German
while still a youth in Zurich. Fuseli's delight in
Shakespeare's text is easily understood when one considers
that the play combines a bloody psychodrama with accounts of
sleep disturbances and nightmares, intrusions of the super-
natural, and the decidedly sad-masochistic relationship be-
tween Macbeth and his Lady. All this was preferred grist to
Fuseli's mill and while he chose the thematically most essen-
tial scene to illustrate, he made sure that it could stress
the terrible as well. Fuseli understood fully the principle
of impending doom being more sublimely frightening than a
graphic display of the aftermath. Unfortunately Reynolds
did not and it is this failure as much as any that accounts
for the impotency of his Macbeth painting. Reynolds' work
looks like a general casting call for grotesques with a
stocky Macbeth standing in an ill-defined center, flaying
his arms in a stock gesture of amazement.

Fuseli's Hamlet is very similar to his Macbeth
painting in feeling and composition. It, too, has a

dynamic couple on the left juxtaposed with a supernatural

58

figure on the right. In this case it is the actively drawn
Hamlet, being restrained by Horatio, who tries to confront
his father's ghost who walks on the battlements. Like the
Macbeth painting, it is a night scene, and a full and
unnatural light falls from the Ghost unto Hamlet's face and
chest. Fuseli has again chosen the pivotal point in the
play to illustrate, the point at which the tragic hero is
confronted with a choice, the consequences of which comprise
the rest of the drama. The verses illustrated are Act I,
Scene IV, 79-82.

Hamlet: It waves me still.
Go on, I'll follow thee.

Marcellus: You shall not go, my lord.
Hamlet: Hold off your hands.

The Ghost gestures to Hamlet to follow him away from his
friends to hear his message while Horatio and the Guard,
Marcellus, warn him against following the apparition who
may be trying to lure Hamlet over the edge and into the
angry sea. In the painting, Marcellus in his officer's
cap gestures his concern while waves toss in the back-
ground behind the Ghost's feet. The figure of the Ghost
is probably borrowed from that of a gesturing soldier in

Raphael's The Freeing of St. Peter. This is even more

 

evident in Fuseli's 1805 version of Hamlet and the Ghost
which has all the figures of the Boydell painting in nearly
identical poses, but the viewer's position has shifted to

one directly behind the Ghost so that he towers above the

59

foreground and dominates the composition. Fuseli loved
his monsters and, as one finds in later works, they pro-
gressively tend to hold center stage.
Fuseli's Henry V, though not strictly an illustra-
tion of a tragedy, has most in common with his tragedy
series. The artist again has chosen to preserve the ten-
sion by dealing with the crucial moment of decision. The
scene is rather complex. In Henry , II, ii, King Henry
is in his council chamber with the peers of the realm,
about to set sail for France and the battle of Agincourt.
Two of his dukes beg Henry to execute a man lately sent to
prison for insulting the King. No, says Henry, "We con-
sider it was excess of wine that set him on,/And in his
more advice we pardon him" II, ii, 41-53. Furthermore howii;
one to punish real traitors if one executes mere drunks?
The king then hands Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey the notices
which include their own names, at which they repent their
treachery to the throne and beg forgiveness.‘ King Henry
denies their appeal, saying that he could forgive them the
threats to himself but not to the country.
"Touching our person seek we no revenge;/
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,/
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws/
We do deliver you." II, ii, 174-177.

The traitors then exit to their death.

One notices that the composition of Fuseli's Henry

ylis nearly identical to his King Lear. This is not

 

60

accidental. Placed side by side, they represent the
essence of wise and foolish Kingship, Fuseli's and
Shakespeare's own narrative of Good and Bad Government. In
both paintings, the sovereign commands the central position,
and in both he stretches out his arm to denounce his
supposed enemies at the left side of the canvas. Both
paintings align the loyal on one side of the King and the
treacherous on the other, but only Henry has properly
discerned at the moment of decision which is which. Both
paintings align three against three: Cordelia, Edgar, and
France against Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril in Leeg; Scroop,
Cambridge, and Grey against Exeter, Bedford, and
Westmoreland who draw their swords in defense of King Henry
V. Fuseli continues the device of the paper trod underfoot
in Henry V but this time it is the death notice under the
foot of the condemned--a symbol of the preservation of the

realm. In Fuseli's King Lear, the King puts his foot

 

literally in the middle of the kingdom as he disinherits
Cordelia--a symbol of dissolution. Shakespeare's Henry V
is meant to be the example of perfect kingship.
Shakespeare's own historical source for his play, Holinshed,
overflows with eulogy: "This Henry was a king, of life
without spot; a prince of all men loved. . . that both
lived and died a pattern in princehood, a lodestar in honor,
and a mirror of magnificence."8 Fuseli has managed to

illustrate Shakespeare's purpose with an ingenious device

61

that allows him, in the much reduced arena of painting, to
describe such abstract virtues as wisdom and executive com-

petence.

NOTES - CHAPTER IV

1David Michael Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth

Century, Oxford, 1928, 20.

21bid., 21.

3Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare, the Tragedies,
Englewood Cliffs, 1964, 74.

4Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli,
New York, 1972, 13.

5E. Lucie-Smith, "London Commentary: Fuseli at
Roland, Browse, and Delbanco," Studio, 175, May, 1968, 270.

6Frederick Antal, Fuseli Studies, London, 1956, 189.

 

 

 

 

7Tomory, 129.

8Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespeare, New York, 1938,

 

434.

62

CHAPTER V
FUSELI'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE COMEDIES
Fuseli's paintings of comic scenes were done some-

what later than the tragedies.1 These works, mostly

painted in the years spanning 1787-92, are: A Midsummer

 

Night's Dream with Titania and Bottom, A Midsummer Night's

 

 

Dream with Titania, Bottom, and Oberon, Puck, The Tempest,

 

 

 

 

and Falstaff. These five paintings, particularly the three

from A Midsummer Night's Dream, show Fuseli's increased

 

preoccupation with the supernatural and the erotic and a
new tendency to use Shakespeare's text as a point of ima-
ginative departure rather than as an end in itself.

Fuseli's two large paintings of Titania and Bottom
are remarkably similar in composition and it is only with
close examination that one sees that they represent two
different scenes in the play. The first, depicting Bottom
with the ass's head, refers to Act IV, Scene 1, where
Titania is yet enamored of Bottom, still under the influence
of the drug, "Love-in-Idleness." The large central figure
of Titania is shown embracing the ass's head and commanding
her fairies to obey him. One of the sprites, Peaseblossom,
is shown scratching Bottom's head and another, Mustard Seed,

63

64

reaches up from his hand to scratch Bottom's nose because,
as Bottom says, "Methinks I am marvellous hairy about the
face; and I am such a tender ass/ If my hair do but tickle
me, I must scratch." IV, i, 25-28. Two figures standing
to the right of the central grouping, a young woman with

a diminutive old man on a leash, are a thematic echo of the
irrational passion depicted in the center. These two
figures are an allegorical representation of Reason in
chains to Folly, a change rung on the old Aristotle and
Phyllis theme which Fuseli made sketches of as a boy.
Peter Tomory identifies the female figure as Queen Mab on

the basis of a line from Milton's L'Allegro which Tomory

 

has misread. Tomory states that:
"the Fairy Mab is identified by her companion
carrying a dish of junket, and by the diminu-
tive friar who leads her. 'And by the Friar's
lantern led,‘ wrote Milton, in a reference not
lost on Fuseli."
The full quotation concerning Mab is as follows:
"With stories told of many a feat: How
fairy Mab the Junkets eat-
She was pinched and pulled, she said,/
And he by friar's lantern led; Tells how
the drudging goblin sweat."3
The pronouns, he and she, refer to peasants remarking their
encounters with fairies. Further there can be no doubt
that the bowl held by the female figure's companion does
not hold junket, a sweetened thick cream, but rather some

kind of berries. One can identify three other figures in

the painting. There is a face peering out of the

65

underbrush, its features expressing mischievous glee and
its hand making an apotropaic sign against Titania's
hostile magic. The figure is Robin Goodfellow spying for
Oberon to make a report on Titania's foolishness. On the
far left is another diminutive fairy, Cobweb, who is doing
battle with a bumble bee in order to bring the honey sack
to Bottom. This fairy sports his heraldic device on his
shield, a cobweb-spinning spider. Next to Cobweb is a
group of serving women, one of whom holds Titania's
foundling child who reaches out her hands but is ignored.
None of the other figures is readily identifiable except
as ladies-in-waiting and various anonymous fairies. In the
lower right-hand corner is a crone fondling an idiot child,
possibly her offspring by the Devil, but sure identifica-
tion is impossible.

The second large Midsummer Night's Dream painting

 

continues Fuseli's visual bestiary of the supernatural with
a new supporting cast of freaks and fairies, but the
central figures are essentially.the same. The verses
illustrated are Act IV, Scene i, 79-85, in which Oberon
awakens Titania. She repents her ill-considered love, King
and Queen are reunited, and Bottom is put into a deep sleep
so that he may remember it all as a dream. The theme of
the reunited lovers is reiterated among the figures to the
left of Titania and Oberon. A dancing couple embrace, and

far up in the left-hand corner a pair of swans glide

66

suspended in space, symbols of lifelong fidelity in love.
To the right of Titania lies Bottom in his trance-like
sleep while a tiny figure representing deep sleep and
dreams gallops madly over his head. This figure may well
be Mab as she is described in Romeo and Juliet, "she
gallops night by night/ Through lovers' brains, and then
they dream of love;" I, iv, 71-72. To the right of the
sleeping Bottom are three witches, one of whom indeed
holds a devil's offspring between her breasts as evidenced
by its tiny ram's horns. At her feet a young girl covers
her eyes and another hides under her skirts, young ini-
tiates in witchcraft. Again there are a number of anony-
mous sprites, one of whom balances delicately upon a moth's
back, showing evidence of FuSeli's entomological studies.
Another cheerful gnome crouches at the left of Oberon with
a smaller figure playing bag-pipes between his knees in

an obvious sexual pun.

Fuseli's third illustration for A Midsummer Night's
Qgeem_is a painting of Puck on his errand for the drug,
Love-in-Idleness. In the speech beginning with II, i, 54,
Oberon asks Puck to find the flower with all possible speed,
to which Puck replies, "I'll put a girdle round about the
earth/ In forty minutes." II, i, 174-175. Puck's left
hand describes a literal "girdle" of this sort in a halo
comprised of planets, moons, and stars and what appears to

be a Mobius strip. This device describes both unnatural

67

speed and freedom from natural law, as if Puck could juggle
celestial bodies. Puck himself is shown as mature with
whiskers and hair on his chest; he is not of the world and
neither is he an innocent. He is certainly no relation to
Reynolds' plump toddler with pointed ears. Fuseli's Puck
' is an amoral Spirit capable of much mischief but no great
evil, closely following his description in Shakespeare's
text. "He that sometime make the drink bear no harm. . .
but those that Hobgoblin call him and sweet Puck/ He does
their work, and they shall have good luck." II, i, 34-42.
In the left foreground is a Mab-like creature holding up
the flower that Puck seeks and in the right is a con-
founded horse and rider who have become vitims of Puck's
tendency to "mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their
harm." II, 1, 38.

The Midsummer Night's Dream paintings show Fuseli

 

at his favorite pastime, concocting a kind of third world
in which myth and allegory share space with the natural
world and are the more frightening for that slight ground-
ing in reality, like awakening to a nightmare. The play
also gives Fuseli a chance to dabble safely with such
themes of perverse eroticism as bestiality and dominance-
submission under the recognizable guise of fantasy.

Fuseli's The Tempest also deals with the juxtaposi-

 

tion of the natural and unnatural world and the erotic

possibilities between the two. The scene illustrated comes

68

early in the play when Prospero catches Caliban trying to
"violate the honour of my child." I, ii, 348. Prospero
here is all the outraged patriarch, standing between his
daughter and this unnatural match. Perversely, Fuseli has
Miranda looking not overly concerned by the prospect but
rather bored, perhaps at her father's sermonizing. Fuseli
has no inhibitions about showing characters scared out of
their wits and Miranda does not even look unnerved--rather
scandalous under the circumstances. The composition is
similar to that found in Fuseli's Hamlet and Macbeth. The
figures representing human civilization stand on the left
aligned with the observer whose eyes travel with theirs to
the right side of the canvas to confront the supernatural.
Each gestures to each across a space which in this case is
filled by the mediating figure of Ariel who is neither hu-
man nor of Caliban's order but an incorporeal spirit.
Prospero never deals with Caliban directly but always
through the intermediary, Ariel. On the other level,
Fuseli is juxtaposing human culture versus the order of
nature to which Caliban belongs with the crayfish, mullusks
and monkey which are grouped with him on the right. The
mediator in this case is the domestic cat which sits pre-
cisely between Prospero and Caliban on the ground beneath
the suspended Ariel.

Fuseli has created in this painting several grids

on which to evaluate the play's experience. On the

69

spiritual level it reads left to right as Good--Amoral
Innocence (Ariel)--Evil. On the physical level it reads
Culture--Domesticated Nature--Nature. One is tempted to
add Super Ego--Ego--Id, espcially when one remembers
Ariel's constant pleas to be freed even from Prospero's
righteous domination to simply run and play. Beneath
Prospero's cloak are some tiny creatures, lesser spirits,
who, like Ariel, were trapped by Sycorax, Caliban's
mother, but who are now being rescued simply by Prospero's
nearness.

Fuseli's last comic scene is that of Falstaff and

Doll Tearsheet from King Henry IV, Part Two. This is

 

 

simply a scene of lasciviousness and excess. The central
focus of the composition is upon Falstaff's belly balanced
on the one hand by an outsized glass of sack and on the
other by the whore, Doll Tearsheet. Through the door in
the right middle ground, come the young Prince Henry and
the servant, Poins, laughing at the incorrigible Falstaff.
Fuseli has added, as usual, some symbolic detail that re-
duces the scene to its essence. Over the door he has
created a coat of arms for Falstaff, a cooked boar's head,
garnished and ready to be served. One notices, also, that
Falstaff does not merely clasp Doll around the waist, he
imbeds his fingers in her hip and his sword is lying out of
reach on the floor where it is least likely to force

Falstaff to honourable action. As Prince Henry enters the

70

room, Falstaff banters insults with him, calling him a
"Whoreson mad compound of majesty" and "a bastard son of the
King." II, iv, 320. The Prince responds in kind and then
gently reminds Falstaff of his rank and place with respect
to a prince of the realm. The scene is the precedent for
Act II, Scene ii, of Hepgy V_where the mature Henry shows
no inclination to hang a drunk simply for an insult.
Falstaff in the earlier play is under indictment for
cowardice as he ran from the battlefield earlier in the
day--again the significance of the tossed-down sword. In
Falstaff's own words, "the better part of valour is dis-
cretion." I,ii, 206-7. Fuseli's particular contribution
in this work was to create the memorable and archtypical
Falstaff that had been missing in Shakespeare illustration

prior to the Boydell Gallery.

NOTES - CHAPTER V

1Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Ffissli, Zurich, 1974,

 

631.

2Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli,
New York, 1972, 100.

3

 

John Milton, L'Allegro, Lines 30-33.

 

71

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Henry Fuseli, without a doubt the most erudite
artist of his age and one of the most sophisticated, was
perhaps the first to combine considerable scholarship with
artistic prowess to confront the problem of Shakespeare
illustration. His nine contributions to the Boydell
Shakespeare Gallery are the most imaginative of all, and
by placing them beside Shakespeare's lines it is possible
to see not only their fidelity to the text itself but also
to the inherent abstractions. Fuseli is particularly worthy
of study as a bellweather of his time because he was worked
upon by so many contemporary influences. Fuseli's acknow-
ledgement of the irrational and erotic undercurrents of
Shakespeare, his willingness to demonstrate vulgarity or
earthiness found in many of the plays, parallels the inno-
vations occurring in contemporary criticism. Just as
Fuseli broke from the traditionally prettified illustra-
tions of his predecessors, so too were young critics and
scholars beginning to feel the influence of such thinkers
as Burke and Goethe and leave behind the traditioncflfPope,
Dryden, and Ben Johnson who saw Shakespeare as merely an

72

73

exceptional teller of moral tales who nevertheless needed
restraining. Fuseli became recognized as a figure of in-
ternational import early in his career and by the time he
returned from Rome, he was already famous. With Lavater's
help, both Goethe and Herder had become staunch admirers of
his work and the literary Sturm und Drang movement recog-
nized him as the artist who emulated their own aims in
visual terms. In London he was equally lionized, and,
backed by the literary avant-garde, he set about introduc-
ing historical painting to England with his monumental
representations of scenes from literature, mythology, and
history. At this point in his career, Fuseli drew his
subject matter primarily from Shakespeare and the following
paragraph from an essay by Guilio Carlo Agan explains a
good deal of Fuseli's attitude toward the poet:

"What Fuseli really discovered in Shakespeare,

apart from his immense dramatic variety, was

the mysterious, secretive, orphic nature of

the theatre. . . Emotion has nothing pathetic

or moving about it for Fuseli. He sees it in

a purely moral light. . . it does not occur

naturally in his works but is to a certain

extent artificial, like the emotional out-

bursts of the mad or the possessed. Fuseli

found in Shakespeare the most suitable themes

for his rebellious, failing morality."

Fuseli's recognition of this "orphic" quality is

most readily seen in his illustrations of the tragedies
which always depict a crucial scene chosen for its pro-

phetic relation to the rest of the play. The power that

he commands with his somewhat outsized and artificial

74

emotion again parallels strides made in other fields.
Garrick's innovations in production are described as a
combining of life-like but rather grandiose movements and
speech with a stylization that was the norm of an earlier
period in dramatic fashion.

Fuseli was to retain his ties with the literary
world eflJ. his life and in his Old age enjoyed a correspon-
dence with Lord Byron whom he much admired.2 Byron and
Fuseli have much in common in their approach to art. Both
deal with essentially "romantic" themes of grand passion
and terror and both build upon essentially traditional neo-

classical foundations in terms of technique and composition.

NOTES - CHAPTER VI

1Tate Gallery, Henry Fuseli 1741-1825 (exhibition
catalog), London, 1975, ll.

 

2John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry
Fuseli, Esq., M.A.R.A., London, 1831, 352.

 

 

75

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bisset, Robert, The Life of Edmund Burke, London, 1778.

 

Blunt, Anthony, The Art of William Blake, New York, 1959.

 

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Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of
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76

77

Ditchburn-Bosch, Ursula, "Johann Heinrich Ffissli Kustlehre
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78
Lucie-Smith, E., "London Commentary: Fuseli at Roland,
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79

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1972.

ILLUSTRATIONS

80

 

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89

 

Illustration 10.--Midsummer'Nighs's Dream. Act II. Scene I.
Painted by H. Fuseli. Engraved by J.
Parker.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

 

9O

 

Illustration ll: Midsummer Night'S'Dream. Act II. Scene LI.
Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Engraved
by L. Schiavonetti.

(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

91

 

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93

 

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Illustration 15: King Henry IV, Part II. Act II. Scene IV.
Painted by H. Fuseli. Engraved by W. Leney.
(Photo: The Boydell Shakespeare Prints)

 

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