What a Piece of Work . . .

"What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell's 'Shakespeare Gallery' do me with Shakespeare," he wrote. "To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable!"

These are the grumpy harrumphings of someone who, no doubt, would cringe to see his favorite book made into a movie. But there's more to Lamb's reservations than a highly orthodox and ascetic Bardolatry. Boydell's Gallery was indeed, as this exhibition's title claims, about "marketing Shakespeare," and the market has never been kind to nuance and subtlety and all the private gleanings an individual mind will find in a great work of art. Lamb's key word, "illimitable," is a bit of philosophical silliness that would infect the language of high art down through centuries of insufferable snobbery; but these paintings, no doubt about it, are extremely limited and inadequate to Shakespeare. (They do a better job capturing actors, and the show has rich visual detail on figures such as David Garrick and that great Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons.)

One might borrow a metaphor Shakespeare obsessed over throughout his career. Boydell's paintings are like the imprints on a coin. They reduce Shakespeare to something easily exchanged -- memorable images and engravings available to the general public. In that exchange there is loss. The public remembers not Shakespeare but a neatly distilled version of Shakespeare. The text itself fades from view, as does the experience of a performance (experience can never be easily "exchanged" and so must be reduced to something else, like a souvenir, a program, an actor's autograph). The memory hangs on to visual talismans. Shakespeare worried about the "effacement" -- the wearing down -- of original images. Boydell ran the master through the same mill.

Boydell's endeavor failed in part because the Napoleonic wars limited the European audience for the engravings made from the gallery's images. But there were imitators of his project even during his time. And Boydell's images continued to have currency for decades, even centuries after his insolvency. Today we have wax museums, animatronic figures and lifelike statues of famous personages to greet you at historic sites (George and Martha Washington get Boydellesque treatment at Mount Vernon even now).

Great art often inspires. Bad art occasionally teaches. There is more purely sociological data in an Elvis on velvet than a Rothko. Boydell failed to elevate English painting, and he failed to make a lasting gallery of Shakespearean art. But if his gallery still existed, what pleasure to stalk it with the eye of an anthropologist, to catalogue the strange creatures, both bigger and smaller than we'd expect them to be, that he found in the menageries of Hamlet and Lear and Falstaff.

Marketing Shakespeare: The Boydell Gallery (1789-1805) and Beyond runs through Jan. 5 at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St. SE. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.