Shakespeare at Georgetown

The Dramatics Association at Georgetown disbanded following the Civil War and was reorganized later in 1898. During this hiatus, there arose the jubilant custom of celebrating Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi-Gras. As explained in the 1901 Domesday Book, "On the Tuesday preceding the beginning of Lent some exhibition of talent was given. These performances were usually farces or of the minstrel variety. After the performance the spectators and actors adjourned to the refectory, where a 'feast' was served. Following the banquet a masked ball was generally held."

Of the programs displayed here, the Mardi-Gras celebration of 1880 included scenes from Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III. In the year 1884, King John was performed, followed by a farce entitled Slasher and Crasher. At the 1888 festivities, scene I from King John was performed.

We call the viewer's attention to the 1861 program of the "CONTRABANDS of Georgetown College," in which the students produced a clever parody on Hamlet entitled GIMLET, DUNCE OF PENMARK, with fanciful interpolations of the characters' names, such as Funniman, Voracio, and Leatherlungs.

This production marked the first anniversary of the reorganization of the Dramatic Association, which had been disbanded after the Civil War. The performance of Henry IV was hailed in The Washington Post as "the best of its kind ever produced in the theatrical history of the college." The critic also praised the antics of Falstaff, played by Mr. C. M. Barry:

His corpulency, the large leathern belt that surrounded it, the short sword, and his ponderous brass shield kept the audience in continual laughter. His acting, however, was marred by an unfortunate occurrence. Near the end of scene 3, act II, ... he dropped a pillow with which he was padded. Only the thorough training that the students had received prevented it from resulting disastrously.

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together with programme

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The Latvian-born Isac Friedlander had a troubled adolescence under the repressive Russian regime. Arrested for what were seen as anti-czarist political activities, he served four years' imprisonment for suspicion of murder, but the three classmates arrested with him were executed. (They only had been protesting compulsory uniforms and weekend curfews.) After his release, Friedlander traveled to Italy, where he had his only formal art training at the Academy in Rome. In the 1930s, with the help of his cousin Joseph Hirshhorn, Friedlander emigrated to Canada, where he met and married his second wife, Gilda Barondess. They soon relocated to New York, where Friedlander became a respected and successful artist and print maker, working primarily in etching and woodcut.

Titania (Act II, scene 2) from A Midsummer-Night's Dream

from a series of forty drawings to illustrate the works of William Shakespeare

One of the most popular artist/illustrators of the mid-twentieth century, Rockwell Kent became known to the American public through his work in new editions of classics such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Moby Dick, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Leaves of Grass, Paul Bunyan, Faust, The Decameron, Candide, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Doubleday, 1936). Perhaps to capitalize on the success of the latter, the publishers issued a limited edition folio of 40 Drawings Done by Rockwell Kent to Illustrate the Works of William Shakespeare a year later. They were sold in a special box, individually matted, with one of the forty prints signed in pencil by the artist.

Concurrent with his fame as an artist, Kent achieved some curious notoriety for his communist and pro-Soviet Union political activities; after donating paintings and drawings to the Soviet Union, he even was awarded the infamous "Lenin Peace Prize".

Volume I, displayed here, contains the following plays: The Tempest, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado About Nothing. The frontispiece portrait, engraved by George Vertue in 1721, was copied from a miniature in the collection of the Earl of Oxford. However, the identity of the miniature remained in doubt and it later was thought to represent Sir Francis Drake.

The beloved British illustrator Arthur Rackham began his career in magazine work before concentrating predominantly on book illustration at the age of 27. His first book commission came in 1898 with The Ingoldsby Legends, followed the next year by Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which included two illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Rackham's favorite texts. In 1908 he was commissioned by the publisher William Heinemann to illustrate the complete play, widely acknowledged as his first great success. Rackham selected the lines that he wished to illustrate, and according to a friend, he marveled at the anachronisms in Shakespeare's text:

Titania seems to have been entirely Shakespeare's own creation, but Oberon is doubtless drawn from the German Elf King, whilst Puck was surely never known in classic times. Then again Demetrius is specially mentioned wearing Athenian dress, Hermia and Helena are described as working on a sampler, popular in the Elizabethan household.

In the first three months following publication, the deluxe edition of 1,000 sold out, and more than half the trade edition of 15,000 sold as well; it remained in print throughout Rackham's life, continuing to earn him royalties. In 1928 Rackham was commissioned by the New York Public Library to illustrate another edition of Shakespeare's Dream. This was delivered as a unique manuscript with original watercolor illustrations, but never published. A third commission to illustrate the Dream came from the Limited Editions Club near the end of Rackham's life, and was published in 1939.

Cited in Arthur Rackham: A Biography by James Hamilton (New York: Arcade, 1990), 169.

Before portraying herself as Lady Macbeth in this engaging self-portrait from 1935, Kyra Markham had pursued a career in theater, supplemented by income from her work as an artist. Markham left high school to study at the Art Students League in Chicago, and simultaneously began writing a series of "poetic dramas." Also a talented actress, she became a member of Chicago's Little Theater in her late teens, and appeared in a production of The Trojan Women. Markham became romantically involved with the writer Theodore Dreiser, twenty years her senior, and moved with him to New York's Greenwich Village. A few years later she left Dreiser and joined the Provincetown Playhouse with a group of her Village theater friends.

During the 1920s, Markahm continued acting while also supporting herself with mural commissions and illustrations for book jackets. In 1930 she studied at the Art Students League in New York. For about twelve years beginning in 1934, Markham created lithographs, several of which were honored with prizes and published in the annual Fine Prints of the Year volume. She joined the Federal Arts Project in 1936 and produced a series of lithographs devoted to theater life.

Chester Leich was born in Evansville, Indiana, but most of his youth was spent abroad, primarily in Germany. He began his art studies at the age of twenty-one in Florence under Giovanni Giacometti, a Swiss artist and father of the famous sculptor Alberto. He then moved to Munich and Hamburg, where he continued his art training until 1915, returning to the United States when conditions deteriorated prior to the First World War. In the twenties, Leich worked in Evansville, Chicago, and New York, and exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, and in Milwaukee and New York. He and his family traveled in Europe during the following decade and settled in the American southwest in 1937.

Although these etchings of scenes from King Lear are not dated, they were made probably in the mid-1930s when Leich created a similar series based on Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt.

In 1920, Sepp Frank produced a limited-edition, fine-press volume of Hamlet with thirty-five etchings published in his native Munich, Germany, by Julius Schroeder. This large drypoint etching, created sixteen years later, reveals the artist's continuing fascination with Shakespeare's most popular protagonist.

One of Italy's leading twentieth-century cartoonists, Mino Maccari was raised in Siena, where he obtained a doctorate in law at the age of twenty-one. Although he had no formal art training, Maccari became one of the primary illustrators of the popular magazine Il Selvaggio, which reflected contemporary life in Italy between the two world wars. He also produced a number of fine prints, such as this stark woodcut interpretation of Hamlet as a troubled modern youth, in a graphic style reminiscent of German Expressionism. The tormented anti-hero brandishes a gun while a skeleton - possibly his father's ghost - grasps Hamlet's leg menacingly from under a table.

The French-born Louis-François Roubiliac moved to London in the mid-eighteenth century and became one of the most popular sculptors in England, through the patronage of Robert Walpole, first Earl of Oxford. He created two likenesses of William Shakespeare: a full-length commissioned by the famous actor David Garrick, now in the British Museum; and a bust in the Garrick Club in London, known as the Davenant bust. The latter, which inspired countless reproductions such as the one in Georgetown's collection, has been the subject of recent scholarly inquiry. Comparing the bust to a purported death mask in Darmstadt, Germany, Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel of Marburg and Mainz University claims in her recent book, The True Face of William Shakespeare (2006), that the Davenant bust must actually be a contemporary likeness of the playwright and not the work of Roubiliac.

A literary truism is that all plots derive from Homer, the Bible, or Shakespeare. One of the most popular latter such "adaptations" from Romeo and Juliet, is the hit Broadway musical West Side Story* (1957).

Inspired by Romeo and Juliet's tragic story of the transcending love of a young man and a young woman from enemy families, West Side Story told the tale in the neighborhoods of Manhattan and two rival street gangs - Tony, leader of the "Jets", falls for Maria, sister of the "Sharks' " leader.

The feature-film adaptation of West Side Story** starred Richard Beymer (b. 1938) as Tony, and Natalie Wood (1938-1981) as Maria. Shown here are publicity photos for Beymer and Wood from the Quigley Photographic Archive, an astonishing resource of 55,000 photographs of people from the motion picture industry, collected since 1915 by Quigley Publications (publishers of Motion Picture Herald and Motion Picture Daily), and given to the Georgetown University Library in 1972 by Martin S. Quigley (COL'39).

* Book by Arthur Laurents; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; music by Leonard Bernstein. Original cast runs 26 September 1957 - 27 Jun 1959, Winter Garden Theatre and Broadway Theatre, New York; and 27 April 1960 - 10 December 1960, Winter Garden Theatre and Alvin Theatre, New York. Produced by Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince; directed by Jerome Robbins.

** Directed by Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1961.

Undated publicity still photo