Rereading Illustrations of the English Stage

Summary

Playing fast and loose with graphic evidence from the English Renaissance is at least as prevalent, on a statistical basis, as doing so with literary or documentary historical material – pictures, it seems to be felt, offer a wide field for speculative ingenuity. So in September 1995 Eric Sams took up a whole page of the TLS with the claim that the Swan drawing shows a performance of Hamlet, and in 1992 the editors of Theatre Notebook saw fit to publish an article by Evert Sprinchorn in which a woodcut from The Three Lords and Ladies of London is used to support a theory about ‘passing over the stage’. Sprinchorn either did not know or did not care that in the 1920s Alfred Pollard identified this picture as originating from a non-theatrical book published twenty-one years before the play, and the readers for the journal apparently shared his ignorance or indifference.

A distinctly casual attitude to the status of illustrations as artefacts with a precise historical and cultural context has led, for example, to the widespread use of the Lawrence Johnson engraving of Tamburlaine as a representation of Edward Alleyn, a misconception I have attacked elsewhere, or to the acceptance of the Scottowe drawing of Tarlton as the standard icon of that actor, a mistake about which I will have something to say here. In this century two serious attempts have been made to examine categories of visual evidence with some care and rigour: in his Bibliography W. W. Greg included reproductions of most of the illustrated material in dramatic texts, and rather more than ten years ago R. A. Foakes took a wider scope in assembling a variety of visual evidence in his anthology Illustrations of the English Stage 1580— 1642.