Poem for Friday, Spider-Man 2, Elizabethan Illustration

Sonnet XXIV
By William Shakespeare

Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is the painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

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I had lots of chores planned for Thursday that did not get done, in large part because I went to the mall for a raid in the morning, ran into a friend there with whom I had lunch, then met my mother and ended up shopping with her for a couple of hours, first at the mall and then at Strathmore's mansion shop, which has beautiful jewelry. Plus I had a visit from my neighbor Rose when I got home with gifts for my cats. So it's all good, though there's a big basket of laundry waiting to be folded in the morning.

Cheryl, Paul, and I watched Spider-Man 2, which I had remembered as better than the first and now I'm not entirely sure why (Dunst has some of the worst dialogue of any woman in any superhero movie and Maguire basically has two facial expressions; something is wrong when James Franco is the best thing in a movie). Here are some photos from the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibit Beyond Words, a collection of book illustrations from Shakespeare's era:


Cards commissioned for Louis XIV of great rulers, including this illustration of Elizabeth I.


A hand-colored illustration of flasks of urine so doctors could diagnose ailments.


Fashionably dressed courtesans and the men who buy illustrations of them.


A fully engraved signal book for Royal Navy officers to identify ship signals.


The English Usurer -- yes, the text and illustrations are as anti-Semitic as you think.


A portrait of an admired Ethiopian cleric included in a book by a German scholar on Ethiopian language and customs.


An early 1600s map of the County of Warwick.


A pocket-sized herbal with woodcuts to identify plants.