The Look of Speech

'Canst paint a doleful cry?': Promotion and Performance in the <em>Spanish Tragedy</em> Title-Page Illustration

“…As an originary text the lines are 'render[ed] faithfully, or as faithfully as an actor might'. 30 The dramatic quality of the banderoles is shown in the way they are placed in the illustration, 'broken up into parts, freed from the constraints of the orderly progression of the printed page, the characters' lines intermingle [and] demand space'. 31 Paul Yachnin suggests that this representation of the human voice shifting from the stage to the page begins to make more sense when we distance ourselves from the modern separation of seeing and hearing as two distinct sensory processes -one based on the refraction of light and the other reliant on vibrations of air -and try to understand the two senses as a seventeenth-century English person would have done.…”

“…Hieronimo Let it be burnt: night is a murderous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen. (24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32) Considering that the first edition to which the woodcut was attached was printed in 1615, some thirteen years after the Painter's scene was added, the…”