Mini: Shakespearean Woodcuts
Today's episode is brought to you by our Patreon Patrons at the Gentry, Noble, and Royal Patron levels! They voted on today's topic: Shakespearean Woodcuts!
Woodcuts were a popular Early Modern print-making method used to add illustrations to printed publications and were kind of like an Early Modern meme.
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Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing.
Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.
KS: In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about woodcuts in early modern publishing. Fun fact: this topic was selected by our Patreon patrons at the Gentry, Noble, and Royal Patron levels. Special thanks to Clocky McDowell, Kristen Herrett, Collective Action Comics Podcast, and Katie Smith!
ES: Pro-tip listeners, for this episode, you might want to get a device that allows you to search images of woodcuts. If you’re listening on your smartphone, you’re exactly where you need to be!
KS: And, while we will discuss the printing press in this episode, we are focusing on the woodcut. We’ll include a brief history of the printing press, but if you’d like to learn more about the printing process, go listen to our mini-episode about Folios and Quartos!
ES: A woodcut, quite literally, is a wooden block that, through the use of knives and other tools, is carved into in order to form a design or image on a wood surface. This image is transferred to paper and becomes an artistic print or book illustration. Printmakers in the early period would carve a design or image into the wooden block. The woodcut was then inked and then printed onto paper, traditionally with a press.
KS: Now, some history. We’re sure the history of the woodcut is more extensive than what a general internet search or your high school world history teacher provides. The widely taught history is that the woodcut was invented in China by the Han Dynasty before 220 BC and then boomed due to the invention of Gutenberg’s movable type printing press after the 1450s. However, we at Shakespeare Anyone question the absoluteness of this claim. We say that because porcelain moveable type was invented in the Song Dynasty in China in the 11th century, metal moveable type in Korea by the 14th century and metal movable type in China again by the late 15th century.
ES: In addition, some scholars note that print trade was brought to what’s now Germany by Roma tribes when they emigrated from the Middle East in the 1410s. Ancient Egyptians block-printed. Mesopotamians printed with cylinder seals. And, going back even further, prehistoric artists used their hands as multiples in caves. We bring this up because printed imagery is dependent on a press, any form of press, so woodcuts may have predecessors we simply do not learn about because history skips the contributions of some regions to printing altogether. While Gutenberg may have perfected a form of movable type, he was not the father of movable type. But, alas, while we would love to expand on this, we are an early modern England podcast and simply do not have the time. However, we did want to acknowledge this bias in Western history.
KS: And, as an early modern English podcast, we must move on and discuss the influence of Gutenberg’s printing press on early modern England. Johannes Gutenberg perfected a wood movable type printing press, like we said, in the 1450s, while he was living in Strassburg. His most famous work is the two-volume, 1,200 page Gutenberg Bible completed over three years, ending in 1455. But, still, printing had not made it to England. English merchant and diplomat William Caxton, while on business in Cologne in the mid-1450s, observed a printing press, began printing himself, and then introduced England to the printing press upon his return in 1476.
ES: Now, let’s get back to woodcuts. English printers saw a push for the development of imagery to accompany text. Prior to the printing press and the movable type process, Medieval scribes published elegantly designed manuscripts by hand. With the advent of movable type, printmakers didn’t want to lose the intricate details of imagery and needed to find a method for printing images: hence woodcuts! Woodcuts allowed printers to mechanically mass reproduce visual elements for a text.
KS: And the woodcut blocks themselves were quite durable! As we’ll discuss later, due to the necessity for mass reproduction, the actual sustainability of the wooden block was quite useful for early modern printers. One single woodcut block could sustain a single printing for, say, one artist selling one single copy of their artwork in print; or it could sustain thousands of prints if the image was published in a popular book!
ES: So woodcuts allowed for artists to print and sell their artwork in far greater quantities (think mass production of modern prints) and they allowed for book publishers using the newly popularized movable type process to keep the visual elements of their publications, rather than just printing only text. But before we discuss the practical uses of woodcuts that would apply more broadly to Shakespeare and his time, let’s do a very quick mini-dive into woodcuts as a form of fine art.
KS: There was an artistic shift that emerged out of the 1400s in woodcuts. That shift was the invention of a new oil-based ink that allowed for larger fields of black ink to be imprinted cleanly. Some engravers and artists took advantage of that innovation on woodcuts. One of the most famous examples of that was the German artist and engraver Albrecht Durer, who lived during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Compared to previous woodcut’s dark line work that constructed images, Durer added in a white line which created a larger depth of space. According to Master Printer Phil Sanders, Durer was a revolutionary who changed the medium of woodcut and printmaking. Rather than serving the woodcut’s previously rudimentary purpose, woodcuts entered into society as a fine art, like drawing and painting. A great example of the intricacies of woodcuts can be found in Durer’s Meisterstiche, or “master engravings”.
ES: While woodcuts could be palettes for fine art like we see with Durer’s work, woodcuts, in reality, were less likely to be used for that purpose. According to Shakespeare scholar and author James Knapp, this is partially due to the fact that the woodblock material used to create a woodcut has its physical limitations. An artist usually cannot be as intricate with a woodcut in comparison to other materials because, with woodcuts, you can only cut to a certain thickness, or else the wood may break. In short, most artists were restrained by the woodblock itself.
KS: So now let’s take a look at some of the purposes for woodcuts in early modern England. Woodcuts in England were not really used for fine art; instead, they were used commercially. Woodcut illustrations show up in a wide variety of publications; and they show up in many important texts of the time, some we have already covered. Given this, we can assume that Shakespeare would have been influenced by the many woodcut illustrations he would have encountered as a playwright living and working in London.
ES: One popular use for woodcuts was the broadside ballad. The broadside ballad was most prevalent during the Tudor, Jacobean, Regency and Victorian periods in England. A broadside ballad is a sheet of paper printed on one side with a ballad, rhyme, news, and sometimes woodcut illustrations to accompany the text. Broadside ballads covered a wide scope of information, from religion to politics to current events to gossip and even “fake news”. But, like their name suggests, the traditional musical form of the “ballad” was the most popular.
KS: Many broadside ballads were accompanied by woodcut illustrations. Not every woodcut image was created for that particular ballad, but the illustration was typically related to the story or message. (Think of internet memes, reproduced and adapted to fit the narration of the creator.) Broadsides were sold by ballad hawkers on the streets who sang snippets of the song as an early modern “preview”. They were displayed decoratively in homes or in public spaces like alehouses. And, at a time when paper was rather scarce, it was used and reused as scrap paper, food wrap and even toilet paper. Broadside ballads can be compared to modern tabloids. Millions of broadside ballads were printed in this time and thousands remain to this day.
ES: And, while broadside illustrations have been deemed inconsequential by scholars of the past, contemporary scholars and historians are using broadside ballads to discover more broadly the lives of early modern people. One example is in queer studies where Dr. Simone Chess, among many others, are studying the iconography and visual vocabulary encoded in broadside ballad woodcuts for a signaling and advertising of queer and non-normative sexualities, sex practices and gender formations. This work searches for meanings generated through repetitions of illustrations, what scholar Katie Cisnero calls “[an] anthology of cultural knowledge that had its parts drawing upon and within each other.” Again, an early modern meme.
KS: If you are interested in learning more about Dr. Chess’s work on broadside ballads, head over to Dr. Chess’s New York Comics & Picture-Synopsium’s lecture “Broadside Ballad Woodcuts: Premodern Visual Culture, Popular Media, and Queer Coding” on Youtube. Dr. Chess also partnered with UC Santa Barbara’s English Broadside Ballad Archive to create a searchable online catalogue to Dianne Dugaw’s book, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. This genre of broadside ballads tells stories of women masquerading as men.
ES: Pamphlets had a similar purpose to broadside ballads, sometimes combining imagery with text to produce a narrative or perspective for readers. One example is from the sexist 1620 anonymous pamphlet Hic-Mulier (translated from Latin: The Man-Woman). Hic-Mulier is accompanied by a title-page woodcut depicting two women being dressed and styled in men’s fashion by two men. Another example is in News from Scotland, printed in 1591, which we discussed in our Macbeth series, which contains a plethora of woodcuts depicting the North Berwick witchcraft court trial and scenes of the alleged sabbats.
KS: Woodcuts were also utilized in historical texts of the time. One of the most infamous textual sources that Shakespeare consulted (and embellished) when writing many of his plays, like Macbeth, King Lear and Cymbeline, was Raphael Holinshed’s Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Holinshed’s Chronicles, which we already covered in another mini-episode (so go back and listen if you haven’t already!), is a collective work detailing a comprehensive history of Britain.
ES: This source material, mostly retellings of legends and revisionist history, contains woodcuts likely illustrated by Marcus Gheerarts the Elder, a Flemish etcher. Woodcuts from the 1577 publication include Cordelia imprisoned and a depiction of her death; an image titled “The prophecy of three women supposing to be the weird sisters or fairies”, which depicts Macbeth and Banquo on horseback met by three women (alas, not bearded!); and a piece titled “the Archbishop of Canterbury’s preacheth” from Edward II, Christopher Marlowe’s source material for his play Edward II. (But, in all transparency, we don’t know how Marlowe used the Chronicles. But we hope to cover this not-Shakespeare play in the future!)
KS: And, for some reason or another, the second edition of Holinshed’s saw a massive reduction in woodcuts from the 1577 publication to the 1587 edition. And by massive, we mean the 1577 edition has 1,026 woodcuts while the 1587 has…none. For some unknown reason, the publishers chose to eliminate woodcuts altogether. While that reason is greatly speculated amongst scholars and historians, it is too great a subject to excavate in this episode. We’ll save that for another day.
ES: As we’ve said, these woodcuts were a commercial art form, not a fine art form. Due to this, most woodcut artists were not credited for their work and those identities are lost to history. The early modern mentality was that a woodcut was intended for mass production and interchangeable. If a specific image was popular or versatile, printers or printing houses might sell or exchange woodcut block images in order to add a more relevant image to its current production. Historians can learn a lot about the history of the woodcut by tracking it through history, like publications, locations and conditions. For example, a woodcut might have been published in England with no crack and, later, in, say, the Netherlands, with a crack. From this, we can determine that the woodcut started in England and somehow traveled to the Netherlands.
KS: But was the imagery depicted in a woodcut image an accurate depiction of early modern life? If we think back on Holinshed’s Chronicles' woodcut depictions of Macbeth and the weird sisters, clearly that woodcut is an illustration of a legendary character and serves to tell a fictional story. However, historians can use woodcuts to learn about the early modern world. A woodcut depicting ancient Rome would still dress those figures in early modern clothing. From this, historians have a clear idea of what fashions were popular at the time the woodcut was designed. We even know a little bit about theatrical performance due to woodcuts, like the woodcut of comedian Will Kemp dancing the jig at the end of a tragedy; or the title page woodcut from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, depicting a scene from the play. These woodcuts tell us how actors were staged and dressed. Contemporary architecture, their building processes and other technical details of early modern life can also be found in woodcuts for historians to study and extrapolate from.
ES: But although woodcuts were popular during the early modern era, the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s inspired some general feelings of disapproval of woodcuts from the idolatry and image-despising Protestants. Remember, some took this to extremes and destroyed a lot of visual art, mostly in churches, through white washing walls, breaking stain-glass windows and destroying statues. According to James Knapp, this hostility led to skepticism of visual imagery in general by the mid-1500s. Overall, books contained far more illustrations in the beginning of the era and, by the 1580s, illustrations in books waned. However, depictions of monarchs and historical events were, according to Protestant England, always acceptable.
KS: With all of this, folks today may ask the question: why isn’t early modern woodcut as renowned in the art world as drawing or painting? For example, as Cassidy Cash of That Shakespeare Life Podcast points out in her discussion with James Knapp, Hans Holbein, the artist of the woodcut series The Dance of Death, is the same who painted Henry VIII’s infamous portrait currently on display in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. If Holbein was painting for the literal king, why are his woodcuts, and other woodcuts of the time, not as popular? According to Knapp, unlike the single copy of the painting or drawing, woodcuts are reproducible, which inherently reduces their value.
ES: Now, if you want to see these woodcuts in real life, many major Western museums have woodcut print exhibits. For example, the British Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago have great early modern print exhibitions displaying single sheet print or artistic print. In addition to single sheet print, museums like the British Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library contain copies of books with woodcuts that would have likely been seen by early modern Londoners, including Shakespeare.
KS: You’ll know if an illustration is a woodcut because the page will contain an imprint from the block.
ES: But if you can’t travel to a museum with woodcut exhibits, that’s alright! There are many facsimile copies of woodcuts online through educational and cultural institutions. We’ll link some in the episode description. Whether you’re interested in history, politics, court life, demonology, gossip, or weird little guys–
KS: –Trust us, there are so many weird little half-man half-animal guys in early modern woodcuts)...
ES: –This print medium is expansive, fascinating and offers a valuable window into early modern life.
KS: And that’s woodcuts in early modern England!
ES: Thank you for listening to this episode.
Quote of the Episode:
ES: From King Lear act two, scene two, said by Lear, “'Tis strange that they should so depart from home/And not send back my messenger.”
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".
Episode written and researched by Kourtney Smith.
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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Works referenced:
@bkadams (Brandi K. Adams) et al. “I'm going to ask you a question, twitter. Who invented printing?” Twitter, 24 Jul. 2022, https://twitter.com/bkadams/status/1551371019448815617
Cash, Cassidy, host. “Ep 79: James Knapp and Elizabethan Woodcuts.” That Shakespeare Life, episode 79, Publisher, 21 October 2019, https://www.cassidycash.com/ep-79-james-knapp-elizabethan-woodcuts/.
“Simone Chess : Broadside Ballad Woodcuts: Premodern Visual Culture, Popular Media, and Queer Coding.” YouTube, NY Comics & Picture-Story Symposium, 31 May 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7oG0GRhRhA&t=597s. From 2:25 to 9:20. Accessed 12 Aug. 2022.
Toledo Museum of Art. (2020, July 27). The History of the Woodcut and Printmaking’s Collaborative Process [Video]. Youtube. From 1:30 to 17:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKyC4DcDu1E&t=254s
