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Shakespeare & Beyond

Illustrating Shakespeare: Three witches on the heath

Folger Finds delivers delightful and insightful moments with the Folger collection. Sarah Hovde, a cataloger at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shows us some surprise artwork in a 1910 edition of Macbeth.

When cataloging a rare book, librarians try to balance describing the things that are identical to every copy of that book (like the publisher, the number of pages, the name of the editor), and the things that make a library’s particular copy unique (such as special bindings, autographs and marginal annotations, or missing pages). This is especially important at the Folger, where many of our readers study these small differences to learn more about printing and publishing in the early modern world.

The two copies of a 1910 French edition of Macbeth shown below highlight a range of differences between both an individual copy of a book and the entire edition of which it is a part. This edition was produced in 1910 as part of ‘Ouvrages de Maurice Maeterlinck’ (“Works of Maurice Maeterlinck”), a series featuring the work of playwright and translator Maurice Maeterlinck.

Comments

…darkness and doom…”how now secret, black and midnight hags” Macbeth pronounces in greeting, on first meeting with the three evil witches screeching into their cauldron of loathsome brew, on the desolate rain swept heath, thunder rumbling overhead… stark encounter….evoking such an impending and ominous sense of grim foboding, which casts a pall over the rest of the play. With elements of witchcraft and sorcery implied and aptly introduced the ‘darkness’ of the Tragedie is almost certain… the Folgers watercolor illustration is rather good, imaginatively depicting a coven….purple heather in the foreground, heavy rain clouds staining a dissolute sky, white hair flowing maniacally in the brisk winds…I tended to picture the witches somewhat more gnarled, bent over and gaunt and of aspect more sinister….while I did not doodle or draw in my Shakespeare texts, for lack of space, I did fill pages with many highlights, close scribbles and heavy margin notes….

Rekha — July 14, 2016

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