• 1 See James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Claire M. L. (...)

1While early modern scholars today acknowledge that multiple figures from both Shakespeare’s time and subsequent ages collaborated in creating the early modern dramatic texts that we read and perform today, we often work casually with outmoded conceptions of authorship. Few of us follow the model offered by the textual scholar James McLaverty, who considers the effects of typesetting and page layout, or that of Claire M. L. Bourne, who has recently examined the significance of indentation, dashes, and pilcrows in early modern volumes of plays.¹ Most textual work has emphasized editorial choices, not aesthetic ones. Issues such as font, layout, print, paper choice, and binding have been relatively neglected; mistakenly, the medium of the book is regarded as transparent.

• 2 Stuart Sillars, The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (...)

3As Stuart Sillars has observed, illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s works reveal how “the plays, increasingly seen as the vital embodiment of cultural maturity, are absorbed into changing ways of seeing, and of organising and aestheticising knowledge.”² The editions by Rowe (1709), Boydell (1802), and Heath (1807) are among the most significant of these. Many illustrated editions of individual plays have also been created; Arthur Rackham’s 1908 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be the most widely known. These mass-market editions were often created by editors or publishers in response to a perceived market—and purchased (just as the editors and publishers hoped) as a sign of status or culture. The volumes were designed by editors, who commissioned artists to create the illustrations, which stand in subordinate relation to the text (as the term “illustration” implies). These mass-market editions are forerunners to the livre d’artiste—deluxe editions with elaborate production values, marketed to and purchased by the wealthy. In such editions the illustrators may be artists: many of the great Modernists of the twentieth century contributed art works to livres d’artistes. But they did not design the books. Their contribution was mediated by the editor, who made the decisions about the typeface, layout, and binding, as well as the identity of the illustrator, to achieve his own vision of the product. The form of the book was never interrogated and the primacy of the text was evident.

• 3 Johanna Drucker, The Century for Artists’ Books, New York, Granary, 1995, p. 3-4. See also the defi (...)

4An artist’s book “interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or material form. […It is] almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form.”³ Decisions about form are controlled by the artist, who makes the decisions about production: content, materials, and the interaction of the two. Many early artists’ books were handmade one-of-a-kind artifacts or printed in very small print runs by artists who had their own presses, but others have been mass-produced with the artist’s input. Many artists’ books are created by a single individual, but in cases where the author and artist are separate people, the work is generally a collaboration between the two.

• 5 Keith A. Smith, Structure of the Visual Book, 4^th ed., Rochester, NY, Keith Smith Books, 2003, p. 1 (...)
• 6 Ibid.
• 7 Ibid., p. 99.

In the view of the book artist Keith A. Smith, such a design makes the book format “a servant of the text it contains.”⁵ By contrast, in discussing the artist’s book, Smith alludes to the necessity for the book designer to respond to the dictates of the artist: “The book format should not be relegated to a warehouse for words. Just as in a book of pictures, the format can reinforce and even alter what is printed on the page.”⁶ The artist’s book may be a codex (sheets of paper, often bound together at one end by a spine) but it may also be a foldbook, a fan book, a tunnel book, or a “Venetian blind”, bound loosely together at two ends. Smith even conceives of a codex consisting of images of transparencies developed with no fixative. Bound as a leather casebound book, the transparencies would blacken as the first viewer turned the pages one by one: “Upon turning each page, the viewer [would] momentarily see the image as it sacrifices itself to protect the remaining pages.”⁷ Artists’ books are more art than book; yet, because of their size, they can generally engage their audience just one person at a time, offering the viewer an intensely personal experience.

• 8 François Rigolot, “Le Poétique et l’analogique”, Poétique 35, September, 1978, p. 258; qtd. and tra (...)

6The artist’s book resembles visual poetry in this important attribute: within it, “[f]iguration, spatialization, visualization of the poetic message aim at remotivating the signifier in the analogical relationship. […] Thus, literal activity tends to displace literary activity or even in extreme cases to replace it entirely.”⁸ In other words, typography and other visual elements render the medium of print a communicative element in itself rather than merely a means of communication.

• 9 Courtney Lehmann, “Introduction, ‘What is a Film Adaptation?’ Or ‘Shakespeare Du Jour’”, in Richard (...)
• 10 Maurizio Calbi, Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century, New York, Pal (...)

7The works I examine here manifest key traits of the artist’s book; yet they are no collaboration between artist and author—in fact, these artists make use of a long-dead author who may be the most canonical figure in literature. I choose the expression “make use of” advisedly, because none of these artists choose Hamlet to illustrate it. Instead, their purpose is to use Hamlet, a supremely literary artifact, to explore the possibilities of their own art: the Shakespeare text functions as a tool for artistic experimentation. When an already acknowledged masterpiece becomes the foundation for new artistic work, the resulting postmodern bricolage has implications for both the literary canon and the art form it represents. Within the artist’s book, Shakespearean text plays Fred Astaire to the art form’s Ginger Rogers. (I am recalling the well-known aperçu about the famous dance couple: “He gives her class and she gives him sex.”) For the book artist, the use of Shakespearean text is both tribute and marketing scheme. The object that results is linked with a well-known name, and the work becomes something of an insouciant challenge to canonicity. The Shakespearean text is the Astaire partner in the collaboration—its presence lends legitimacy to the work while suggesting the necessity for reappraisal of the value inherent in Shakespeare usage. Is the Shakespeare brand somewhat demeaned by this usage? Not at all, I would argue: the artist’s use of Shakespeare brings new meaning and new vigor to our concept of “Shakespeare.” The deadening nature of the canon is revivified by such new usage, which sexes up Shakespeare and demands new consideration of old white men who show off their skill with rhythmic feet. Once we acknowledge that spatial play and materiality are forging the text, the nature of text is redefined. Hamlet is the base, or perhaps the basis for the artwork, but Shakespeare’s words, while valuable, are merely one element among others. If, as Courtney Lehmann says, “a legacy comprised of remains is nothing less than an invitation to participate in an adaptation process that […] is always unfinished,” these remains may become part of something new.⁹ Works like these draw attention to what Maurizio Calbi characterizes as “the fluidity of their own boundaries.”¹⁰ In making use of Shakespeare, they become, to a greater or lesser extent, something else.

• 11 Printed Matter, Inc. Website. “What is an artist’s book?”: https://www.printedmatter.org/what-we-do (...)
• 12 Smith, op. cit., p. 218.
• 13 Ibid., p. 30.

8To follow up on the connection between Fred Astaire, William Shakespeare, and the artist’s book, I focus in this essay on elements key to the coherence of the artist’s book. As with dance and drama, the coherence of the artist’s book must derive from some sort of structure, yet, in this experimental form, the artist may choose to use neither the traditional codex form nor traditional forms of textual organization. Printed Matter, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the appreciation of this art form, characterizes the experience of examining an artist’s book as “physically moving through an artwork.”¹¹ Yet the expression “moving through” may be misleading: frequently the artist’s book challenges the notion of the book with a structure that frustrates attempts to read unidirectionally from beginning to end. Smith argues that “single pictures amassed are either a group, series, or a sequence.” He defines group as a list unified by a common denominator of some sort: “compilation without structure or constructed movement.” A series, in his view, is “linking movement”, a linear progression or succession in which each picture extends the previous one and affects the one after it. Finally, a sequence “is constructed by cause and effect. […] Several pictures react to, or act upon each other, but not necessarily with the adjacent picture, as in a series. […] A sequence is a geometric progression, a montage.”¹² He also asserts that series “generally are thematically related or connected while sequences are based upon disjunctive relationships.” In his words, “[a] sequence is structured by allowing one image to follow another by an order of presentation which is not apparently thematic or systematic.”¹³

• 14 Bohn, op. cit., p. 4.

9Concern with sequencing and correlation looms large in the form of the works I examine. In the edition of Hamlet created by the Cranach Press as a collaboration among the book’s designer, illustrator and editor, woodcuts and source material provide secondary narratives that engage in dialogue with the printed text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Bad Quarto is still more collaborative. In contrast, Wolf’s Hamlet II:2 is made by a single artist; in this book, the division of each page into three parts recalls the Surrealist game “Exquisite Corpse”, a semi-serious activity of artistic collaboration, and the divided pages result in a collaboration between artist and spectator. The artists who created these works challenge the codex’s privileging of series. We can see that the forward movement of the series yields to the multivalent pleasures of sequence. White space becomes visual silence that “creates a privileged space for the text and its individual images.”¹⁴ The results are new forms of Hamlet. With that change in signifier, the signified is transformed as well.

• 15 Drucker, op. cit., p. 87.

10While the Cranach Press Hamlet is clearly an homage to Shakespeare’s work, its structure also challenges assumptions about the transparency of media. Its creators “appropriate[e] the territory of writing for experiment and invention.” The interchanging of illustration for source material here “undermines the linguistic aspect of the system of language”, as in artists’ books.¹⁵ The structure of the volume implicitly privileges the perceptions of the reader/spectator even as it recalls past traditions of text/image relations.

• 16 Stephen Orgel alludes to the 1457 Mainz Psalter. See Stephen Orgel, Spectacular Performances: Essay (...)
• 17 James P. Taylor, “The Shadow Puppets of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig and the Cranach Press Hamlet” (...)

11The Cranach Press edition of Hamlet is a deluxe edition created by the boutique press founded by Harry Graf Kessler. The first edition was published in German in 1929; the second edition, which is the one I discuss here, came out in 1930 and reverted to English. It is about 14 inches tall; its blackletter typeface was designed by Edward Johnston for this edition and is based on fonts used in the fifteenth century.¹⁶ The format combines the qualities of a deluxe edition with those of a scholarly edition: two short inner columns of Shakespeare’s text are surrounded by columns of Shakespeare’s source material in smaller print, running outside and underneath Shakespeare’s text. This design evolved from collaboration between publisher and artist: initially Kessler had hoped that the illustrator, Edward Gordon Craig, would write marginal notes as well as provide woodcuts.¹⁷ As it turned out, however, the margins contain Shakespeare’s source material instead: the Amleth episode from Saxo Grammaticus’s history of Denmark and one of the tales from Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, translated in the sixteenth century from a still-earlier Italian source. The text of Hamlet is that edited by J. Dover Wilson, based on the second quarto of 1604. (Wilson diverged from many Shakespeare scholars of his time who regarded as definitive a version that combined the second quarto with the Hamlet of the First Folio.)

• 18 Werner, op. cit. [No pagination.]

12Shakespeare played no part in the book’s design, of course: the volume is a collaboration by the publisher, Harry Graf Kessler; the editor, J. Dover Wilson; the typeface designer, Edward Johnston; and the illustrator, Edward Gordon Craig. As Sarah Werner has observed, Johnston’s typeface strongly contributes to the volume’s realization of Kessler’s intention to rework the past.¹⁸

• 19 Experiments in typography were enacted by members of twentieth-century avant-garde movements such a (...)

14Kessler’s layout of Saxo and Belleforest in relation to Dover Wilson’s Hamlet, with the source material sharing the page with the play (appearing in smaller print surrounding the drama) and the editorial notes in a separate folder (but in the same typeface) is one of many possible ways of indicating relations among texts. Like concrete poetry, this editorial choice forces the reader to consider the meaning as an arrangement of linguistic and typographic elements simultaneously.¹⁹ Through the smaller type, Kessler characterizes the source-texts as subordinate in importance to Shakespeare’s play. They are still indicated, however, as reading matter, unlike the editorial notes, whose presentation characterizes them as a kind of appendix.

• 21 See Ephesians 5:22-24 and 5:31-33.

18Hamlet’s mockery of the insensate Polonius characterizes the old man as a seller of fish, a man who is pimping out his own daughter at the command of the lecherous old king. Below Shakespeare’s text is a passage from Saxo describing how Amleth’s new wife, daughter of the king of England, remains faithful to him even after she learns that he has been unfaithful to her with Queen Hermutrude of Scotland: “[N]o disaster shall put out my flame for thee; no ill-will shall quench it, or prevent me from exposing the malignant designs against thee, or from revealing the snares I have detected.” In contrast to the scene in Hamlet, in which Ophelia is degraded by her association with her corrupt father, Amleth’s new wife, who reveals to her husband that her father is plotting against him, demonstrates her virtue by showing herself “more inclined to love her husband than her father,” as Saxo’s narrator comments. The seemingly inevitable besmirching of feminine virtue is challenged by this exemplar of a strong woman who nonetheless follows Paul’s dictum to join herself to her husband.²¹

• 22 See http://virginiabookarts.org/2015/04/vabcs-bad-hamlet/ (last accessed 17 April 2018).

20I turn now to The Bad Quarto, an artist’s book conceived as a celebration of Shakespeare by the members of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. This artist’s book is a casebound volume created by four teams of artists who worked with the text of Hamlet Q1, each team interpreting their portion of the “bad quarto” with relief-printing methods including letterpress, print-making, stamping, and overlays. Each team was assigned two or three eight-page signatures of Q1, selected out of order to avoid the appearance of stylistic division among different sections of the book. For printing, each team received sheets already printed with page numbers and act and scene references. Artists were limited to a color palette of white, transparent white, black, and red (a choice inspired by the red background and white cross of the Danish flag).²²

• 23 Smith, op. cit., 94.

29Smith discusses books with similar forms in his treatment of “accumulated fragments.” He observes that turning the page
- is a physical movement.
- Turning pages reveals the order of viewing.
- It places the book into time.
- The book is a single experience, a compound picture of the many separate sheets.
- In the codex, this single experience is revealed in slivers. The total is perceived and exists only as retention of afterimage in the mind. The codex is never seen at once.²³

• 24 Barthes uses the term “anchorage” with reference to the textual component of the magazine ad, argui (...)
• 25 Drucker, op. cit., p. 228.
• 26 Ibid.
• 27 Ibid., p. 229-230.
• 28 Qtd. in Thomas Ingmire, “Remembering Arne Wolf” (http://www.thomasingmire.com/blog/remembering-arne (...)
• 29 John Prestianni, “Words and Images: An Interview with Arne Wolf”, Alphabet: The Journal of the Frie (...)
• 30 Ibid.

30The artifact is not merely a tribute to Shakespeare, of course: Wolf’s removal of the sentence from its context un-anchors it from its original meaning and allows it to signify more freely.²⁴ Wolf seems to be overlooking the identity of the character who speaks the words, using Hamlet as a commentary on the meaning-making process of his own artifact. (There may be some self-mockery in apotheosizing the sentiments of a character generally viewed as wordy, pompous, and foolish.) The “method” is the random combinations of signs, only a single series of which results in the “right” combination of paper strips. But, as I have already noted, the combinations that fail to form letters are aesthetic creations in their own right. Wolf’s elegant artwork recalls the typographic experimentation of the Bauhaus School, the Surrealists and, most of all, the Lettrists, a post-1945 avant-garde group who invented new glyphic writing forms. Their founder, the Franco-Romanian Isidore Isou, characterized the movement as “an interrogation of letterforms as the fundamental units of communication.”²⁵ Followers of Isou like Maurice Lemaître used letters and glyph-like marks as graphic elements.²⁶ Lemaître hoped to create letters that were like rebuses or Chinese characters, letters that communicate ideas directly in an attempt to intensify the visual properties of writing.²⁷ In Hamlet II:2, Wolf is creating both a series, which moves forward towards a very focused, specific representation of an utterance, and a sequence, in which the page-turner can revel in the meaning of the utterance, the madness of applying exquisite corpse techniques to a typographical artwork. Wolf uses not primarily Polonius, but Hamlet’s word-games: the playful divisions among written matter that occur “between whom,” as Hamlet obscurely inquires—whether as grounds for quarrel or as “wild and whirling words” with no apparent communicative intention. Wolf clearly chose Hamlet specifically for its thematic concern with the divide between the word and what it represents, the enactor of a deed versus the actor of the staged show, the world-making utterance and the potential in utterance for falsity. In his lectures as a professor, Wolf asserted, “Content equals the whole message, not just the verbal message.”²⁸ Hamlet II:2 makes typography a formal disruption of print’s appearance of transparency. It problematizes the perception of print as the unmediated transmission of ideas. The book artist once explained in an interview that his liking for a piece of literature could become the springboard for his own creation, referring to “the urge for the visual extension of the verbal.”²⁹ As he explains, “I don’t claim that whatever verbal fragment I chose indeed stands for the verbal whole—I only claim that for me it represents, it calls up, the whole, the idea of the whole, as a trigger, or as you put it, a springboard.”³⁰ Wolf’s work cuts out the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely and calls attention to its themes. Polonius’s words become in Wolf’s work a commentary on typography, just as they are a commentary about the deceptive potential of words in Hamlet.

• 31 Smith, op. cit., 130.

31Like purely visual books, Hamlet II:2 is what Smith calls a one-picture book: “the total, not the individual drawings or photographs, is of major importance. Each page compounds time, memory, and specific images towards creating one compound concept.”³¹ The length of time it takes for Hamlet to conclude his investigation is paralleled with the reader’s experience of turning the strips and laboriously making out their meaning. Memory, so crucial to Hamlet’s process of grieving and his ability to come to terms with his father’s fate, proves equally necessary to Wolf’s reader, who needs to remember what has been turned and cast aside in order to comprehend the full message. Wolf’s message is cumulative: one needs to remember what is no longer present to process the statement in its complete form.

• 32 Calbi, op. cit., p. 18.

32Wolf’s goals are different from those of the makers of The Bad Quarto, which in turn diverge from those of the creators of the Cranach Press Hamlet. Wolf uses a textual fragment to reflect on the creative nature of typographical artistry, whereas the makers of the Cranach Press Hamlet experiment with non-verbal storytelling. Yet there is one important commonality: while all these volumes are clearly homage to Shakespeare, the creators are also inserting themselves as makers. With these volumes, both High Modern and postmodern artists have used Shakespeare to challenge the forward motion of drama and narrative. They spur us to discard our perception of Shakespeare’s works as texts and reconceive our books as material artifacts. The unusual decision to select J. Dover Wilson’s edition of Hamlet as the text for the Cranach Press Hamlet and the inclusion of Wilson’s notes in a separate booklet draw our attention to the complex textual history of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the volume also challenges our identification of “Hamlet” with Shakespeare: why not Saxo’s Hamlet, or Belleforest’s? As there is no authoritative version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, why should Shakespeare’s authorship of a specific version of the story be privileged? Theories of the artist’s book tend to privilege the originary version of a volume, and the original maker of an artist’s book, but collaborative efforts in these areas recall recent scholarship on the necessarily collaborative nature of early modern printing and book production. I want to go beyond Maurizio Calbi’s assertion that the “signature of the ‘Thing “Shakespeare”’ […] cannot be clearly or absolutely separated from its afterlife.”³² My point is about attention to textuality as medium: it is time that we cease to treat the medium (book or otherwise) as transparent.