The Graver’s Strife

Banner - copper engraving burin - First Folio Droeshout engraver

· 26 April 2019 ·
[Was Martin Droeshout a lousy engraver?]

A couple of days ago I ran across someone on Twitter asking a perceptive question about Martin Droeshout’s First Folio image of Willy Shax:

Inspirational tweets re Droeshout engraving on Willy's birthday 2019

How come the writing was so good
back in Shakespeare’s day, but
everyone was shit at drawing?

I was almost tempted to reply, but this person wasn’t one of my followers, I didn’t want to be presumptuous. Dead poetic earls from the 16th century appearing unexpectedly in one’s timeline can be unsettling. I also wanted to illustrate my answer in some detail, and Twitter is no good for that. It’s why I began this blog in the first place. So I’m taking a short break from my in-progress Flanders post to address this.

I cannot answer for everyone being shit at drawing, and the ‘drawing’ here is actually grooves incised with sharp tools into a plate of copper (see the banner photo above for an example), but where Martin Droeshout’s skill as an artist is concerned I can at least help you to judge for yourself.

Here’s a better image of the engraving. I dislike giving Willy this much space (that cetaceous forehead), but in this context it’s unavoidable.

Martin Droeshout First Folio title page - clumsy engraving of Willy




If it seems that Sly Boots Ben is telling you more than just what the words say, you aren’t the first to so intuit. Jonson’s ambiguous praise for Droeshout’s dubious cartoon is the point. See my post for Ben’s less inscrutable do-over: To the Reader. Try Again.

And then there are these.

line engraving, Martin Droeshout, c. 1618-1628
D43024, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

line engraving, Martin Droeshout, 1620s-1630s
D25275, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

line engraving, Martin Droeshout, 1631
D28555, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

[in his death shroud, not a tamale costume]
line engraving, Martin Droeshout, 1633
D25948, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

line engraving, Martin Droeshout, 1630s
D19250, ©National Portrait Gallery, London

The images come from the National Portrait Gallery via this Creative Commons licence. I didn’t bother to dig up more of Droeshout’s work; these serve my purpose quite well enough.

Consider this statement:


Unsourced and unattributed, this anonymous condemnation comes from Wikipedia’s entry for Droeshout. Quelle surprise. It trashes him as a (literal) chiseler, and blames him as if he, personally, snuck his clumsy image of Willy into the book as a rogue act of literary sabotage. The statement’s intent is to dismiss the embarrassing portrait, get it out of sight, turn the page on it as quickly as possible. Short-circuit any inquiry into why this large depiction of the nominal author, measuring about 156×188 mm, 6.1×7.4 in, on the title page of such an important and thoroughly planned volume should be so obviously awful.

That is the question.

The First Folio was no back-alley pamphlet slapped together on a shoestring. It was a big, expensive, limited-edition, coffee-table art book, the first of its kind. A folio was an exceptional formatFolio comes from the Latin folium, meaning leaf. A folio was made by folding one large sheet of paper in half after both sides were printed in the press. The result was two leaves, four printed pages. In book terms, a folio was a bound assembly of these once-folded sheets. Compare with a twice-folded quarto, half the size of a folio, which had four leaves, eight pages per printed sheet. Quarto pages had to be trimmed or cut open after they were bound, hence the purpose of paper-knives., normally reserved for religious and reference works. If you owned one at all, it was likely to be the family BibleMy Geneva Bible, now owned by and hidden away at the Folger, is a folio..

First Folio open to preface and title page

The Folios shown above and below are not the same copy. Folio specs vary because every set of sheets was bound to suit the purchaser’s preference and pocket. Some were cut smaller than others, but a reasonable average for the page dimensions would be 21×33 cm, 8.25×13 in. About 900 pages (half that many leaves), weighing more than 2 kg, nearly 5 lbs. It’s a massive book.

First Folio open to Hamlet display image

Was Martin Droeshout the finest engraver ever? My vote goes to Dürer. But what matters is that Droeshout did other work far superior to the Folio engraving, and some of that work was done at and near the same time. His picture of Willy was an anomaly.

Once you understand that Droeshout’s “work as a whole” is not clumsy while Willy’s portrait is, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the clumsiness was intentional. Directed, even. Droeshout produced what was desired by the people who hired and paid him. If they hadn’t been happy with the result, the engraving would never have been used. It was, ergo they were.




