Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)

Robert Thew

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fascinated by the supernatural, Fuseli found rich subjects in Shakespeare. Alife-long devotee, the artist read the plays as a youth in Zurich then devised an elaborate mural scheme devoted to admired plays while in Rome during the 1770s. After settling in London, Fuseli contributed paintings to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, launched in 1786 as an exhibition cum print-publishing scheme funded by subscribers. Thew's print reproduces Fuseli's conception of the ghost scene at the start of "Hamlet" where the prince's murdered father appears outside Elsinore Castle to demand vengeance. This impression comes from an American reissue of 1852 spearheaded by Shearjashub Spooner, a New York dental surgeon, writer and art scholar who acquired Boydell's heavily worn plates and had them reworked. His New York edition was printed on thick cream paper with small numbers added in the lower left margin, this being number 96.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)

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.