Contact
Please contact Michael at MJ_Goodman@outlook.com or on Twitter @DrMikeyGoodman for inquiries.
Content
Created by Dr Michael John Goodman, the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, available at www.shakespeareillustration.org is an online open-access resource that contains over three thousand illustrations taken from the four major editions of Shakespeare’s Works in the Victorian period. It is a user-friendly resource where images are searchable through a number of fields such as play, genre, character and illustrator.
Alongside these search categories each image has also been tagged with iconographical meta-data to further describe the illustrations to include terms such as ‘walking sticks’, ‘chairs’ and ‘curtains’. The aim of the project was to make accessible to as wide an audience as possible these critically neglected illustrations and at the same time to explore the implications around the creation of such work, such as curation, authenticity, remediation and design.
As well as highlighting how different illustrators approached the same text with very different styles, the illustrations provide an insight into how the Victorians visualized the Shakespeare world, before the advent of cinema, relying just as much on illustrations as on the theater.
All of the content on the site is free through a Creative Commons license: users can share illustrations on social media, remix, research, create and do whatever they choose with them. This is a new kind of academic resource that will appeal as much to Shakespeare scholars and Victorianists as to artists, makers, and creators.