Shakespeareana of Serhii Yakutovych

Serhii Heorhiiovych Yakutovych (1952–2017) is a well-known Ukrainian graphic artist, illustrator of classic Ukrainian and West-European classic. His heritage includes illustrations for “The Three Musketeers” by Alexandre Dumas (1980), the Estonian epic “Kalevipoeg” (1980–1981), “Till Eulenspiegel” by Charles de Coster (1987–1989), “The Song on Roland” (2003), and “Tristan and Isolde” (2004). The artist has created 43 etchings for the six-volume collection of works by William Shakespeare [7]. Seven of them are for works of poetry (sonnets, poems ”Venus and Adonis”, ”Lucretia”, «Phoenix and the Dove”, etc.), and the remaining 36 are for 37 plays by Shakespeare: chronicles, comedies, tragedies and the so-called «problem plays». Serhii Yakutovych’s Shakespeareana is the most comprehensive one in Ukrainian art, but it hasn’t attracted scholars’ attention yet. Each play (or poem) in the six-volume set has only one illustration, located on the half-title page. It can be an image of the main character / heroes (”Richard the 3rd”, ”Hamlet”, ”Coriolanus”, “Timon of Athens”, ”The Tempest”, ”Henry the 8th”, “The Taming of the Shrew”, ”Romeo and Juliet”, ”Troilus and Cressida”, ”All is Well That Ends Well”, ”Antony and Cleopatra”, ”King John” and others) or the key (”Titus Andronicus”, ”Henry the 5th”, ”Othello”, ”King Lear”, ”Macbeth”, ”Julius Caesar”) or simply the most famous (”A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) scene of the work, which, however possible, represents visually both the plot of the play and its problems. There are brilliant works among the artist’s heritage, such as half-title illustrations to ”The Comedy of Errors”, ”The Taming of the Shrew”, ”Richard the 3rd”, ”Romeo and Juliet”, ”Hamlet”, ”King Lear”, ”King John”. The tone of Serhii Yakutovych’s etchings is clear, cold, even dry, and extremely sober. The few invariably important details remind us of the concise and succinct aesthetics of Elizabethan theater itself. At the same time, the costumes of the characters are emphatically lavish and reproduced in great detail (with all the sometimes grotesque features of 15th and 16th centuries fashion). Serhii Yakutovych’s etchings contain numerous allusions to the art of the Romanesque era, the Gothic, and Italian quattrocento of the Northern Renaissance. In addition, some half-titles show the influence of cinema, in particular the most famous adaptations of Shakespeare’s works (”The Taming of the Shrew”, ”King Lear”), although at the same time the artist avoids demonstratively any ”filmic resemblance” in his etchings for ”Richard the 3rd”, ”Hamlet”, ”Romeo and Juliet”. The appearance of ”cinematic allusions” in Serhii Yakutovych’s Shakespeariana is not accidental. It is just during the 1970s and 1980s that the artist is keenly interested in cinema / television and they appear repeatedly in his easel graphic series (”TV-Television” (1979), ”A Movie is Filming” (1981), ”Time X” (1983), and to some extent ”Today. And Always?..” (1986, sheet “Turn the TV off”)). Serhii Yakutovych has turned to work in cinema directly at the beginning of the new century and become an art director as well as, in fact, a co-author of the film “Prayer for Hetman Mazepa” (2000–2002, directed by Yu. Illienko).