Abstract

This paper reports a study done on the eighteenth-century reception of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The focus will be on the inclusion of illustrations in the major editions of the play in the period. In the course of discovering the nature of illustrative interest in the text, this research explores the significant factors which influence the choice of pictures inserted. The pictures, as discussed in this report, represent an unusual reflection of the play from the artists’ or the editor’s perspectives. The characters, depicted settings, choice of scenes, and models are among the factors variously employed by the illustrators in their visual representations and these factors in the end become the feature of the text visual interpretation. The selection of pictures covers from Rowe’s edition in 1709 to George Steevens’ ‘grangerised’ version in 1793. What emerges in the course of the research is that the fascination with Antony and Cleopatra which was manifested in its illustrative representation began to take a different course in the mid to late eighteenth century. Hence this paper argues that the initiative to illustrate the play offers distinctive clues to the interest in the understanding of Shakespeare’s work and how it affected the eighteenth century.