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.

Punishment

Marrying a punk, my lord, is

pressing to death,

whipping, and hanging.

Measure for Measure (5.1.596-597)

To drive home his dismay at being forced to marry the prostitute ("punk") he has impregnated, Lucio compares his fate to the worst kinds of punishment he can imagine. The first example he gives, pressing to death, was a form of torture in which the body of an accused person who refused to speak was crushed under a mass of stones.

Sports

Richard II

Queen: What sport shall ... drive away the heavy thought of care?

Lady: Madam, we'll play at bowls.

Queen: 'Twill make me think the world is full of rubs

And that my fortune runs against the bias (3.4.1-5)

Richard's Queen desires some diversion to make her forget her cares. She rejects the suggestion of a game of bowls, punning on rub (an obstruction that deflects the course of the bowl) and bias (the curve that brings the ball to the desired point).

Julius Caesar

. . . we are at the stake

And bayed about with many enemies. . . . (4.1.52-53)

Bearbaiting was a bloodsport in which dogs attacked a bear chained to a stake. Extremely popular in Shakespeare's time, the sport took place in market squares, village greens, and in urban arenas such as the famous Paris and Bear Gardens on London's Bankside, where Shakespeare's Globe was also located. At least one theater, the Hope, which opened on the Bankside in 1614, was used both for playing and bearbaiting.

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.

Love's Labor's Lost

He shall present Hercules in minority. His enter and

exit shall be

strangling a snake.

(5.1.133-135)

Classical mythology constitutes the single most important body of material that Shakespeare drew upon in constructing his plays. Whether used for comic, ironic, or tragic effect, Shakespeare's many allusions to mythology introduce us to words and images that significantly enlarge the scope and widen our perspective of the plays. Hercules was a mythological character of whom Shakespeare made frequent use. In this image, the hero is depicted as a child, strangling the two snakes sent to destroy him. Shakespeare's recurring use of images of Hercules reminds us that mythological characters were part of the common currency of language in his day.

Much Ado About Nothing

Leander the good swimmer.

(5.2.30-31)

In Greek mythology, Leander was a famous lover who drowned while swimming across the Hellespont to see his sweetheart Hero. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick claims that Leander's suffering as a lover is nothing as compared to Benedick's own where Beatrice is concerned. Shakespeare's characters frequently refer to Leander's exploits as a standard measure of romantic devotion.

Richard III

. . . fair St. George

Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons.

(5.3.371-372)

While Shakespeare's allusions to mythology are most often classical, at times he drew upon non-classical myths and native folklore, calling up memories of the legendary King Arthur or heroic St. George. King Richard, as he prepares for the battle at Bosworth Field, calls upon England's patron saint and dragon slayer, asking for an infusion of the dragon's courage ("spleen") for himself and his men.

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: