Twentieth-century illustration technique revealed in a "snow Globe"

While looking through the Folger collection for snow scenes (it’s that time of year!) I stumbled across this image of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, drawn in the 1960s by C. Walter Hodges:

C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004). The Second Globe Under Snow. Pen and ink drawing, circa 1968. Folger ART Box H688 no.3.5.

It is one of about 900 items in the “C. Walter Hodges collection of Elizabethan and other theatre drawings” acquired by the Folger between 1986 and 1990. Hodges drew it for the 1968 edition of his book The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre, published by Oxford University Press. The drawing’s origin as a 20th-century book illustration clings to it, literally, thanks to the transparent overlay hinged to its left edge with tape:

Pen and ink drawing with transparent screentone overlay opened to the left (Folger ART Box H688 no.3.5)

If you zoom in on the overlay in the online digital image, you can see that it’s actually a uniform grid of dots with cut-outs where the “snow” appears in the drawing.

Detail of transparent overlay showing pieces cut from the screentint.

When folded back over the drawing, the black dots in the overlay create the optical illusion of a shade of grey, letting the snow stand out more brightly (though the original it is much yellowed today). This “camera ready” art would then have been photographed and transferred to a printing plate.

C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004). The Second Globe Under Snow. Pen and ink drawing with screentone overlay, circa 1968. Folger ART Box H688 no.3.5.

Book illustrators in Shakespeare’s day faced the same problem: how do you create shades of grey using only black ink? Back then, woodcutters and engravers typically relied on varying the width and spacing of the black lines to create shading (see the Collation post “Woodcut, engraving, or what?” for more on this topic):

Detail of Jost Amman (1539-1591). Woodcut of “Typographus. Der Buchdrucker [The Printer],” in Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum aut sedentariarum artium, 1568. Folger GT5770.S4 Cage

Detail of Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) Wynnstay Theatre. Line and stipple engraving, 1785. Folger ART 264815

Things became much easier by the end of the 19th century: instead of having to make dots by hand, commercial illustrators could purchase sheets of ready-made dots in different densities that they could cut-and-paste as needed to create different tonal effects. These screentone sheets dominated inexpensive 20th-century commercial illustration.

The final result of C. Walter Hodges’ drawing of the snow-covered Globe, with the addtion of mechanical screentone, can be found on page one of The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre (Oxford University Press, 1968).

Detail from page 1 of C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre. Second edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Folger PR2920 .H6 1968.

And in case you’re like me, and wonder what the scene would look like with just the snow, I leave you with this:

Transparent screentone overlay for C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Under Snow. Pen and ink drawing for The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre. Second edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.