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The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was an exhibition of paintings by prominent British artists that had been commissioned by John and Josiah Boydell with the idea of making money from selling a special edition of Shakespeare’s plays illustrated with engravings of the paintings. In 1789, thirty-four of the paintings went on display in a gallery on Pall Mall in London. By the time the gallery closed in 1805, there were 163 paintings. Unfortunately, the Boydells lost money on the expensive venture.
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Westall’s painting draws not only on the important eighteenth-century tradition of full-length portraiture, practiced by such English artists as George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, but also on the contemporary traditions of neo-classicism, encouraged by the discovery and importation of Greek and Roman antiquities (e.g., the Elgin Marbles), and of history painting.
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On the pictorial representations of Siddons as Lady Macbeth, see the forthcoming article by Heather McPherson in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. I am grateful to McPherson for the opportunity to read and cite her essay.
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Reprinted and translated in Shakespeare and His Times (London 1852).
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For a discussion of the Glyn portrait, see Pressly 1993:240–41.
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The publisher Charles Heath produced two sets of engravings of Shakespeare’s heroines. The first, in 1836–37, comprised forty-five portraits with a passage from each play quoted on the facing pages; the second set, in 1848, was even more popular, going through five editions until 1883. It was a series of engravings based on paintings by artists such as Frith, Egg, Meadows, Hayter, Wright, and Corbould. These sets belonged to the popular tradition of “beauties” portraits that depicted heroines from other admired authors such as Byron and Scott, or the ladies of Victoria’s court.
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Nearly 1,000 wood engravings by Kenny Meadows first appeared in Shakespeare’s Works, edited by J.Ogden and published in three volumes by R.Tyas (London 1839–43). Like many Victorian novels, the edition first appeared in paper-bound parts, issued serially.
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Lilith was Adam’s first wife, according to Rabbinical literature, and Lamia is a witch from classical literature; they are the subjects of poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats, respectively. Salammbô is a priestess in a novel of ancient Carthage by the French writer Gustave Flaubert. All three women are associated with serpents. The New Woman is a term used to denote those who advocated voting and educational rights, as well as more social freedom for women in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
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