A digital file that contains 3.000 totally free illustrations from the Victorian era of Shakespeare are now available to use for your own works. A great way to access high-quality illustrations without having to look to see if they are copyrighted.
A Cardiff University student's PhD project is offering artists the ability to access thousands of historical digital versions of Shakespearean illustrations. It is precisely the PhD graduate in literature Dr. Michael Goodman who is behind the open online access to the digital archive.
There are more than 3.000 illustrations from four major illustrated editions from the Complete Works of Shakespeare in the Victorian era. Shakespeare's Illustrated Victorian Archive invites users around the world to access a tool to search for drawing lines by motif, such as witches, fairies or ghosts and with categories such as clowns, castles, horses, kings, moons, musicians, ships and swords.
The website allows search each of the four editions and access each individual work of digitized illustrations by type. So users can access illustrations from stories such as Henry VIII, comedies such as Much ado about a few nines, and tragedies such as Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.
All content is free through the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. So you can not only integrate the illustrations into your creative process, but you can share them on social networks for free.
Michael used Photoshop to isolate the illustrations, scan them one by one and make the appropriate tags to each image. As one might imagine, the process was long and laborious, but Michael says that the archive allows us to appreciate how the works are like a room of mirrors that reflect certain ideas to each other.