Shakespeare – Sacrificed; or, The Offering to Avarice

Shakespeare – Sacrificed; or, The Offering to Avarice

James Gillray

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Between 1789 and 1805, the publisher John Boydell ran the Shakespeare Gallery, a popular London exhibition space financed by print subscriptions. When Boydell failed to hire Gillray to make prints for the project, the satirist reciprocated with this scathing parody of the scheme. Boydell appears as a high priest sacrificing the Bard’s writings to Avarice—a grinning figure with moneybags near a fool who fans the flames. Smoke obscures a famous memorial and then rises to support characters derived from paintings shown in the gallery. Bottom points to his magical ass’s head, and King Lear is given a crassly modern brick throne. Fearing reprisal, Gillray used a pseudonym in this rare early state. He substituted his real name when the print proved a success, coveted even by the artists it mocks.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.