Coley, Suzanne. "Shakespeare and the art of bookmaking." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/shakespeare-and-the-art-of-book-making.

Shakespeare and the art of bookmaking

Interpreting Shakespeare’s sonnets through a contemporary lens of bookmaking, embroidery, and printmaking.

Download the transcript
Suzanne Coley
Independent artist

As a book artist specializing in printmaking, poetry, embroidery, and bookbinding, Suzanne Coley reimagines the words of Shakespeare through the medium of book art. Her work brings Shakespeare into the contemporary world and reshapes his texts into culturally and socially significant art objects. In the last 10 years she has made over 500 unique traditional hardback books expanding the traditional bookbinding and book arts practices. Suzanne's art combines painting, poetry, printmaking, and textile manipulation to examine the human condition and modern-day social justice issues.

Further learning

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Othello and Barbary's blues

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song in Shakespeare's Othello, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

Justin P. Shaw
Video

Slavery, sugar, and the value of Shakespeare

Emma Smith traces the linage of Richard Oswald's 18th-century library to reveal how so-called rare books became totems of class status. Oswald's library is an example of how enslavement of African people by the British is woven into the fabric of book history and how value is construced.

Emma Smith
RaceB4Race Highlight

PCRS and appropriation studies

Vanessa I. Corredera explores ways of productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations.

Vanessa I. Corredera