"Everybody's Shakespeare": representative genres and John Boydell's Winter's Tale.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell's "Shakespeare Gallery" do me with Shakespeare! To have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's Shakespeare (though he did the best in "Lear"), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait!

--Charles Lamb

CHARLES LAMB'S PIQUED REMINISCENCE OF THE SHAKESPEARE GALLERY (1789-1805) calls attention to the proprietary problems that accompany the illustration of literature. (1) In the case of John Boydell's scheme for commissioning and exhibiting history paintings based on England's representative poet, these problems took on national significance. Conceived as a for-profit experiment in cultural representation, the Shakespeare Gallery-London's premiere exhibition hall in the 1790s--took the aristocratic ideal of the insular family gallery to a wider public. Englishness was now focused on the national poet, and the traditional image of the nationas-patrimony broadened to include anybody with some money and a taste for Shakespeare.

But inevitably, as Lamb complains, an exclusionary principle prevailed. One person's "Shakespeare" was not another's. Middle-class readers were especially invested in a personalized encounter with the plays, as Deidre Lynch has argued, finding their own "inner regions of selfhood" mirrored back to them by the characters they read about. (2) Yet in rejecting prevailing tastes for portraiture and theater painting and making history painting the vehicle for his popular nationalism, Boydell championed the genre of the aristocracy over the genre of characterization. The marriage of art, commerce, and nationalism may have been a stroke of marketing genius, but the marriage of democratic and high-aesthetic values was contradictory. Boydell's scheme was an overtly ideological proposition, yet its own politics were strikingly unsettled.

The ideological contradictions of the Boydell enterprise are epitomized by its attenuation of generic difference. For all the Shakespeare Gallery's promotion of history painting, the insistent shadow-presence of portraiture in its productions reveals how difficult it would be to forge a distinctively national culture from the aesthetic values of a propertied class. History painting was said to promote civic virtue, but portraiture was the genre for a nation of shopkeepers. Its appeal to the private tastes of a new class of art patrons had to be accommodated if the Gallery was to succeed as a nationalist project and as a commercial venture.

The painters of the Shakespeare Gallery, ironically, are the ones who effected the accommodation between civic virtue and private taste, providing aesthetic solutions to problems that Boydell did not foresee. Entrusted with creating a school of history painting that could rekindle feelings of civic virtue, they instead produced naturalistic scenes of private virtue in mixed modes--"historical portraits," "domestic histories," and "fancy pictures"--that were better suited to the nineteenth-century image of England. "The much-envied history painter succeeded as an exponent of civic virtue to the extent that he could expand on the genre of portraiture," argues Louise Lippincott; "the successful history painting 'lived' as closely as possible the market life of a portrait." (3) This miscibility of genres was the main achievement of Boydell's undertaking. The Shakespeare Gallery was a site of aesthetic play, where generic boundaries were actively reconfigured in the effort to produce an art--and a public exhibition space--that could be marketed as genuinely national. (4)

These dynamics are best studied in historical and textual particulars, rather than in the abstractions that for so long have enabled out-of-hand dismissals of the Shakespeare Gallery--from the romantic-period painter James Northcote, who derided the collection as "such a collection of slipslop imbecility as it was dreadful to look at," to W. Moelwyn Merchant, who in Shakespeare and the Artist (1959) lamented that this "most ambitious attempt to illustrate Shakespeare should give the general impression of a massive irrelevance." (5) Another way of approaching the Gallery's significance seeks to account for what the plays depicted in the Gallery meant to English audiences of the late eighteenth century, and how specific interpretive cruxes within those plays invited artistic treatment. (6) "In what we usually think of as art history," John Barrell writes, "interpretation is often regarded with suspicion; where it is attempted, it is usually with the aim of revealing that a work of art hangs together, has a coherent meaning." (7) Here, however, I am interested in what specific paintings produced for Boydell suggest about the relation between genre and nation at the turn of the nineteenth century. An especially appealing case for this purpose is The Winter's Tale, not the least because it is a genre-mixer, a famous tragicomedy, as well as one of the most widely represented plays in the Gallery. At once about art and artistic reproduction, political authority, and-as adapted in the eighteenth century by Garrick and others--the British middle class, The Winter's Tale afforded artists an occasion to reflect on Boydell's political and aesthetic objectives. Shakespeare's treatment of autonomy and collaboration, in particular, stimulated the artists. In order to appreciate the contemporary force of this play, it will be necessary first to understand the origins of the Shakespeare Gallery and its meanings in Georgian Britain. These meanings involved not just an historical sense of Great Britain, but also the way national icons could be adapted to the requirements of private virtue--a modification subtly indicated by Charles Lamb's identification of the Gallery's Shakespearean paintings as "portraits." Against this background, the depictions of The Winter's Tale show how these painters' elaboration of a network of dependencies destabilized the Gallery's ideological imperatives. As we shall see, the very painters commissioned to produce "everybody's Shakespeare" proved also to be the most insightful critics (pace Lamb) of this nationalist undertaking.

1. The Shakespeare Gallery and Aesthetic Democracy

John Boydell conceived the Shakespeare Gallery as a public locus for imagining a national community. He planned to commission work in painting's most elite genre that would simultaneously be made accessible to consumers. Whereas Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, saw commerce as detrimental to the arts, Boydell embraced commercial processes such as print-publishing, which since the success of Benjamin West's The Death of Wolfe (1776) had helped to finance high-aesthetic pursuit. (8) History painting's profitable collaboration with engraving assisted the civic imperative of the arts by spreading its vision far and wide. In this "aesthetic democracy," Boydell used the marriage of history painting and engraving to elevate middle-class consumers from "vulgar" tastes to an elevated public spirit that was metonymic for the nation as a whole. (9)

But from the outset, this form of aesthetic democracy was vexed by paradox. Linda Dowling locates the seeds of this contradictory notion in Shaftesbury, who "imagine[s] that his own deep appreciation of [paintings, music, and the Greek and Roman classics] must be, if only latently or potentially, basic to human nature itself" (xiv). Such a view held that taste was a natural inheritance, as opposed to an acquisition obtained and improved through education and training; its prevalence among the elite was purely coincidental. But the projection of an "aristocratic sensibility outward onto humanity as a whole" (15) was problematic: "the collapse that had threatened aesthetic democracy from the very beginning," Dowling argues, "is the loss or emptying out of meaning that occurs in any context where 'noble' or 'aristocratic' is no longer permitted to function in relation to a set of terms--the ignoble, the vulgar, the base in opposition to which it had originally assumed its meaning" (xii). Boydell's commercialism is a case in point. He wanted no portraits representing a middle-class, commercial, and private society--even though portraiture had been established as one of the nation's aesthetic triumphs, and consumers had underwritten it. Instead, he meant for history painting to become middle-class, commercial, and private. Yet if he succeeded, the genre would relinquish the aura of elitism that was the source of its prestige. Even as Boydell fortified existing ideas about rank by making aspiration (toward higher genres; toward elite tastes) the key-note of his project, the vehicle and object of aspiration was emptied of the meanings that imbued it with cultural value in the first place.

To understand how this conflict plays out in the Shakespeare Gallery, it will help to examine the conception, advertisement, execution, and reception of the project. The received view of the Gallery as "a massive irrelevance" belies the sensation it caused in its heyday, when it was an integral part of a thriving exhibition culture and a fashionable place for the nouveau riche to flaunt their status as patrons of the arts. The Gallery originated in a similar site, a dinner-party held at the house of Boydell's nephew, Josiah Boydell, on 4 November 1786. There, compliments were offered to the elder Boydell for having raised British engraving to the highest ranks while nearly single-handedly creating an annual print-trade-surplus of over 200,000 [pounds sterling]. Boydell's response brims with the patriotic sentimentality from which national heroes are made: "The only answer the Alderman made to these compliments was, that he was not yet satisfied with what he had done, and that, old as he was, he should like to wipe away the stigma that all foreign critics threw on this nation--that they had no genius for historical painting." George Nicol (who as a bookseller was hardly an uninterested party) goaded Boydell, noting "that there was one great National subject concerning which there could be no second opinion, and mentioned Shakespeare." (10) With that was born an enterprise dedicated to establishing an English historical school with subjects drawn from the "great National" poet. Before the night was over, a prospectus was taking shape, and within three years "a triumph of the hyperbolic," in Grant Scott's appealing phrase, was a reality (114).

Hyperbolic as it may have been, Boydell's plan was straightforward and savvy. Two series of oil-paintings--one large, one small--were to be commissioned from the principal artists of the day, and a gallery was to be built for their exhibition at 52 Pall Mall. The spectacle of the exhibition-hall was something of a decoy; it was primarily intended to promote the commercial heart of the project, an imperial folio edition of 100 engravings taken from the large paintings, and a typographically resplendent edition of Shakespeare's plays embellished with engravings from the smaller paintings. Londoners would circulate through the Gallery en masse, ogling the original compositions of Britain's finest painters, and building on this publicity, the engravings would circulate as international commodities on the Boydell-dominated print market that was the financial bloodline for the project.

As an approach to art patronage, this represented a revolution of sorts, in the almost entire reliance on middle-class print buyers. (11) On a list of more than six hundred subscribers (as Edward Malone observed), "there were not above twenty names among them that anybody knew. Such is the wealth of this country" (qtd. in Friedman 69). Yet, paradoxically again, one of the prime attractions for potential patrons was the chance to be peer to royalty, since among those subscribers were notables such as George III. Boydell capitalized on this appeal, even designing a medal engraved with the names of subscribers--each asked "to sign his name, with his own hand, on sheets of vellum" supplied by the Gallery. He boldly advertised this cachet:

The encouragers of this great national undertaking will also have the satisfaction to know, that their names will be handed down to Posterity, as the Patrons of Native Genius, enrolled with their own hands, in the same book, with the best of Sovereigns--the Father...

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