Abstract: In 1888, Henry J. Johnson, a commercial publisher of trade books in New York, released a three-volume Collected Works of William Shakespeare dubbed the “Stratford Edition.” The volumes were edited by William Cullen Bryant and Evert Augustus Duyckinck, and illustrated by Alonzo Chappel and F. O. C. Darley. This article examines the artistic and cultural significance of this collection. This was one of the first instances of American artists providing illustrations to the Shakespearean canon (only preceded by the works of T. H. Matteson in the 1850s); moreover, these volumes were instrumental in, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s language, the “Americanization of Shakespeare.” On the one hand, I will argue that the works of the two artists created an uneven and eclectic final product due to their distinct and divergent artistic styles. Whereas Darley presented a close reading of the text, Chappel was mostly inspired by the stage practice of his time. On the other hand, I argue that the Democratic political impulses of the antebellum period were still the guiding ideology behind the artwork, despite the fact that this edition was published in the aftermath of the Civil War. As such, although anachronistic, the Stratford Edition was a cultural means to assert a specific brand of American nationalist sentiments.
Hesam Sharifian (Thu,) studied this question.