SHAKESPEARE LITERATURE IN ENGRAVING

Shakespeare. As you like it. Act IV, Scene III. A forest. Orlando and Oliver. Publ. Dec. 1 1789 by J&J Boydell No. 90 Cheapside; & at the Shakespeare Gallery Pall Mall. Painted by Raphael West. Engraved by W.C. Wilson.

Engraving on paper. Work in good condition, with a restoration in the image, on the trunk. Preserved in an old frame. Measures. Paper: x cm.

The engraving, as the title shows, illustrates a scene from the comedy “As you like it”, a comic play by William Shakespeare written around 1599 and included in the First Folio (1623) as the eighth of eighteen comedies, following a chronological order. It tells the story of Oliverio, heir to a manor, and his younger brother Orlando. The engraving represents scene III of act IV, and in the lower margin are transcribed the lines in which Oliver tells Rosalinda the story: “Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age / And high top bald with dry antiquity, / A wretched, ragged man, overgrown with hair, / Lay sleeping on his back. About his neck / A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself, / Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached / The opening of his mouth. But suddenly, / Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself / And, with indented glides, did slip away

Into a bush, under which bushs shade / A lioness, with udders all drawn dry, / Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch / When that the sleeping man should stir”.

We see the high fidelity of the scene with Oliver lying under an old oak tree and the snake coiled around his neck. To the left and below, in the foreground, the expectant lioness. His younger brother defends him with a sword as his cape blows up in the wind. The work is based on the painting by the British Raphael Lamar West (London, 1766 - Bushey, 1850), son of the famous North American painter Benjamin West, and hired by John Boydell in 1786 to participate in his great publisher Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.

One element justifies the choice of this passage from Shakespeare's comedy: the appearance of the old oak. Lamar West represented him as menacing and eloquent as the crouching lioness, giving them special prominence. Romantic artist, Lamar West made a special focus on nature, above all on the expressive and aged trunks. We see here the fruit of the successful meeting of his talent with that of the British engraver William Charles Wilson, born around 1750; stand out in it, the large format, the beauty of the composition and the very fine quality in the realization of the engraving.