The Stratford Edition: The Old ‘Young America’ and an Anachronistic Democratic Shakespeare

Speaker: Hesam Sharifian (PhD Candidate in the Dept. of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University)

Henry J. Johnson, a publisher of pirated literary works in the early 1850s and a household name in the 1880s, released the “Stratford Edition” of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1888. The edition was first published in twenty-five parts for the subscribers, later to be lavishly bound in leather and gold glitter in three volumes. The frontispiece reads “containing one hundred photogravure illustrations from original designs by Felix O. C. Darley and Alonzo Chappel with an explanatory page to each.” Sharifian will demonstrate that Darley sought inspiration in close-reading of the plays and included signs of domestic life, congruent with his genre works. Chappel, in contrast, depicted his Shakespearean subjects in the grand style, with an unlikely source for historical accuracy: the commercial stage of New York City.

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts.

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