Late in the spring of 2015, some friends asked if I wanted to participate in an art show they were putting on. They kindly wondered if I’d be interested in presenting some shadowbox assemblages for a larger project that I was always talking about, but hadn’t yet begun. As I thought about it, I realized that I still wasn’t ready, but was happy to do something I’d long wanted to try – design covers for all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays.
It all started one day when I was standing in my back room / workshop. On the wall, full of wonderful little curios, hangs a typesetter’s tray. Back in the days when printers used thousands of pieces of movable type – each piece making an imprint of one letter – the little compartments of the tray would hold the letters of the typeface. There was a compartment for As, Bs, and so forth. In recent years type trays have become popular as whatnot shelves and consequently, instead of costing $5 dollars in junkshops, now they cost $50 in overpriced hipster kitsch emproriums.
However, I digress. On the afternoon in question, my attention was drawn to a miniature plastic skull in one of the compartments. I thought it would make an excellent cover for an edition of Hamlet. Then, as I looked at the rest of the inviting objects in the tray’s tiny boxes, why not portray the whole of the Shakespearean canon in miniature? The compartments of the type tray made admirably theatrical little stages upon which to set scenes.
As I got to work, out of my library tumbled a literature primer from 1890 with the spelling ‘Shakspere.’ Shakespeare’s last name was definitely spelled ‘Shakespeare,’ but in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was common to use abbreviations. Out of the six surviving examples of Shakespeare’s signature he writes variously: William Shakespeare, Willm Shakspere, Wm Shakspē, William Shakspēr, and Willm Shakp. I decided to use ‘Wm Shakspere’ as the playwright name on each over. The signature is from the mortgage for his house in Blackfriars – Wm Shakspē. On the back of each card, when writing about the play itself, I use the standard spelling, since I will not have people thinking I don’t know how to spell, ‘Shakespeare.’
In the Elizabethan Age, a writer’s rough, handwritten pages were referred to as ‘foul papers.’ What better name for an imagining of covers for the Shakespeare canon?
This website was created to accompany exhibitions of Foul Papers – in a gallery, visitors can use their smart phones to scan a QR code and read about why I chose the images I did for each play.
In the not too distant future I will also add a commerce section where you’ll be able to order sets of the cards.
In the more distant future I’ll start creating covers for other works – up next, I think, the 56 short stories and 4 novels that make up the Sherlock Holmes canon.
Until then …