The Theatre of the Illuminated Books

Abstract

The performance history of Blake’s works over the last century, with a clear spike in the past few decades, reveals an impulse to view his works dramatically and put them on the stage, an impulse sparked by the nature of the works themselves. For Blake, what he called ‘Illuminated Books’ produced in ‘Illuminated Printing’ had a visionary quality and the ability to transform the senses (‘Prospectus of 1793’, E 693). This distinct process of mixing media (engraving, painting, and poetry), produced by completely circumventing the conventional methods of commercial print publication, gave him total control over the production phase of his artistic creations. With few exceptions, Blake’s chosen medium for his artistic expression and his method of uniting art forms such as poetry, painting, and engraving make him unlike any other artists (literary and pictorial) of his day.¹ Although combining texts (poems and narratives) and images (paintings and engravings) was not new — one has only to consider the commissioning of illustrated literary texts or the proliferation of prints of satirical caricatures — nothing else quite like Blake’s Illuminated Books was produced.²