"Everybody's Shakespeare": Representative Genres and John Boydell's "Winter's Tale"

Abstract

What injury (short of theatres) did not Boydell's do me with Shakespeare! To have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's (though he did best in Lear), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! --Charles Lamb CHARLES LAMB'S PIQUED REMINISCENCE OF THE SHAKESPEARE GALLERY (1789-1805) calls attention to proprietary problems that accompany illustration of literature. (1) In case of John Boydell's scheme for commissioning and exhibiting history paintings based on England's representative poet, these problems took on national significance. Conceived as a for-profit experiment in cultural representation, Gallery-London's premiere exhibition hall in 1790s--took aristocratic ideal of insular family gallery to a wider public. Englishness was now focused on national poet, and traditional image of nationas-patrimony broadened to include anybody with some money and a taste for Shakespeare. But inevitably, as Lamb complains, an exclusionary principle prevailed. One person's Shakespeare was not another's. Middle-class readers were especially invested in a personalized encounter with plays, as Deidre Lynch has argued, finding their own inner regions of selfhood mirrored back to them by characters they read about. (2) Yet in rejecting prevailing tastes for portraiture and theater painting and making history painting vehicle for his popular nationalism, Boydell championed genre of aristocracy over genre of characterization. marriage of art, commerce, and nationalism may have been a stroke of marketing genius, but marriage of democratic and high-aesthetic values was contradictory. Boydell's scheme was an overtly ideological proposition, yet its own politics were strikingly unsettled. ideological contradictions of Boydell enterprise are epitomized by its attenuation of generic difference. For all Gallery's promotion of history painting, insistent shadow-presence of portraiture in its productions reveals how difficult it would be to forge a distinctively national culture from aesthetic values of a propertied class. History painting was said to promote civic virtue, but portraiture was genre for a nation of shopkeepers. Its appeal to private tastes of a new class of art patrons had to be accommodated if Gallery was to succeed as a nationalist project and as a commercial venture. painters of Gallery, ironically, are ones who effected accommodation between civic virtue and private taste, providing aesthetic solutions to problems that Boydell did not foresee. Entrusted with creating a school of history painting that could rekindle feelings of civic virtue, they instead produced naturalistic scenes of private virtue in mixed modes--historical portraits, domestic histories, and fancy pictures--that were better suited to nineteenth-century image of England. The much-envied history painter succeeded as an exponent of civic virtue to extent that he could expand on genre of portraiture, argues Louise Lippincott; the successful history painting 'lived' as closely as possible market life of a portrait. (3) This miscibility of genres was main achievement of Boydell's undertaking. Gallery was a site of aesthetic play, where generic boundaries were actively reconfigured in effort to produce an art--and a public exhibition space--that could be marketed as genuinely national. (4) These dynamics are best studied in historical and textual particulars, rather than in abstractions that for so long have enabled out-of-hand dismissals of Gallery--from romantic-period painter James Northcote, who derided collection as such a collection of slipslop imbecility as it was dreadful to look at, to W. …