![]() In his landmark study Capitalism and Slavery in the 1940s, the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued that the slave economy pump-primed Britain’s Industrial Revolution (and that it was the development of alternative sources of profit through manufacture, rather than moral concerns, that motivated abolition). And the history of this book also contributes to ongoing debates about what happened to the vast profits made from the trade and exploitation of enslaved peoples in the late 18th century and beyond. ![]() These stories have their meeting point in one specific object: the valuable book known as Shakespeare’s First Folio, published 400 years ago in 1623. As scholar Gary Taylor puts it, “Shakespeare’s coronation as the King of English poets” dates from the third quarter of the 18th century, boosted by the actor David Garrick’s lavish Shakespeare Jubilee celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. The second is the establishment of William Shakespeare as the national bard. According to estimates from the Slave Voyages database, the number of enslaved people carried by British ships more than doubled, from around 410,000 in the first quarter of the century to more than 830,000 in the third. The first is the increased dominance of Britain in the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, because of the poem is signed, the first author name in the Folio is ‘B.I.’ (Ben Jonson, ‘I’ and ‘J’ being interchangeable at the time), rather than William Shakespeare.Two stories, usually seen as disconnected, unfold themselves during the second half of the 18th century. It has the unfortunate result that William Shakespeare’s famous book now begins with poetry by one of his rivals. Starting the First Folio with a poem by someone else is anyway odd. Its main point, that the picture cannot convey its author’s wit so one should read the book instead, would be a joke if under the picture where it is, before the picture, it is rude, dispraising what we are yet to focus on. That the poem is supposed to be under the picture is clear from its content: ‘This Figure, that thou here seest put, / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut’, it starts, as though sharing a page with the image given its actual position on the opposite page, its subject is actually ‘that Figure … there’. At some point Droeshout seems to have cut his losses, and – we have the result. Did Droeshout miss a crucial word, botch a spelling, transpose a rhyme? Correcting small errors on a brass plate was possible but involved scraping down the plate itself correcting many or repeated errors would lower the height of the plate, potentially affecting the printing process. Were there troubles with spacing? The poem is substituted by Shakespeare’s ungainly body– a deeply cross-hatched dark doublet in a dark background – effectively a scribble, hiding whatever has gone wrong underneath. The head is too close to the top of the picture. And then something or several things went wrong. So what went wrong with Droeshout’s Shakespeare portrait? At a guess, Droeshout copied Shakespeare’s head and rebato with a view to encircling the picture and writing the poem – now to be found printed on the page before – underneath, in standard fashion. The Folio Shakespeare portrait as a whole consists, then, of a bad(ly) copied head, and, under it, an ungainly body apparently supplied by Droeshout himself. The body takes up a good half of the picture, and yet conveys no information: the dark clothes are without ornamentation or jewellery and the arms do not extend to hands, so cannot display rings or hold tools of the craft – pens, books, actors’ parts. ![]() It gives Shakespeare massive upper arms and shoulders that edge so far under the rebato (the starched collar used to protect clothes and highlight the face) that there is barely or no neck, hinting at Shakespeare’s future as a Bobblehead toy. Containing no points of light at all, it seems to have an entirely different origin from the face. The lower half of the picture has different problems. Was the portrait behind the picture itself unflattering, perhaps showing Shakespeare when he was ill? Or were the spots of light Droeshout’s early, unsuccessful, experiments with visual contrast? Droeshout’s engraving will have been based on a portrait, as was usual at the time (he was fifteen when Shakespeare died and is unlikely ever to have seen his subject). But that hardly explains why Shakespeare’s face is so … damp, light pooling on a sweaty spot on the bald upper temple, a shiny crevice under the left eye, the greasy sheen along the length of the nose, a dot of moisture on the lower lip. An engraving by Martin Droeshout, it may well be apprentice work (Droeshout was twenty-two when the Folio was printed and was perhaps still learning his trade).
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