{"id":13906,"date":"2013-06-17T02:14:22","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T01:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=13906"},"modified":"2013-06-17T02:14:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T01:14:22","slug":"john-austens-hamlet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/06\/17\/john-austens-hamlet\/","title":{"rendered":"John Austen’s Hamlet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The 1922 edition of Hamlet<\/em> “decorated” by British artist John Austen (1886\u20131948) is a lot more visible today than it was a few years ago, thanks to a reprint by Dover Publications<\/a> in their Calla Editions series. The scans here are from an original printing at VTS<\/a>. Austen’s Hamlet<\/em> is often rated as his chef d’oeuvre<\/em>, and with good reason, he manages to lend some visual splendour to a play whose concerns are a lot more introspective than the usual illustration standards of The Tempest<\/em> and A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em>. Masks, swords and skulls are recurrent symbols. Yes, the drawings owe a great deal to Harry Clarke’s example\u2014all those manga faces, spiny fingers and swathes of black\u2014but that’s no bad thing if you can pull it off. If you’re going to borrow a style then you may as well take from the best.<\/p>\n

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The art of John Austen, 1886\u20131948<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1922 edition of Hamlet “decorated” by British artist John Austen (1886\u20131948) is a lot more visible today than it was a few years ago, thanks to a reprint by Dover Publications in their Calla Editions series. The scans here are from an original printing at VTS. Austen’s Hamlet is often rated as his chef … Continue reading “John Austen’s Hamlet”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,30,42,48,46],"tags":[99,2140,445,63],"class_list":["post-13906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-black-white","category-books","category-illustrators","category-theatre","tag-harry-clarke","tag-john-austen","tag-skulls","tag-swords"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3Ci","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}