X - “Xylograph”

After Hamlet resolves to keep the watch with Horatio and Marcellus, he turns to his library and reaches for a battered old tome, flipping through its pages to find a chapter titled “Of Demons: Their Number and Nature.” The illustration on the page appears to be a woodcut, aka xylograph, print of skeletons engaged in a danse macabre. 

Woodcuts and metal engravings were widely used in Shakespeare’s time to add images to printed materials. The First Folio that John Heminge and Henry Condell raised money to publish in1623 included the world famous Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare. One of two possible Martin Droeshouts (Senior or Junior) made the iconic, if lackluster metal engraving most people conjure in their minds when they think of Shakespeare. It was made posthumously, most likely by copying a (lost) painting.

Shakespeare’s First Folio was the first folio-sized book published in England entirely devoted to plays. The large, expensive format was usually reserved for more “serious” subjects like religion and history. The fact that Shakespeare’s friends decided to mount such a great effort to collect the playwright’s works and obtain the rights to re-publish several that were already in quarto editions is a testament to their loyalty and their belief that these plays were exceptional and worthy of preservation.

Henry Condell and a handful of Shakespeare’s other friends are portrayed with great comic effect in the BBC series Upstart Crow (2016), a sitcom starring David Mitchell as a neurotic nebbish Shakespeare whose genius insights are very often inspired and molded by the common sense of the clever characters in his family and circle of friends. The opening credits sequence consists of cheeky woodcut-style animations of the silly everyday goings-on in Elizabethan England. One Christmas special episode guest-starred Kenneth Branagh in a dual role—an Irish comic player and a mysterious gray ghost who anachronistically tells Shakespeare the story of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Ben Elton, writer for the show, appeared as Verges in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and also wrote the screenplay for Branagh’s Shakespeare film All is True (2018).

Sources:

Smith, Emma.  The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2015.