By Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Thanks to Alexandra Franklin and Jacquelyn Sunderland!

In the last post about the Sayer religious harlequinade, I became entangled with questions about the significance of etched illustrations versus woodblock illustrations. Since the two prints were never cut, focusing on how the turn-up might have been assembled is the aim of this follow-up blog.

When learning about how the woodblock illustrations were made, I was privileged to watch the panel being printed on the Bodleian handpress. I was most struck by how there was no Eve block, rather Eve was formed by the Adam and Mermaid blocks. When a reader-viewer-player, following directions, lifts the top flap Adam transforms into Eve (apt indeed given the biblical origin from Adam’s rib). When the bottom flap is turned down Eve transforms into the mermaid. Again, with the etched version made by engraved plates there is no Eve, just Adam and the mermaid. My questions are: How is Eve printed with the etched illustrations? Were there four or eight separate images or a single plate? Since there is no known published version of this text to refer to, how was the Sayer turn-up assembled? Can scrutinizing images of the two sheets provide a clue?

I approached several curators about this. Because I had learned how the woodcut version was made at the Bodleian Library, I emailed Alexandra Franklin with my questions and sent her the high resolution Wellcome Library open access images. She kindly sent me a thorough, educational response. She stated that the reproduced images are large enough to allow us to see the crucial image of the plate mark. The plate mark, she explained, is a “rectangular impression or ridge going around the whole of the image page area.” She said that this impression indicates where the copper plate was pressed into the paper (or rather the paper pressed over the plate). The pressure on the soft paper, she continued, left an indentation of the copper plate’s edge that indicates all of the images and text on the “Adam” print were printed from a single plate and all of the images and text on the “mermaid/Eve” “mermaid” print were printed from a different single plate (personal email from Alexandra Franklin, June 14, 2024). Using this description as a guide, I realized that what I mistook in the photos of the two separate sheets as layers of paper is the indentation of the plate (note 1).

This was fascinating, but how was the turn-up printed to achieve the transformation? Dr. Franklin observed that the “‘mermaid’ plate could have been printed on a large sheet and the ‘Adam’ plate could have been printed on the folded edges, after they were folded over…” (Franklin email). This would provide the same kind of transformation as in the letterpress sheet, the layout of which can be viewed at http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/sheet/23300.

This last point about how the Adam plate could have been printed on the folded edges after they were folded over intrigued but stumped me. I took Dr. Franklin’s clear description to Ms. Jacquelyn Sunderland at special collections McGill University. Using the clue of the mid-body lines on both sheets indicating where they were to be cut, we worked with a facsimile based on the Wellcome Library images and were able to manipulate the flaps up and down for all four panels. This activity forms the basis of a subsequent multimedia blog post.

To me, the visual effect was indeed an animation of a religious and moral harlequinade called Adam & Eve & etc. I would love to know if there were such a stage play. While we were working with the turn-up we noticed a difference in the representation of Adam and Eve / mermaid and merman in comparison to the woodcut illustrations. In the top half of the panel the figures now have bellybuttons-something I had not seen in other turn-ups. This humanizes the animated figures even more. Were they costumes in the stage harlequinade (note 2)?

Notes

1. For a brief discussion of intaglio printing see John Carter and Nicolas Barker, ABC for Book Collectors, 8th ed., Oak Knoll Press/The British Library, 2004.
2. There is an ongoing debate about mermaids and bellybuttons. Here is an image of a medieval mermaid with one https://www.instagram.com/p/C9jTDBTo-wG/?igsh=aXBybnl3MWd6aG50. In relation to contemporary girls’ culture, the representation of Ariel is discussed since she too has a bellybutton in the first film https://disneyheroines.fandom.com/wiki/Ariel#:~:text=Appearance%20and%20personality-,Physical%20appearance,wears%20a%20purple%20seashell%20bra.