Last year, the author Michael Morpurgo published More Tales from Shakespeare, a follow up to his Tales from Shakespeare, published in 2023. Meanwhile, earlier in 2025, Michael Rosen published Michael Rosen’s Pocket Shakespeare: A Beginner’s Guide to the Best Bits of the Bard, while in 2024, Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust published Shakespeare’s First Folio: All the Plays a Children’s Edition. All these books feature beautiful illustrations by various talented artists (the plays in Morpurgo’s books are illustrated by different illustrators, while Emily Sutton illustrates Shakespeare’s First Folio, and Chris Riddel illustrates Rosen’s Pocket Shakespeare), and their target market is, evidently, children.
If today we associate Shakespeare illustration with children’s books, the Victorians remind us that this was not always the case. In the Victorian period the illustrated Shakespeare edition was not only hugely popular, but it was aimed at all demographics whereby thousands of original illustrations were created for many different editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Advancements in printing technology meant that it became possible to produce large quantities of illustrated books, and the development of the railway allowed for the dissemination of these books throughout the country efficiently and cost-effectively. For the Victorians, Shakespeare was everywhere and everything.
The Victorian era also saw the public begin to have more access to education and literacy. This new readership was eager to engage with Shakespeare’s plays, and illustrated editions provided an accessible and visually appealing way to do so. While illustrated works of Shakespeare existed previously, they were often expensive and usually only included an illustration as a title page. What characterises the Victorian Illustrated edition, then, is the sheer quantity of illustrations contained within its pages – sometimes over 1000. These editions were affordable and allowed for people of all classes to engage with Shakespeare’s plays in a meaningful and rewarding way. They enabled the public to appreciate and study Shakespeare in the privacy of their own homes, rather than attending a theatre performance.
The illustrations themselves were not merely decorative – they played a crucial role in shaping the Victorian public’s understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and provided a visual critique of them. Artists such as Kenny Meadows and John Gilbert brought their distinctive styles to the illustrations, offering critical interpretations of the characters and scenes. Meadows’ illustrations were surreal and had a caricature-like quality, while Gilbert’s were more realistic, providing Victorians with a variety of visual interpretations of the plays, and us today with a rich visual history of how Shakespeare was understood during this period. Indeed, there are four main Victorian illustrated editions that would become so successful their influence was felt for decades to come.
The first significant illustrated edition of the period was Charles Knight’s Pictorial Edition of the Works of William Shakspere (writers would frequently spell Shakespeare like this as they felt it was more authentic to how Shakespeare’s name was spelt in his time), which was published in monthly parts between 1838 and 1843 and then in eight volumes. The edition was to feature 1,200 illustrations by various artists. Knight was a publisher and an educational reformer who believed that ‘the poor man must be made a thinking man – a man capable of intellectual pleasures’.
Knight wanted to shape the values and knowledge of mid-nineteenth century Britain by publishing cheap illustrated literature that was available to every class of society, and which were also, crucially, educational. These values are evident in his Pictorial Edition, especially the illustrations, which instead of depicting dramatic conflict or narrative, concern themselves with visually explaining objects, locations and historical figures mentioned in the plays. In many ways, the Pictorial Edition is a Victorian visual reference manual to Shakespeare’s works.
Published almost contemporaneously with the Pictorial Edition, in weekly parts between 1839 to 1843 and in book form, was the publisher Robert Tyas’s The Works of Shakspere with nearly 1000 illustrations by Kenny Meadows. The visual treatment of the plays here could not have contrasted more with the illustrations that appeared in Knight’s edition. Meadows’s illustrations are gothic, grotesque and frequently surreal. The title page of Macbeth, for example, presents both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as snakes wearing spiky crowns, wrapped around each other in a circle, their destiny completely entwinned, while a dagger hangs above them, dripping blood. In the centre of the circle formed by the snakes the lettering of ‘Macbeth’ is presented with blood dripping from each letter. Meadows’s unique illustrations would ensure the success of the project as it was reprinted many times throughout the period.
Due to the overwhelming popularity of the Knight and Tyas publications, it was not until the mid 1850’s when the next important illustrated edition was produced. Between 1856 and 1860, George Routledge published The Plays of Shakespeare in monthly parts which were then collected in three volumes. The edition would feature over 800 illustrations by the artist, John Gilbert (he would soon become Sir John Gilbert when he was knighted in 1872). The most striking aspect of Gilbert’s work in the illustrations is the skill he displays in depicting with realism and inner life Shakespeare’s characters and scenes. His depiction of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, has a realism and gravitas just as much as the battle scenes in Henry V, or Lear on the heath.
The Plays of Shakespeare and Gilbert’s illustrations to them would become very popular, with reprints even extending into the late twentieth century with the publication of The Globe Shakespeare. Indeed, as I was watching the recent Aimee Lou Wood show, Film Club, I was only slightly surprised to see a poster of Gilbert’s title page to A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the bedroom wall of her character.
The final noteworthy edition is “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare” published in both weekly and monthly parts and volumes between 1864 and 1869. The publishers, Cassell, Petter and Galpin, chose Mary and Charles Cowden Clarke as editors and artist Henry Courteny Selous as illustrator. Selous produced about 650 illustrations for the project, which, whilst lacking the technical skill of Gilbert’s images, or the curious whimsy of Meadows’, nevertheless look, from our perspective in the twenty-first century, the most modern and attractive of all the Shakespeare illustrations discussed here.
There is a freshness and a boldness to Selous’s illustrations which appeals to our present-day perceptions of what Shakespeare illustration should be and look like. Along with the expressive title pages to the plays, particularly notable are Selous’s illustrations of Ariel on a bat’s back, the witches from Macbeth, and Hamlet and the Ghost. Like the other editions discussed here, “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare” was frequently reprinted in the period, often with additional illustrations added, or with ‘Photogravure’ plates of famous actors of the period inserted – no doubt as an incentive for customers to purchase the edition once more.
Alongside these editions there were several more illustrated publications that are worth briefly mentioning. These editions did not contain the quantity of illustrations as the ones above, but they either were massively popular, or they did something innovative with their visual material. First, there is Dicks’ Complete Works of Shakspere with a Memoir. Published by John Dicks in weekly parts and book form in 1864. While there is only a single header image above each play, this edition, the cheapest on the market, is estimated to have sold around a million copies in its various formats. In 1850 John Tallis published his Complete Works of Shakspere which creatively combined photography with traditional illustration techniques to produce portraits of contemporary actors in character. Finally, there is John Murdoch’s Complete Works from 1880 which used chromolithography to present the plays in beautiful technicolour.
Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare editions, then, are the ancestors of today’s illustrated Shakespeare books aimed at children. They created a market where Shakespeare editions became affordable to all classes of Victorian society and Shakespeare became no longer for the rich, but also the poor. While these illustrated editions were aimed at all age groups, and a variety of readers, their purpose was very similar to the modern-day Shakespeare books for children. That is, they sought to make accessible, explain, inform and educate through visualisation some of the greatest works of literature ever created. By equipping and empowering people with these tools they helped make Shakespeare and his works available to all.