The Weimar Republic brought a period of prolific creativity to Germany in the years between World Wars I and II, with art, theater, music, and literature all experiencing a golden age.  Fine press printing—which began during the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century—was no exception, and perhaps the pinnacle of Weimar fine press achievement is the Cranach Press.  Headed by Count Harry Graf Kessler, an aristocratic patron of the arts, the Cranach Press enlisted the help of an international stable of artists and scholars to produce hand-made books that doubled as works of art.  My favorite book from the Cranach Press is an edition of Hamlet based on the text of Shakespeare’s Second Quarto.  NYPL’s Rare Book Division holds both the original German edition of 1928 and the English edition of 1930.

Hamlet’s elegance comes from all aspects of its design working together to make something aesthetically beautiful, substantively evocative, and functionally readable.  In order to achieve this, Kessler knew that the play’s illustrations needed to work with the text to both complement and supplement it.  He asked Edward Gordon Craig, an English wood engraver and, importantly, actor and theater set designer, to design and carve the woodblock illustrations.

"Why echo [the author's] words—how can there be anything in that?  But then if you don't do that, how illustrate the book?" —Edward Gordon Craig, Franklin, p. 84.

Craig was no stranger to Hamlet —he had recently worked as the set designer on a production of the play for the Moscow Art Theatre and had considered producing his own edition of the text.  Craig wanted to address the lack of stage directions in Shakespeare’s original text by providing illustrations of scene designs, costumes, lighting, and actor movements.  This mindset shaped his intentions for the Cranach Press’ Hamlet, and the tiny wooden figures he created to model the Moscow Art Theatre’s sets became the basis for the form these intentions would take.

Over the course of his dramatic career, Craig tended toward minimalism, believing that theater could be stripped down to form, light, movement, and music.  His Hamlet illustrations freed him from constraints of cost, space, and physical reality, allowing him to showcase these elements in a purer form.  He even employed idealized, monumental versions of the innovative screens that he developed for the Moscow Art Theatre to frame and compartmentalize the play’s action.

While beautiful in their own right, Craig’s illustrations also pair with the text to guide you through the play.  Echoing the philosophy of the Bauhaus school that influenced—and integrated—the fine and applied art worlds of the time, Kessler and Craig ensured that Hamlet’s form and function were inextricably linked.  Illustrations cluster around entrances and exits, cluing you in on changes to a scene's characters.  Decorated initials are reserved for peripheral characters: Barnardo and Francisco in the opening scene, and the gravediggers of Act Five, Scene One.

Beyond providing context clues, Kessler and Craig also use book layout to pack an emotional punch.  One example is through repeated motifs.  Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is framed by an image of Hamlet confronting the turbulent waters of sleep and death.  This imagery is repeated in the aftermath of Polonius’ killing to wordlessly convey parallel themes of mortality and moral action.  In the first illustration, Hamlet’s figure leans back, hands raised: hesitant and contemplative.  By the second he is leaning forward, resigned to the consequences of his actions.

For Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, Kessler was faced with a typographical challenge: how to organize the main text, the play-within-a-play’s text, and the historical commentary in a clean, understandable way.  He met this challenge using all the design artillery in his book arts arsenal.  The play’s text occupies the center of the page, surrounded by the commentary.  The beginning of the play-within-a-play is indicated by orange type and two large illustrations of the players.  What’s more, these illustrations begin a string of confronting figures, conveying the mounting tension as Hamlet waits to witness his uncle’s guilty response to the play-within-a-play’s plot.  When this occurs, the page design shifts—whereas before your eye was drawn inward, suddenly text and supporting characters expand outward from the central player and fleeing Claudius.  Kessler and Craig wanted you not only to follow the play’s plot, but also to experience the emotions of the characters, and they use "the quite unusual daring of [Hamlet’s] typographical arrangement" (Scröder, p. 4) to do so.

Like many private presses of the time, Kessler sought to honor the early printing era with Hamlet’s gothic font, columned layout, and black-and-white color scheme accompanied by a single accent color—orange in this case, plus one striking use of blue.  The illustrations, however, are distinctly modern, and this disconnect put me off-kilter—giving me the feeling that something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark.  Of course words, images, and design affect everyone differently, but I found my time with Hamlet to be an immersive experience that transported the atmosphere of Elsinore, full of doubt and foreboding, to my own desk at NYPL.

To learn more about the Cranach Press, Kessler, and Craig, try:

• Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937  
• Colin Franklin’s Fond of Printing: Gordon Craig as Typographer and Illustrator
• Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (This book also features illustrations by Edward Gordon Craig.)
• Edward Gordon Craig’s The Art of the Theatre
• Rudolf Alexander Scröder’s The Cranach Press in Weimar

Image credits, unless otherwise noted: Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.