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Another illustrated Shakespeare and another Archive.org PDF. Lucy Fitch Perkins’ adaptation dates from 1907 and while her colour work in this volume is distinctly bland, her ink drawings are styled with some tasty Art Nouveau flourishes. Puck with bat wings is an unusual touch.
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Something for the Summer Solstice, the whole of Arthur Rackham’s Shakespeare at Archive.org. Rackham’s paintings are classics of the period but for me William Heath Robinson’s black and white drawings are the superior renderings of this story. Happily you can see that book as well.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton [...]

Down and out in Paris | Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.

The Library of Babel (no date).
Another French artist who specialised in fantastic architecture, Pierre Clayette’s work came to my attention via the picture above which illustrates a Borges story. This leads me to wonder once again what it is about French and Belgian artists which attracts them more than others to this type of [...]

Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854–58).

Richard Dadd painting Contradiction, c. 1856.
Of all the paintings based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream my favourite is this one by Richard Dadd (1817–1886), the artist who famously murdered his father in a fit of psychosis and spent the rest of his days as an inhabitant of Bethlem Royal Hospital [...]

‘Fair and False’, Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1915).
More illustrated gems from the PDF collection at Archive.org. Charles Robinson, as mentioned earlier, was the older brother of illustrator William Heath (there was also a third illustrator brother in the family, Thomas). Charles was so prolific it’s difficult to choose one work over the [...]

I wasn’t planning on featuring W Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great PDF download from the scanned books at Archive.org. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as [...]

Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, If…., is finally given a DVD release in the UK in June. Anderson’s film—about the dramatic resistance to authority of three boys at an unnamed British school—was made in 1968 but I didn’t get to see it until (as I recall) 1977. I was 15 at the time and feeling increasingly desperate [...]

We tend to think of cinema as quintessentially 20th century and a modern medium. But the modern medium was born in the 19th century, of course, and the heyday of the Silent Age (the Twenties) was closer to the fin de siècle Decadence (mid-1880s to the late-1890s) than we are now to the 1970s. This [...]

Title by John Dee, words by William Shakespeare, narration by Judi Dench and music by Coil; Derek Jarman’s oneiric film/poem is released on DVD, along with two other works.
The BFI releases three Derek Jarman films together—Caravaggio (1986), Wittgenstein (1993) and The Angelic Conversation (1985)—all digitally restored and re-mastered for DVD and each with extensive and [...]

In which the lovable moptops get the official mashup treatment courtesy of George Martin’s son, Giles. Very creditable it sounds to these ears although it strains a bit much in places to shoehorn tiny bits of the very familiar songs into other very familiar songs. The added sound effects are pretty superfluous, some of them [...]

The road to hell
Cormac McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic America in The Road is terrifying, but also beautiful and tender, says Alan Warner.
Saturday, November 4, 2006
The Guardian
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
256pp, Picador, £16.99
Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This [...]

In my obsession with all things Orson Welles, his 1936 production of Macbeth holds a special fascination, partly for being my favourite Shakespeare play, and partly for the curiosity of its production—an all-black cast that included genuine Haitian drummers who famously claimed to have drummed a Broadway critic to death after he gave the play [...]

I scanned this essay years ago from a library copy of a 1949 edition of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (Trianon Press, London). It’s worth reproducing here since it’s still one of the best analyses I’ve read of these fascinating and enigmatic drawings. Online reproduction quality of Piranesi’s work is dismayingly low for the most part. And [...]

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius.
While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time:
Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that makes vision [...]

The Angelic Conversation, 1985.
An unseen woman recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—fourteen in all—as a man wordlessly seeks his heart’s desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must [...]

Still-life with a skull (vanitas) by Philippe de Champaigne.
vanitas
think of the scene from shakespeare’s hamlet where the prince holds a skull of yorick, a former servant, bemoaning the pointlessness and temporary nature of worldly matters. certain themes characteristic of a specific philosophy have been commonly represented during an era, and an iconography has been developed [...]

Vampyr, Der Traum des Allan Gray (1932) is one of the founding and defining works of psychological horror cinema, adapted from Gothic stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, a disturbing narrative of vampirism, obsession and posession of the soul. But it is also a film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the revered and legendary Danish [...]