I

What was it like to experience the plays through the multiple channels that have been the subject of this book – historicised performance, illustrated edition, academic painting, illustrated prose retelling? The voice of the reader and audience member is too often silent, obscured by the clamour of those who speak for a living, in various contexts, and with various degrees of professionalism. In this final chapter I should like to depart a little from the usual academic hierarchies and procedures and speculate more broadly on the splendid confusion of visual forms, and temporal reorganisations, of the plays that were available to two fictional, but not implausible, individuals at two moments – and after all, the selection of the moment is key to the illustration – during the period that these pages have discussed.

The first of these is a married woman of early middle age, living in an area of London that, while not of the highest social echelon, is respectable and sought after among the group now defining itself as upper middle class. Her husband is a professional man, her neighbours include a barrister and a doctor. She herself does not work, but she is involved in the discussions of the local Shakespeare circle, and makes frequent visits to the theatre. This is not as she would wish; the degree of dependence essential to a mature woman of aesthetic or professional inclinations is anathema to her innate feelings. But she knows that this will change, and is content to do what she can to ensure that it does. Meanwhile, her pursuit of Shakespeare is avid, in the theatre of course but also in reading the latest editions and exploring the galleries to see how his work has been expressed on canvas. In her more confident moments she likes to think of herself as allied in spirit, intellect and situation to those other women who have done so much for Shakespeare: Mary Cowden Clarke, Anna Brownell Jameson, and the new breed of actresses that have done so much to make the profession respectable.