Illustrations have been an important element of many of the most extensively read editions of Shakespeare's plays, from the frontispieces to Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition to the multiple images placed within the text of Victorian editions. Through symbols the illustrations have explored language and character; by allusion to earlier paintings they have offered critical readings; and by gesture, setting and costume they have redesigned the plays within the visual vocabulary of their own times. In all these ways they offer important exchanges with contemporary social, aesthetic and critical concerns, and, despite being largely ignored by scholars, are central to the plays' reception. Highly illustrated, including many images not previously reproduced, the book allows the reader to share the experience of early readers of the plays. Building on the author's earlier work in Painting Shakespeare it offers a fresh address to the tradition of visual criticism and assimilation of Shakespeare's plays.

A complete study of the history and tradition of illustrated editions of Shakespeare, containing 167 illustrative images from major editions.

Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years. The essays in this volume consider Venice a real as well as symbolic landscape that needs to be explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare's historical context and in the later tradition of reconfiguring one of the most represented cities in Western culture. Shylock and Othello are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical; we are still haunted by these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism.

An illustrated collection of new essays with valuable reference material on the performance and reception of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's Pictures is the first full-length study of visual objects in Shakespearean drama. In several plays (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, among others) pictures are brought on stage - in the form of portraits or other images - as part of the dramatic action. Shakespeare's characters show, exchange and describe them. The pictures arouse in their beholders strong feelings, of desire, nostalgia or contempt, and sometimes even taking the place of the people they depict. The pictures presented in Shakespeare's work are part of the language of the drama, and they have a significant impact on theatrical performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own. Keir Elam pays close attention to the iconographic and literary contexts of Shakespeare's pictures while also exploring their role in performance history. Highly illustrated with 46 images, this volume examines the conflicted cooperation between the visual and the verbal.

A ground-breaking contribution to the economic and cultural history of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publishing of illustrated belles lettres in Scotland, the book offers detailed accounts of numerous agents of prints (booksellers, printers, designers, engravers) and their involvement in the making and marketing of illustrated editions. It examines the ways in which the makers of books not only produced printed visual culture artefacts but also contributed to the ideological inscription of these illustrations to engender patriotic concerns and issues of national identity. The book differs fundamentally from existing interventions in book illustration studies: Examinations of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary book illustrations have, as a rule, been selective rather than broad in scope or systematic in outlook; they have focused on English examples of book illustrations. By contrast, The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1820 studies a large body of illustrated editions andadopts a systematic and decentered (non-London-centered) approach. It focuses on the examination of the production of literary book illustrations in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland, while at the same time bearing in mind that developments in the marketing of illustrated books need to be understood as part of the cultural and book-historical dynamics of exchange that existed between Scotland and England. Not only does the monograph offer the first large-scale study of the subject, contextualizing literary book illustrations in terms of the ideologically defined ventures as part of which they were issued, but it also draws a map of illustrated works that has not been imagined yet by scholars of the history of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book. In doing so, the book provides an account of the publishing of belles lettres and the various strategies that bookseller-publishers deployed to market their editions competitively in both Scotland and England.

This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.