Ricketts and Saint Joan

CARL WOODRING
 

The English artist Charles Ricketts designed works for three
of the leading Irish writers of his time. With his coworker
and companion Charles Shannon he designed or illustrated
(or both) almost all the books by Oscar Wilde. He designed sets and
costumes for two productions of Wilde's Salome. An elaborate geo¬
metrical design by Ricketts became the standard cover for the col¬
lected poems, the autobiography, and other works by William But¬
ler Yeats, who, as a manager of the Abbey Theatre, eagerly and
repeatedly involved Ricketts in costumes and decor. Yeats's daugh¬
ter has retained costume designs by Ricketts for Yeats's plays, but
scholars have pursued unsuccessfully a costume Ricketts designed
for solo performances by Yeats, referred to in their correspondence
as "The Jester."

Yeats was often one of those who gathered at Ricketts and Shan¬
non's in London on Friday evenings, and Ricketts's journal has fre¬
quent entries such as "Yeats and Rothenstein to grub." His friend¬
ship with Bernard Shaw was less close, but he designed costumes for
Shaw's plays over a period of twenty years. The title pages of
Shaw's individually printed plays, with title, author, and imprint
flush left, were imitated by Shaw himself from title pages designed
by Ricketts, much as Ricketts borrowed from Whistler's asymmet¬
rical typography in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (18 90) for the
first edition of Tess ofthe d 'Urbervilles (1891)—so pleasing to Thomas
Hardy that he asked Osgood, Mcllvaine (owned by Harpers) to
have Ricketts redesign all his novels in the same manner.

When Ricketts, Laurence Binyon, and Sturge Moore formed the
Literary Theatre Society in 1905 and Florence Farr proposed to
Shaw that they put on Act III, Scene 2 of Man and Superman,
"Don Juan in Hell," Shaw asked, "IsRicketts taken with it?," for he
was reluctant to have it done without "a really artistic fantastic pic¬
ture." When Granville-Barker and Vedrenne produced it trium¬
phantly in 1907, with costumes and black drapes by Ricketts, Shaw