Seeing What Shakespeare Means

Seeing What Shakespeare Means, part of the Exhibitions at the Folger opened April 3, 1999 and closed on August 21, 1999.

Understanding Shakespeare's language is not always easy. Four hundred years of "static" intervene between his writing and our reading and hearing. While most of Shakespeare's immense vocabulary is still in use, and many ideas and figures to which he refers are still part of our culture, some of his words and references seem foreign to us. Fortunately, books from Shakespeare's time contain woodcuts and engravings that give us ways of literally seeing what Shakespeare means. This exhibition drew from the Folger's rich collections of early books, highlighting images that illuminate Shakespeare's text and that have been used to aid readers of the The New Folger Library Shakespeare.

Only through pictures can we visualize many of the objects, places, pastimes, and customs of Shakespeare's everyday life. These include the male attire of doublet and hose, the cattle markets of Eastcheap, and the sports of bearbaiting and bowls. Pictures also let us see how Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined the world. Their education was very different from our own, with their time in school devoted almost exclusively to the classics — texts in Latin and Greek that often featured mythological subjects. It was thus natural for Shakespeare to present or allude to the harpy and the phoenix, Leander and Hercules, Cupid and Diana, whose images appear in the exhibition. Pictures also illuminate much of the conventional wisdom quoted in Shakespeare's plays. We can understand many of Shakespeare's lines with lightning speed if we have the right visual images before us — if, for example, we can see the figure of Time as he "goes on crutches" or see a picture of the world "going on wheels." This exhibition presents a sample of the Folger's vast holdings of the visual arts of Shakespeare's day and thus makes visible much of Shakespeare's remarkable language.

Exhibition materials

Visualizing Shakespeare

One way in which illustrations inform our readings of Shakespeare is by helping us visualize the objects, places, and customs of his day that are no longer familiar. Sometimes Shakespeare refers directly to such things; at other times, as in the case of the doublet and hose, Shakespeare uses the everyday reference to illustrate a figurative idea.

Imagining Shakespeare

As an age of exploration and discovery, the Renaissance was awash in the marvelous: the wonders of nature itself, of the strange practices and customs of newly discovered worlds, of the individual's fantastic imaginings, and of the characters and strange creatures brought into the public consciousness through the period's immersion in classical mythology. Shakespeare's plays offer us a window into this imaginative world of the Renaissance. Images depicting these strange creatures, stories, and characters help us to understand the imaginative context of the plays and the world in which they were written.

Othello

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders. These to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline.

(1.3.166-170)

Images from Lycosthenes' appropriately entitled Prodigiorum (of Prodigies or Wonders) depict one of the strange sights Othello encountered in his travels. Tales of these and other marvelous beings comprise the whole of the "witchcraft" with which Othello confesses to having captured Desdemona's heart. Surprisingly, the same set of images — cannibals, anthropophagi, and men with heads beneath their shoulders — appears in the play and on a single page of the Prodigiorum.

The Tempest

. . . Now I will believe

That there are unicorns, that in Arabia

There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix

At this hour reigning there.

(3.3.26-29)

In The Tempest, Sebastian wryly recalls this aviary wonder to express amazement at the "strange shapes" bringing in a mysterious banquet to him and his shipwrecked mates. No sooner do several of the crew take up the invitation to eat and drink than Ariel appears to them as a harpy, a mythological creature with the face and breasts of a woman and the wings and talons of a bird, and makes the food and drink vanish. This incident is modeled on stories from the Argonautica and Aeneid of harpies destroying or devouring the food of starving travelers. The passage quoted here is actually a rather striking stage direction.

Understanding Shakespeare

Visual images can illustrate not merely objects, places, or stories, but also abstract ideas and popular beliefs. The images reproduced here exemplify Shakespeare's creative use of figurative language and, in particular, of three rhetorical devices: personification, proverb, and metaphor. In personification, human attributes are ascribed to non-human creatures or inanimate objects. Proverbs distill common experience into a compact and memorable formula. And metaphor is a comparison that identifies one thing with another, dissimilar thing. All of these help explain the strange by using the familiar, challenging the reader with the power of their resonance.

Look at a few examples from the plays to see what Shakespeare really means: