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Aktualisiert: 17. September 2013 / updated: 17 September 2013
Shakespeare-Bildarchiv Oppel-Hammerschmidt / The Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive

an der Universitäts-Bibliothek Mainz / at the Central University Library, Mainz

Official Presentation of the ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive’ at the Central Library at the University of Mainz

On the basis of illustrations to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the new digital ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive’ at the Mainz University Library - together with a lavishly-constructed and multiply-linked  Web interface version -  was presented to the public on 17 November 2008 . This collection, never previously published, holds about 3,500 images and is part of the only Shakespeare illustration archive in the world. The archive was founded in 1946, at a difficult time when the University of Mainz had re-opened after more than 150 years, by the nationally and internationally acclaimed Shakespeare and Goethe scholar, Professor Horst Oppel (1913-82). This part of the archive was donated to the Mainz University Library on condition that its holdings were to be digitalised and made available to the public. The collection has been named ‘The Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive’ in accordance with the terms of the Agreement of Donation of 9, 15, and 16 September 2005, and honouring the 16 March 1988 Delegation of Authority and Declaration of Intent by Frau Ingeborg Oppel, Professor Oppel’s widow and legal assignee. 
                Professor Jörg Oldenstein, Vice-President of the University of Mainz, opened the proceedings by noting that 2008 had been a good year for international Shakespeare scholarship. For in London the site of the ‘Theatre’ in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare’s company performed, had been unearthed, and in Mainz the Shakespeare Archive had gone online with thousands of illustrations. Professor Clemens Zintzen (University of Cologne), former President of the Mainz Academy of Literature and Sciences, recalled highlights from the more than sixty-year-long history of the Shakespeare Illustration Archive. From as early as 1963, when Horst Oppel was made a member of the Mainz Academy, the Academy had begun to support the Archive financially and  morally. The ‘Shakespeare Illustration’ research project proposed by Oppel in 1976 had been taken forward by Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel from 1982 to 1996 in the University of Mainz, and from 1996-2005 at the Mainz Academy of Literature and Sciences. The Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Philology at the University of Mainz, Professor Mechthild Dreyer, who mentioned that she herself had long been successfully employing interdisciplinary research methods, took particular pleasure in the transdisciplinary approach to research resolutely pursued by Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel. It was an approach that had also paid dividends in building and expanding the Shakespeare Illustration Archive; implementing the ‘Shakespeare Illustration’ research project; and planning and constructing the Web version of the ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Picture Archive’. Professor Kurt Otten (University of Heidelberg and Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge) drew an impressive portrait of Horst Oppel’s personality as an academic. Recalling the significant role played by the humanities in post-war Germany, and invoking such names as Karl Jaspers and Ernst Robert Curtius, Professor Otten paid tribute to his great senior colleague, who had brought him to Marburg and whom he admired as one of the best-known scholars of the day. Oppel’s famous book Morphologische Literaturwissenschaft: Goethes Ansicht und Methode (Morphological Approach to the Study of Literature: Goethe’s Perspective and Method, Mainz, 1947) had been translated into many languages, and was a ‘big seller’. His Shakespeare Illustration Archive, the basis for many a dissertation, had enjoyed great popularity around the world. With the appointment of Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel as leading research team member, and her expansion of the Archive’s holdings from c. 1,600 to c. 7,000 illustrations in the 1980s and 1990s, the institution had really begun its ‘triumphant progress’. Professor Rüdiger Ahrens OBE drew attention to Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s research results, directly or indirectly arising out of her work on the Shakespeare Illustration Archive, and either published or reviewed in Anglistik. International Journal of English Studies or inSymbolism. An International Annual of Critial Aesthetics,  two periodicals he edited [OR: both of which periodicals he editied]. This research had centred on proving the authenticity of four visual representations  of Shakespeare, including the poet’s death mask; solving the mystery around Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’; and determining the dramatist’s religion. He recalled how he had encouraged Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel at the Annual Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English in Mainz in September 1999 to write the first comprehensive Shakespeare biography in the German language, incorporating her latest findings about the playwright. 
                In her richly illustrated lecture, Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel reported on her ‘Shakespeare Illustration’ project, describing the nature, dimensions and significance of the Archive’s pictorial material, which relates to all of Shakespeare’s plays and stretches over five centuries, right back to the dramatist’s own lifetime. Among the approximately 800 artists represented there are the big names of art history: Frans Hals, William Hogarth, Daniel Chodowiecki, John Henry Fuseli, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, George Romney, William Blake, William Turner, Eugène Delacroix, Karl Theodor von Piloty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Edouard Manet, Victor Müller, James Whistler, Odilon Redon, Alfred Kubin, Franz Marc, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dali, and Marc Chagall, as well as a number of outstanding stage designers such as Inigo Jones, William Telbin, Emil Orlik, Pavel Tchelitchew, Alexandra Exter, Willi Baumeister, Caspar Neher, Leslie Hurry, Karl Gröning, Hein Heckenroth, Edward Gordon Craig, Adolf Mahnke, Eduard Schütte, and Teo Otto. There were also a few sculptors, such as Sir Ronald Gower or Alfred Hrdlicka.
                Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel singled out for comment one rare item in the new digital collection: an 1881 engraving based on a Hamlet sculpture by Sir Ronald Gower. In order to make his visualisation of Shakespeare’s doomed prince more compelling, Gower realised his inspired idea of equipping his Hamlet with the features of the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask. Sir Ronald had venerated the death mask  whose authenticity Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel succeeded in demonstrating in 1995, with the aid of medics and experts from the German Federal Bureau of Investigation. Among the most outstanding stage-sets the Web version contained were those of Teo Otto. His stage designs, combining a partly abstract style with sumptuous Baroque features, had been enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. As an open enemy of the Nazi regime who emigrated to Switzerland, Otto was especially sensitive to the repression, spying, and violence present in Shakespeare’s tragedies, especially in Hamlet. This sensitivity was suitably demonstrated in his 1948 stage design for a production of Hamlet at the Zurich Schauspielhaus (Theatre), where he placed Hamlet in a kind of cage with savage beasts of prey lurking above it.  
                Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel explained that the online ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Illustration Archive’ with its 3,500 illustrations was an enlarged version of the three-volume edition she had compiled, authored and edited for publication in 2003.*  Unlike the print version, however, the online collection had only been partly been editorially prepared. It  represented source material and a basis for further work.
                Frau Hammerschmidt-Hummel thanked Professor Zintzen, former President of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and Chair of the academy’s Fund Raising Trust,  for his support and his mediating role in connection with the financing of the printed work Shakespearean Illustration (1594-2000) (2003), which could not have been published if the Fund Raising Trust had not generously met the printing costs. Both collections, print and website, belonged together  and reflected the particular, many-faceted view presented by artists on Shakespearean themes, scenes, figures, scene-settings, actors etc. Thanks to their chronological arrangement within a given scene, the illustrations revealed –  through small units – the way in which artistic styles, tendencies, currents and individual perceptions have changed over time. However, significantly more artists were represented online than in the 2003 book publication. Because of the relatively strict limitations of space imposed upon the pictorial material in the print version, the latter was obliged to omit many illustrations on Shakespeare’s plays in media such as sculpture, posters, photographs, photographic records of adaptations for stage and screen, comic-strip versions, and especially many stage-sets designs. These illustrations had now enriched the new digital illustration archive. 
                Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel expressed her thanks to the Head of the Central Library of the the University of Mainz, Dr Andreas Anderhub, for his untiring commitment. After the initial donation had been made, he had entered enthusiastically into setting up the necessary contacts, getting all the work underway, and clearing the legal hurdles. Frau Hammerschmidt-Hummel was especially grateful to University of Mainz librarian Heike Geisel, who had worked for nearly five years, sometimes even in her spare time, to carry out the large-scale digitalization and scanning of a total of 8,800 items  Frau Geisel, she said, was also extremely resourceful in devising ways of making the collection yield even more, e.g. by classifying and cross-linking the data, assembling clusters of individual topics that lend themselves to research, and (in collaboration with the art historian Dr Klaus Weber) comparing the archive’s index of artists with the data-bank of artists held by the University of Mainz Institute of Art History and making the systems compatible.. In addition, Frau Geisel had compiled an extremely helpful ‘users’ guide’ (leaflet) to the ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive’. She had enjoyed invaluable and indispensable support from Dr Annette Holzapfel-Pschorn, the leading academic in the Central IT Department at the University, who set up an intelligent, most impressive Web interface using the latest application technologies, capable of dealing with the intricacies of data interlinking. Finally, Frau Geisel and Dr Holzapfel-Pschorn were much praised for their convincing demonstration, using illustrations to Hamlet, of the individual steps involved in accessing this well-devised and exceptionally user-friendly Web version, with its diverse, goal-oriented and productive search options. 
The collection that was presented, which for legal reasons cannot be released for open access on the internet,**  was received with considerable interest by the media. It should also meet with great interest not only among academic specialists, but also among the creators of the arts and culture in general, as well as theatre and film directors, dramaturges, teachers, and innumerable Shakespeare enthusiasts.
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel

* Die Shakespeare-Illustration (1594-200). Bildkünstlerische Darstellungen zu den Dramen William Shakespeares: Katalog, Geschichte, Funktion und Deutung. Mit Künstlerlexikon, klassifizierter Bibliographie und Registern. 3 Teile (‘Shakespearean Illustrations from 1594 to 2000: The Work of Artists on Shakespeare’s Plays – Catalogue, History, Function and Interpretation.’ With a dictionary of artists, a classified bibliography, and indexes. In three parts). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag / Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 2003, c. 3,100 illustrations.
** The collection can only be accessed from computers logged into the University of Mainz network. Information about the ‘Oppel-Hammerschmidt Shakespeare Illustration Archive’, with further links (‘Von der Karteikarte zur Datenbank’ [from the card catalogue to the data bank], ‘Rechercheanleitung’ [instructions for research], and ‘Fachbibliothek Prof. Horst Oppel’ [the Prof. Horst Oppel Special Library] at the Mainz Academy of Literature and Sciences), can be found under: http://www.ub.uni-mainz.de/6295.php.

Captions to the appended illustrations:
Teo Otto, stage design for Hamlet, Zurich Schauspielhaus, 1948. Directed by Oskar Wälterlin.
Engraving of 1881 after a Hamlet sculpture by Sir Ronald Gower.

 

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