#Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

[yama-bato]

Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

by Michael John Goodman

Lady Macbeth

Date: Author: Michael Goodman Category: Act II, Heroines of Shakspeare, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth (Play), Tragedy

Illustrator: K. Meadows

Engraver: W. H. Mote

[lafcadiosadventures]

Madame Putiphar Readalong. Book One, Chapter Nine:

A cosy tête-à-tête between killers.

Macbeth illustration by John Gilbert engraved by the Dalziel Brothers, 1867 from the wonderful Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

We are back at the master bedroom of Cockermouth Castle. The Lord and Lady of the castle are doing a bit of party planning (perhaps Anne is already working on sweetening her husband’s temper, as promised)

They are interrupted by Chris, who walks up to Cockermouth “from behind” and mutters a few words in his ear. There is something about Chris’ behaviour that the Lady finds “insulting”. She leaves them, making her indignation and disgust visible. (why is Lady Anne insulted? Shouldn’t she be scared/alarmed for the imminent danger that might be about to fall on Debby? I get that Chris comes and goes into her husband’s room a lot and she might be asked to leave them alone a lot too, but she knows who Chris is, she has to know these meetings usually happen when violence is nigh...)

Chris reports to his commodore, and we get confirmation that the chest was stolen by him.

(Once again the story is constructed by the characters’s multiple pov’s. We know Debby naively assumes Patrick had taken the chesthimself, but the reader is suspicious, and gets confirmation not from an omniscient narrator, but from the dialogue between the commodore and his underling)(So far we have heard from a narrating je, in the poem preface and chapter one, but this voice induces through questioning and irony rather than emitting overt statements. He almost removes himself from the story and makes the chapters very dialogue heavy with minimal interventions to describe attitudes/architecture and nature. He takes the floor in an unambiguous way for the main portraits of Debby, Patrick and Lord Cockermouth -and Anne- but after that he goes back to letting the characters speak for themselves sans editorializing)(isn’t it interesting and disruptive that Borel’s preface is a poem, and a poem about doubt and nihilism, when most prefaces of the day are overt declarations of principles?)

Chris and Cockermouth pry the chest open to find only one letter inside it. Chris leaves Cockermouth who reads it “avidly”. The missive provokes emotions ranging from curiosity, to surprise, to contained rage. (contained rage? That’s new for him)

It is a letter Patrick left for Debby, but she didn’t get to read it. We are unaware of its content. (this points to the reader being allowed to know Debby's thoughts and point of view better than Patrick's. At least for now) For the first time, the villains are one step ahead of us, they know something we don’t.

Chris returns to Cockermouth’s room at night, for the delightful task of helping him get his boots off. He finds him smoking, frowning, rigid and erect against a wall in a way in which he seems to be blending with the building (100/100 symbolism and gothic imagery) he is “like a Hermes on his plinth.” (translation by @sainteverge here!)

Why Hermes, the patron of thieves, of communication, of speed? A trickster god with a sharp wit... Even if Cockermouth is a thief (he has stolen that letter, and his whole wealth is based on imperial power) Hermes’ role as the messenger of the gods -and a spy, and sometimes a treacherous informer- seems to fit Chris better. But the comparison seems motivated by form more than by content. Hermes himself seems irrelevant if you’ll allow me to speculate. Borel seems to have in mind a specific genre of busts of Hermes -called Herma- where the god’s torso blends into the base of the sculpture/a column -featuring sometimes an erect phallus representing virility and war-like disposition- [In fact, french wikipedia  informs me that the expressions “terme”, “hermès”, or “buste d’Hermès” are all synonyms for a bust engrained into its pedestal. (Some diverse examples of Herma here for the art nerds -warning: marble genitals on display-)]

So the master and the castle are one. He embodies the prison, like an aristocratic and more grandiose madame Vauquer -who is also some kind of a jailer- his prison/house is an extension of his body.

Stillness and contained rage, and silent meditation are all aspects of his personality that had been described by the narrator (that to foolish eyes, he could pass for a thinker when quiet) but that are new to us, we are used to his explosions and outbursts.

Cockermouth asks if Chris has a particular grudge against Patrick and wants to know the cause (yes he does, he tried to tell you about it back in chapter six. But would you listen! What a thankless job that of the besotted henchman) So we get Chris’ 1st person narration of his Tale of Woe.

Once upon a time, Chris tried to invite Patrick to drink with him at the local tavern. Patrick refuses politely. Chris misunderstands Patrick’s refusal for classist disdain, (and how dare a cowherd disdain him, “an old sailor”) while Patrick probably just dislikes bloody murderers and colonizers in general.

Patrick replies to Crhis' insulting insistence by telling Chris the onlly time he’d drink with an Englisman he’d be drinking out of his skull. Which is completely iconic and also nice because it could be a private joke by Borel alluding to the bouzingot orgies (I recommend reading Gautier’s hilarious telling of that time Nerval asked his surgeon father to gift him a cranium to make a cup out of it, to homage Lord Byron/Hugo's Han d’Islande/a general idea of a “cannibal” in the bouzingot’s orgies. Just ctrl+f the word crâne here) but more importantly, using his pagan celtic heritage to frighten the English settler, the custom of collecting trophy-heads (a pretty much universal custom of cutting the head of an enemy, embalming it in some way, and making a hole in the cranium to pass a rope through enabling the warrior to wear it as an ornament. Some cultures made chalices for rituals out of them, here’s a video with very nice skull cap imagery)

This remark infuriates Chris. His rage makes him forget the times when he “used to break Frenchmen on my knees like a stick” were long gone (uwu). He tries to punch Patrick, but he’s younger and more agile, manages to land three punches in his face and knocks him out. The people cheer and start chanting “Death to the English!”. And as much as the punches had to hurt, it’s Chris’ pride what’s mortally wounded. Formerly feared, known as “the boarding tiger” (as we know, a beast with negative connotations to Frenchmen in this era, -and probably earlier too? If anyone knows when this derogative connotations of tigers began and why, I’d love to hear- while the lion is the regal, honorable big cat, the tiger is the brutal, base animal. It is also fitting of the Indian setting of Chris’ brutal exploits) and “the anthropophagite”. Chris is sad because he feels like a has been, his glory days of inspiring terror in colonials and rivals’ minds alike are way, way behind him. He is no longer a terrifying embodiment of colonial violence, poor thing, the would be oppressed masses laugh at him, and laughter inspires rebellion. So he makes an oath to himself that one day he would crush Patrick’s throat under his knee.

When Cockermouth asks if he’d like to sate his hunger for vengeance, Chris humbly replies the honor would be too great. Cockermouth orders for him to fetch rum and tobacco. Cockermouth locks the chamber’s door under it’s three locks. The narrator informs us the people of the castle saw lights in his window all night long . . .

[fivedayshakespeare]

3/21/2024-3/25/2024: Coriolanus

The header images I've been using are from the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive. One thing about Shakespeare is that there's literal centuries of stuff about him, and some of it is available on the Internet. In this case, it's an archive of, as you can tell from the name of the site, illustrations from Victorian editions of Shakespeare.

Okay, so Coriolanus. Yet again, I found myself enjoying a play most people don't seem to like. If Coriolanus has a tragic flaw that leads to his downfall, I don't think it's exactly "pride." I think it's "being a huge jerk at all times."

At one point, when he's been refused Consulship by the people for the fairly good reason that he didn't seem to want it and refused to ask them for their approval, he's going to the two Tribunes. He's counseled to be mild. He says over and over again that he will be mild. Then he gets to the meeting and immediately starts shouting at them. I think this guy is hilarious.

He's got two modes: being good at being a general and being terrible at being a politician, and both of them involve shouting at people he considers lesser than him. Which is everyone.

Next up: The Winter's Tale

[man-and-atom]

Hamlet ― yes, the Shakespeare play ― a mathematical concept called the “zero ring”, violence at Target stores, and a long filibuster in the Nebraska legislature… what do these things possibly have in common? Maybe nothing! But they all serve to illustrate one of my major concerns : the intersection of lack of knowledge with lack of understanding. We live today in an enormously complex society, and there is such a wealth of information available that no human mind can deal with it all. As a result, people who specialize in one subject are often totally divorced, both in knowledge and in working methods, from those who specialize in another. Meanwhile, our societies give evidence of being caught in vast eddies and backwashes of ignorance.

Direct archive link

Supplementary Shows

2023–05–30 “Every patient represents an improbable event.” Conclusion of Vignette №20, Populations, Samples, and Items, and commencement of №21, Probability is not Gambling.

2023–06–02 “Small sample statistics of ambiguously defined events in ambiguously defined populations are almoset certain to be the most colossal lies perpetrated. But large sample estaimates made from precisely defined events happening to closely regulated items can be more accurate measurements of what actually happened than is achievable in any other science.” Completion of Vignette №21, Probability is not Gambling, and all of №23, What is a Good Small Sample? (Unfortunately I don’t seem to have №22.) Then I talk about various things for a few minutes, including the Chernobyl tragedy of 1986.

2023–06–06 Vignette №24, A Tracer Has No Pharmacology, concluding the first volume (really binder) of Vignettes in Nuclear Medicine by Marshall Brucer, MD. The material most interesting to the general public is mainly in this first volume, so I will probably stop here, absent requests to continue. Also a great deal of commentary and discussion from me.

2023–06–09 A piece in the Wall Street Journal leads me to read from that monumental work of supercilious Victorian moralizing, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I start at the beginning (of the 1841 edition, which is somewhat different in content and arrangement than the 1852 edition) with John Law.

[indigodreams]

The Plays of William Shakespeare / Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

[english-history-trip]

Histories Appreciation Week 2019 - Day 1: Kings

(All images courtesy of the excellent Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive)

[lioninsunheart]

Good Morning/Afternoon Tumblrs!

From the people who brought you the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive comes an Illustrated Shakespeare Coloring Book--a coloring book featuring illustrations of 35 different Shakespeare plays. (All illustrations come from a nineteenth edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare.) 

http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/a-free-shakespeare-coloring-book.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

[maryxglz]

Shakespeare Magazine Issue 14  

Published on Jul 27, 2018  

Hamlet is the theme of Shakespeare Magazine Issue 14, with each and every article devoted to the fictional Prince of Denmark and the play that bears his name. Rhodri Lewis asks “How Old is Hamlet?” while Samira Ahmed wonders “Why do Women Love Hamlet?” and we review recent productions of the play starring Tom Hiddleston and Andrew Scott. There's a set report from the making of Daisy Ridley's Ophelia movie and a visit to Hamlet's historic home, Kronborg Castle. We also delve deep into the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive's Hamlet collection, while Gyles Brandreth tells us about his family production of the play, and Alice Barclay recounts how she taught a group of amateur actors to become Hamlet.

[yama-bato]

“Come Unto These Yellow Sands”

Date: Author: Michael Goodman Category: Ariel, Comedy, Exterior, Imperial Edition, The Tempest Tags: Dancing, Fairies

Illustrator: C.R Leslie, R.A

Engraver: L. Stocks, RA

[lafcadiosadventures]

Madame Putiphar Readalong. Book One, Chapter Ten:

Were it not for the open ending this chapter could have been a short story like those in Champavert. A young woman is stabbed by her father’s henchman who thinks he’s murdering her lover instead (as commanded by her father) Once the mistake is discovered, the father is distraught, not because he has much love for his daughter but because it frustrates his negotiations to marry her off.

Romeo and Juliet Act Five Header illustrated by Kenny Meadows, engraved by John Orrin Smith. From the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

We begin with more Cockermouth characterization which allows Borel to explain us the different ways in which English domain of Ireland was exerted. The autonomous since 1690 Irish Parliament was now under English control (whatever the intervened parliament decided had to be approved by the English Crown)

Both the Irish clergy and the rebels are fervently against Cockermouth (Cockermouth is so extreme and baroque in his power abuse that he had proposed to implement mandatory castration of catholic priests)(and the rebels that had fallen in his power during the Kerry uprisings had been treated with the utmost cruelty)(Cockermouth is here to rip the country’s culture off and obliterate its morale via gruesome violence)(Borel tells us this castration ordeal had been implemented before, and Cockermouth was merely trying to bring it back in 1723)(all I could find was this: “In 1719 a law was put forward which included the penalty of castration for unregistered priests. It was rejected by the British authorities. A 1723 bill was to require all Catholic bishops and clergy who were members of orders to leave the country, along with secular priests who did not take an oath of abjuration.”-> source )

But after that intro about exerting and holding power in colonies, the narrative violently swerves and we dive into the preparations for Cockermouth’s birthday party.

The only people adhering to the celebrations are the paupers (earlier the local workers payed their compulsory respects to their lord), who come expressly to their lands to pay liege homage to the kitchen. The description of the charity by the ladies of the castle is vaguely idealized. Anne and Deborah are like the good fairies feeding and dressing the mendicants. We are told they are dressed elegantly but are humble and kind and generous. The people are naturally grateful and happy at being fed and treated kindly. A full fledged popular party breaks out, bagpipes are implemented, the minstrels sing traditional songs and improvise some new ones in their hostesses honor. There is no irony in the treatment of charity by Borel. He makes that comment on the women’s elegance among the smoky surroundings and the dirtiness/raggedness/nudity of their guests, but calls it a beautiful example. However, this paragraph comes right after the one about Cockermouth violence so we cannot help but put them in contrast. How do the local poor people felt at being forced to get their food at the house of an infamous torturer, (who also usurped their land of its resources) willingly entering his house to beg for food because its a celebration day. It is very revealing of their desperation, even if Borel doesn’t highlight and has only positive words for Debby and Anne.

By nightfall, the comme il faut guests start arriving to the Castle. They are received by the Lord and Lady. She, “(...) of an interesting beauty even through a forest of fandangle (...) ” (translation -and footnotes- here!! ) I like Borel dismissing luxury as being in detriment of beauty (takes us back to his proclaimed love of poverty in the prologue for the Rhapsodies) So of course Debby, who is Petrus’ ideal wears no fussy jewels -but she has other reasons besides aesthetic ones to avoid attention. As soon as she can, she tries to get lost into the crowd.

But she is forced to abandon her hiding place to meet her husband to-be. She keeps her lips tightly shut in a smile, curtseying to her suitor, making herself into a pleasant doll, a nodding Coppelia, playing her part hoping it would make it all pass as quickly as possible.

And we hear about her suitor. Through him Borel sketches his own prototypical libertine in an 18 th c novel, but there is no glamour, no appeal to the figure. He is a man of leisure who is a professional rapist (the peasant girls he thinks himself so irresistible to, flee on his sight like Daphne from Apollo) He is also ridden with venereal diseases (the peasant girls run away from him like from the Plague, he is the masculine version of the prostitutes in Félicien Rops’ paintings, a skeleton hiding behind a grinning mask, but in his case even the mask is blood-curdling). His family is trying to prevent any grave scandal by marrying him off (by giving him Deborah) but of course he has no intention of changing his ways and is merely glad that his future wife is good looking and that her money would enable him future conquests because “Money is the sinews of war.” 

Deborah was aware of his reputation, but even if she hadn’t been she would have been instinctively repelled because his demeanour made him as repelling to women as poison.

As once as his disgusting attentions were over, she fled.

Leaving lights in her window when leaving her room to make it seem occupied, she ran to meet Patrick. We return to Cockermouth who is not enjoying himself, he is too anxious checking his watch, thinking of his plot to have any fun. At nine he meets Chris at the courtyard (and the next scene between them is once again a theatrical dialogue)

Thinking Debby was still in her room, they lock the gate expecting to keep her trapped inside. Chris complains about the lack of stars, the visibility is very low and he can’t see ahead. Low visibility notwithstanding, they still station themselves in a turret and Chris aims and shoots at a figure walking by bellow. They descend, and Cockermouth watches as Chris humiliates his victim.

Chris makes sure to bring up that one time Patrick refused to drink with him, and jokes on how he wouldn’t drink with him whom is now disembowelling him. To which lord Cockermouth feels compelled to add the disembowelling is done on his behalf. (to which Chris adds, rather insolently, on half his behalf) Cockermouth grows impatient at his henchman’s childish sadism (he is compared to Harlequin, we already discussed this but they are farce and commedia coded). As he would never be able to murder him by hitting him with the butt of his rifle only, the Lord hands him the feudal sword to make the task swifter. (and I bet Chris would have been extremely pleased by being bestowed that honor, touching the blade of his beloved Lord, but he is having too much fun stabbing away to remark on that fact. Cockermouth asks for his sword to be cleaned before it being returned to him)

After the carnage, Cockermouth nonchalantly returns to the banquet. He invites his guests to follow him to the dining room. They all seat for the feast. Deborah’s fiancé misses her, and asks over and over for her. Lord Cockermouth angrily sends Chris to find her, bring her back and scold her for her rudeness. When Chris returns, he reports that Deborah was nowhere to be found. However, her rooms were locked from within and the lights were still burning. Cockermouth extended arm fell inertly on the table, all the guests noticed his distress and his pallor...

[jaydahya]

Personal Module Evaluative Essay

Having read the brief, I firmly understood a few things: there was a desperate need to bring a newer audience into the world of poetry and literature, a continuation of a younger generation of creatives bringing forth the traditional oral recitals of the past for a somewhat dying art form to relive in today’s technology-ridden society, as well as having to create an “attractive” image of poetry in the eyes of the media. This was a really important detail that was to be stressed to me, the contractor/designer, by the client, UNESCO. Although the International Poetry Day is a worldwide recognised celebration of this rich literature culture by UNESCO, my outcome was being produced for Birmingham City Council. As smaller events such as Poetry Days and Book Days aren’t marketed for the mass, larger events marketed to a wider demographic such as Diwali or Christmas are month long campaigns for community involvement, with cities holding numerous happenings around a city in celebration of them. By attempting to market minority events with the importance of bigger events, it gives the City Council the chance to highlight the importance of encouraging arts, literature and linguistics to younger generations by enforcing fun activities aimed at local schools, libraries, theatres and neighbourhood centres. Our lecture on concept constructions and ideations, linking to themes of thinking, was a big aid in creating my work. I adapted methods such as KISS (Keep It Short Stupid) to peel back my ideas to the minimalist of aesthetics, text minimisation was incorporated to keep the meaning behind my intentions with shorter sentences and as a surprise to me, user-centred design and having to think about my audience at every stage. One of the best ideas I came up with was an installation pieces that revolved around the spectacle of layering large sheets of acrylic paper on top of each other, lined and held up by cables from the ceiling downwards, showing a famous poem as the base and having analysis of said poem come out at you, each layer displaying a different level of interpretation. It would not only intrigue you to go towards it but it would force the audience to actually experience the piece as you would have to lay down on the floor to look up at the work, making it a unique and slightly quirky experience for a person to have to interact with art.

I chose to sketch up an interesting idea on a poster for a select number of poems before tying myself down to one or two particular ideas that I very much saw potential in as something that could practically work. I then had to choose from two different poems, one British and one American, to develop further. Although I did not use a particular practitioner as a base form of inspiration in order to come to a personal reasoning behind my approach to the way I have produced my work, I have always been a true admirer of Paula Scher’s work – from her mainstream and non-mainstream vinyl covers to her commercial poster campaign work, all the way to her crazy but stunning ‘maps’ of insanely detailed cities all over the United States such as New York, New York and her hometown, Washington DC. Her approach to creating work as well as her work itself, the way she uses space, both suffocating as well as minimalistic in their ways, has always caught my eye. The catch of an eye would become a stare and a stare would become a gaze. Her unique way of approaching typefaces in her work appeals to both the corporate world as well as he experimentalist graphic designer within her, finding her gems sometimes deep within archives of type itself. Her work will forever continue to impact me and my work in whatever little or big ways as they do. In order to solve the problem at hand, I decided to create a solution for UNESCO using Adobe Illustrator.

Considering one of the themes of thinking methods of KISS, having to strip back the idea of a poster about poetry and literature, it gave me the image of every creative’s starting point – paper and pen. Poets would traditionally write with feather quills onto paper, in my case, Victorian parchment, however nowadays it would be more convenient for a contemporary poet to type their thoughts out onto their notes application on their phones. Going back and drawing out a paper and pen with a poem already written out, including a feather quill with droplets of black ink decorated as if mistakenly placed onto the paper was my way of reflecting on the traditional aspect of this rich culture I try to depict. Although it reinforces the stereotype that poetry is a thing of the past and it was regarded with having wit, immense wisdom and class, my poster honours Britain’s most highly regarded writer, William Shakespeare. Due to his impact having been in the Victorian era, it was only right to portray a sense of time and space from his years if I were to do work on his poems. I chose Adobe Illustrator to produce my works because I did not want to use software such as Adobe Photoshop for work that could be blown up in a large format and come out pixelated. Using Illustrator meant that I could create my shapes and images in a vector format as well as none of the texts used in my work being pixelated either due to how small or large they may be. I would produce my work on Matt 230gsm card paper to give it that nicely printed finish.

I set myself a challenge to take a risk in involving myself creatively in something I had not experimented with and was able to make a unique interactive poster design for UNESCO/Birmingham City Council to potentially go forward with. Although my Plan A may not have worked out for show of my final idea, I attempted to learn and immerse myself into a completely new design programme with functionalities and capabilities I have not had the pleasure in dealing with before. It was a brand new experience I would like to go back and perhaps revisit upon in the future. I set out to create something that involved augmented reality and was successful in doing so. I kept a thematic flow from how Birmingham City Council represents themselves visually, down from the font they use throughout their government website to emulating, or imitating, the style of illustration they use in their said website. All this being said, I regret not spending day and night slaving away at the 3D modelling software program Autodesk Maya 2018 to try and perfect my vision for Plan A as much as I could have done. I focused so much on making sure I had a great backup plan that it cost me my true intrigue in making something of an opportunity so untouched. I could have thought of ways of involving colour into my work – black and white looks really blank and because of the way I have used space and balance, things can seem to appear quite ‘safe’ and boring. Although the AR experience is something interactive, the main poster itself is quite plain. I need to stop thinking so logically, in terms of conceptually creating with a marketing and overall visual mind-set, and force myself to start being the budding artiste I am in the process of becoming. Taking more risks, developing my talents and discovering new ones, restricting myself of the boundaries that come with this directorial mind set and start innovating in my own ways. I would definitely like to spend time trying to achieve the look and feel of the true 3D AR experience I had envisioned for my interactive poster if an opportunity was ever raised in the future to be able to create a world inside an A2 print of paper.

[shakespearenews]

How did you settle upon this topic for your Ph.D. project?

I knew if I was going to do a Ph.D. I would want it to be innovative, exciting, and Shakespeare-based as my background is in drama and I feel very comfortable working with Shakespeare. Of course, the problem with that is that almost every aspect of Shakespeare has been written about to death!

At the time I was thinking through ideas, I was also studying a module for my M.A. about Victorian book illustration and the thought came to me that I could I could combine Shakespeare with Victorian book illustration and I could have a ready-made Ph.D. project. I knew that illustration had been on the whole critically neglected as an area of literary study and art history and I suspected that Victorian Shakespeare illustration would have been similarly overlooked, which it was.

[fairfieldthinkspace]

Emily Dickinson’s unquiet passion: A literature professor’s take on Terence Davies’ film

Emily Orlando, PhD

Associate Professor of English, Fairfield University

Photo: Emily Dickinson, Courtesy of Amherst College Archives & Special Collections

Based on glowing reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Atlantic, I had great hopes that Terence Davies’ new film, “A Quiet Passion,” an interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s life, would correct the sexist, short-sighted image of the 19th-century poet inscribed into the American collective consciousness. Emily Dickinson has been more historically misunderstood than any other writer I teach. For that reason, when I introduce her to students, I ask what comes to mind when they hear her name. Responses are versions of a same theme: Recluse. Freak. Disappointed spinster. Crazy. Odd. Depressing. Death-obssessed. Impossible to understand.

Yes, Dickinson grew increasingly reclusive, apparently due to illness. No, Dickinson did not die of a broken heart; the evidence suggests that, like her literary peer Louisa May Alcott, Dickinson chose not to marry. Diving into her wholly dazzling body of poems, students enjoy discovering a new Dickinson, a fierce poet bursting with creative power. A fully developed artist who knew she was so ahead of her time the publishing world would have to wait to discover her hand-sewn poetry books upon her decease. I would have liked to have seen more of that Dickinson in Davies’ film.

 First, let’s talk about the title: Why “A Quiet Passion”? This is the poet who likened her creative energy to a “Loaded Gun.” A writer who famously told her mentor and correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson — who is entirely left out of Davies’ narrative — that she knew something was poetry if it made her “feel physically as if the top of [her] head were taken off.” There is little about Emily Dickinson that is quiet. Her poetic voice is volcanic and as “full as Opera,” to borrow two images to which she compares it. The gesture of withholding Dickinson’s name from the film’s title and emphasizing the “quiet” of her “passion” effectively reminds us of the poet’s indictment of 19th-century patriarchal conceptions of womanhood. “They shut me up in Prose –,” Dickinson poignantly wrote, “They put me in the Closet  -- / Because they liked me ‘still.’ ” The film’s title closets the furious energy that is Emily Dickinson’s verse.

 Davies’ film makes other puzzling choices: Although the poetry of Longfellow is cited, as is the prose of the Brontës and George Eliot, there is no mention of Whitman, Emerson, Keats, Shakespeare, or the Brownings, all of whom were important to Dickinson’s development as an artist. Her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson (Jodhi May) is woefully underdeveloped, save for one private scene in which a hint of their intimacy is suggested. As Martha Nell Smith has shown in her study “Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson,” Susan Dickinson was an indispensable poetic collaborator and kindred spirit — and one of the great loves of Dickinson’s life. (Dickinson’s beloved canine companion, Carlo, named for St. John Rivers’ dog in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, also is absent. Restoring him to the story may have brought some much-needed levity.)

 Withheld, too, is the affirmative voice of poems like “I dwell in Possibility,” “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” and “Wild nights – Wild nights!” Instead, Davies focuses more on the so-called “death poems.”

Perhaps most troubling is Davies’ focus on Dickinson’s decline and decease. Here’s the thing: Emily Dickinson — unlike, say, Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe — is not known for her death. She is known for her vibrant body of work. And yet, the director chooses to put his viewer — and the exceedingly excellent Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson — through an excruciating, poorly directed death scene. The same is true for the seizures that precede her passing: too long, too agonizing. Davies also overdoes the death scene of Emily Dickinson’s mother. (Did we have to hear the death rattle?) These overwrought and disturbing scenes, while perhaps intended to illustrate the inadequacies of medical treatment in 19th-century New England, effectively privilege the dying and dead female body — the passive trope of the female corpse that is replicated across Victorian visual culture (think: The Lady of Shalott, Beatrice, Ophelia). Davies seems less concerned with male deaths: Dickinson’s father, played wonderfully by Keith Carradine, is given a dignified death, and Davies omits any reference to the tragic demise of Susan and Austin’s young son Gilbert. 

 In fact, the red hair, pale skin, closed eyes, and wasting body of Davies’ Dickinson summon the image of another historically misunderstood Victorian woman: Elizabeth Siddall, who posed as each of those dying heroines for Pre-Raphaelite painters across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, Davies also gravitates to the trope of the female corpse in the closing moments of his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” which ends with (the also auburn-haired) Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart drinking chloral to escape the dinginess and despair that her life had become. Yes, Wharton ends her novel with Lily’s death. But did Davies have to roll the credits over Lily’s tableau mort?

 With “A Quiet Passion,” Davies forces us to not only endure a horrific death scene but also to gaze upon Dickinson’s body post-mortem, laid out in white and barefooted. One wonders why the film ends with Dickinson’s death, with no mention of, say, the goldmine of nearly 1,800 poems Dickinson left for future generations to discover. (The poems were brought to light with the help of Mabel Loomis Todd, whom Davies features as little more than a home-wrecking opportunist.)

 In sum, Emily Dickinson deserves better. In her lifetime, the handful of her poems that were published were bowdlerized — punctuation altered, stanzas formalized, capital letters reduced — and in this film, so, arguably, is her legacy.  

 See the film for its beautiful cinematography, particularly the sequence in which Davies zooms in on a portrait of each member of the Dickinson family, slowly transitioning into their older selves. Go for a reminder of the cultural nightmare that was the Civil War, and a grasp of the incalculable number of men shot down in their youth. Go for Cynthia Nixon’s masterful channeling of Dickinson’s refreshing irreverence and poetic voice. Go, too, for the always excellent Jennifer Ehle (as younger sister Lavinia Dickinson).

 Don’t go for the script, which offers little in the way of nuance and at times feels as though snippets of Dickinson’s verse are being forged into lines of dialogue. Beware that the troubling omissions and historical inaccuracies serve to perpetuate the image of what Higginson unkindly referred to as his “partially cracked poetess at Amherst.”

 Representation is always a politically charged act, and this one compromises the life and work of one of the most important writers in the history of American literature. We gain little by seeing Dickinson as a passive corpse laid out for our visual consumption and mourned for what might have been.

 A better use of two hours would be to immerse ourselves in Dickinson’s poetry, unfiltered, unedited. Emily Dickinson was an active doer of her word — a poet who was modernist before we had a name for it, a writer who took the world by storm and altered our perceptions of the infinite possibilities of poetry.

Originally published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

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Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

by Michael John Goodman

Mariana

Date: Author: Michael Goodman Category: Act IV, Heroines of Shakspeare, Measure For Measure

Illustrator: J. W. Wright

Engraver: T. Knight

[yama-bato]

Ophelia

Author: Michael Goodman Category: Exterior, Hamlet (Play), Imperial Edition, Ophelia, Tragedy

Illustrator: A. Hughes

Engraver: C. Cousen