Pen and Ink

For three centuries, if you had seen a performance and wanted to keep it, what you could buy was a line drawing. Not a painting, not later a photograph — a print made from an engraved or etched plate, in black line on white paper. The reasons are partly technical and partly to do with what a line can carry that a photograph cannot, and the second reason has outlasted the first.

The technical reason

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the only way to print an image alongside or in place of type, cheaply and in quantity, was from a relief or intaglio plate — woodcut, wood engraving, copper or steel engraving, etching, lithograph. All of these are line media. Tone has to be manufactured out of marks: hatching, cross-hatching, stipple, the engraver's swelling line. An artist working for print therefore learned to think in line, and audiences learned to read line as a full description of a face, a costume, a room.

Photography did not immediately displace this, because for decades photographs could not be printed on the same press as text. The half-tone process, which broke a photograph into a grid of dots that a printing press could handle, came into general use only in the 1880s and 1890s. Before that, a newspaper's photograph was an engraving after a photograph — a drawing, made by a person, from a plate.

The stage-light reason

Theatre is also a genuinely hard photographic subject, and was much harder before fast film. Stage lighting is extreme, contrasty and coloured; performers move; the auditorium is dark. The nineteenth-century solution was to photograph actors in costume in a studio, in daylight, holding a pose — which produces a stiff, sculptural image with none of the performance in it. A draughtsman in the auditorium with a notebook could get something the camera could not: the shape of a gesture, remembered and reconstructed.

The great theatrical caricaturists worked exactly this way, and the results are historically valuable precisely because they are not literal. Substantial collections of both kinds of image are held by the V&A's theatre and performance collections and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

What a line can do

Three things, mainly.

• It can omit. A photograph records everything in front of it, including the fire exit. A drawing includes only what the artist decided mattered, and the blank paper is not an absence — it is an assertion that nothing there is worth your attention.
• It can exaggerate without lying. Caricature is not distortion for its own sake; it is the isolation of what is characteristic. A drawing that lengthens a jaw by a third can be more recognisable than a photograph of the same face.
• It can hold a moment that never existed. A gesture is a movement, and no single instant of it looks like the whole. Draughtsmen routinely synthesise a pose from several moments, producing an image that is false as a record and true as a description.

Character versus actor

Theatrical portraiture has always sat awkwardly between two subjects. A print of a great performer in a great part is sold on the performer's name, but it survives as an image of the part. Over generations the specific face fades out of public memory and what remains is a costume, a posture and a prop — which then become the character's standard iconography, and the next generation of actors arrives having absorbed it.

This is how a role acquires furniture. Hamlet holding a skull, Richard's silhouette, Lady Macbeth on the stairs with a candle: these are not in the stage directions. They are inherited pictures, and they exert real pressure on production. A director who stages the graveyard scene without a skull is making a point whether or not that was the intention.

The practical problem of drawing a character

Choose the moment and you have chosen the reading. Draw Malvolio in the yellow stockings and the character is a fool; draw him before the letter and the play is cruel. Draw Shylock at the trial and the question of who is on trial is already answered by the composition. Illustration is criticism carried out with a nib, and it is not neutral even when it is trying to be.

The next page takes the other half of the same problem: what happens when a single line of text is welded to a single image and the two stop being separable.