Woodcuts

Though carving wood is an ancient form of printing, the art and skill of carving images or designs onto the surface of a woodblock grew in popularity and refinement around 1500. This craft was less popular in England in general, and was also limited there, as Watt discusses, by the Protestant Reformation, which often frowned upon “graven images.” Though there was consistent use and sale of woodcut images throughout the Elizabethan period, there is an upsurge in production during the Jacobean period, which is evident through the inclusion of “pictures” in the Wood-Symcocke Patent for Printing of Broadsides in 1619. It seems that ballad publishers printed woodcuts as a sideline, but very few earned a living by woodcutting alone.

The actual technique of woodblock carving used a sharp knife to cut grooves into a hard piece of wood. In order to create a clear and lasting image, the quality of the wood was very important. David Landeau and Peter Parshall list some of the more common types of woodcut wood in their book The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550. It was important to use a resilient and fine grained type of wood, dense enough to withstand the repeated and sustained pressure of the printing press. This wood could be expensive or hard to obtain, and might have needed to be imported from Germany, Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Some popular wood choices include nut wood, lime wood, pear wood, and other nut and fruit woods like cherry, beech, maple and apple. Woodblock planks were usually cut from the outer sections of a log, and were cut parallel to the grain. For this reason, warping most often splits cuts vertically, along their longer axis. Despite this warping and splitting problem with the grain, the parallel cut was most logical because a plank cut at an angle to the grain was more likely to split under the pressure of the press. By the latter part of the sixteenth century, most woodblocks were cut on the end-grain instead of along a plank. This tactic is called “wood engraving” (once used interchangeably with “wood cutting”), and it becomes popular because, with no bias of the wood grain, it allows for more delicate carving with a knife or even (as became more and more popular) with engraving tools. End-grain blocks are strong and long lasting, but often restricted by limited log size.

The wood was prepared for carving by careful planning, to create a smooth, flat surface with no knots or splits. Small imperfections (and, later, artist mistakes) in the wood were hidden by cutting them out and filling the holes with wedge-shaped plugs. As the woodblocks aged, the plug warped more drastically, and its contraction would leave a gap in the design. These splits and gaps are flaws that we now see in many popular block prints. To make larger cuts, the artist might also join two or more small planks into a larger block. This technique also could lead to seamed or partial prints as the cut aged.

Because of the pressure of the press, woodcuts were ideally carved on thicker blocks. This depth would vary, though, since each block was intended to be at the same depth as composed type text. If a block was too thin, a thin reinforcement plank might be nailed to the back (this also helped stop warping. Often, a cut would be carved on both the recto and the verso of a block, utilizing the wood to its full extent.

In terms of the carving itself, existing uncut and partially cut blocks from the Renaissance show that draftsmen would cover the block in white paint to make their design more clear, or might paste a design directly on the block (for this, thin paper was preferred, since you could see the design in reverse through the paper, which made it easier to carve in reverse), or the draftsman might use carbon or incising to show the design. However, all of these techniques would likely have inhibited delicate printing, so, for technical reasons, finer prints are assumed to have been carved and designed free-hand.

The basic tool of woodcutters was a strong and sharp steel knife with a pointed tip and beveled edge. This shape allowed for dense cross hatching, tight lines, and curling patterns that we see often in Renaissance cuts. Chisels were also used for more open areas of the cut. Later, block cutters would turn to engraving tools for more sophisticated work.

Before printing, a woodcut would be set alongside text in the press and then coated in ink with a dabber. If the ink was not applied smoothly, the design could be clogged, and we often see evidence of this sort of small clogging.

Evidence of warping and splitting is clear in most surviving woodcut prints (it’s important to remember that only about 1 in 10,000 ballads with cuts survive). It’s also clear, though, that despite this flaw, woodblocks were long lasting and durable. Sixteenth century broadsheet blocks show up in eighteenth century prints, a fact that Watt uses in her argument to show that pre-Reformation images made their way into Protestant England through the reuse of extant woodcuts in printing shops, thereby remaining in the popular consciousness.

Copper Engraving

As Watt points out, copper engravings are usually not considered “cheap print” because of their cost. Copper was, in general, higher quality, but usually made smaller runs (only a few hundred) and needed more time for each impression. Also, because copper had to be engraved backwards it was complicated work. Importantly for our study of ballad, copper was almost never used alongside texts, since it was so thin. Woodblocks, on the other hand, could be set in the press alongside the type. Also, while there’s no correlation between a woodcut’s quality and its price, copper engravings wore down quickly, especially if they were delicately engraved. Thus, the most expensive engravings wore down most quickly. Some copper work might have been used in cheaper printing later in the sixteenth century, when cast copper plates were nailed to woodblocks for printing. These stereotype casts would have included text and images.

Cries

Cries are “pictures of hawkers, animated by poetry or prose recording their shouts or naming their trades” (Shesgreen 2). Sean Shesgreen calls the Cries “stored images that represent sound silently, sounds and voices that, in life, were common, vulgar, transgressive, even threatening, socially and politically” (Shesgreen 2). The first set is called The Cries of Paris. It is a series of woodcuts, cut by an anonymous artists around 1500. By 1550, the form of Cries was accepted as a popular genre, and many cities, including Nuremberg and Vienna, had their own sets. The original collection, and the others which followed it show a turn from the ugly, deformed or monstrous image of ballad sellers or peddlers that we’ve seen talked about, toward a sort of dignified or noble representation of the laborer.

Cries could function as a sort of tourist item, since they showed a city from the most local perspective possible. But they were sold mostly to urban buyers, and became especially interesting to people concerned with the ways that society organized itself: they sold almost like science texts about other “forms of life.” Often sold as loose sheets, the Cries were also printed in books of trade and costume books, and the images of a happy-looking working class (also called the Lower Orders or the humblest class) became popular items of curiosity.

In London, Cries ranged from halfpenny sheets sold by small scale booksellers to expensive half guinea sets of seventy-four print collections designed for display in a “Cabinet of the Curious.” There are three main formats for Cries. The first, from the 1590s and earlier, shows hawkers together in a panel in a single leaf with a general title. These flysheets were sold singly, each sheet with up to thirty six small figures. They were often sold together with maps or allegories of continents, elements, or seasons. Second, in the late 1600s, Cries shifted from group prints to individual portraits on a single leaf (these leaves were then arranged sequentially). This focus on the individual is thought to reflect, after Cromwell, greater visibility for commoners. These single leaf prints were often framed or hung individually. Finally, around 1750, Cries are published in a last format, within illustrated books. In early examples of this, the print is presented with an accompanying page of text. Later, the Cries become scattered illustrations throughout the book.

~ Simone Chess

Works Cited:

Landeau, David and Peter Parshal. The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1994.

Shesgreen, Sean. Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.