We think we know William Shakespeare from his plays alone, indeed the Victorians even tried hard to match the chronology of his theatrical dramas with putative events in his life to build a more complete picture of this mysterious, mercurial playwright. Alas, it was all rather speculative. So, what of the man?
“What we know about Shakespeare is what we can glean from surviving documents when his life intersected with officialdom and the law,” says Gordon McMullan, the director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London and the academic director for Shakespeare 400, a consortium of cultural, creative and educational organisations that are marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death this year.
“These records could be seen as banal, but because they reveal real events in Shakespeare’s life, they’re actually really exciting,” McMullan adds.
The exhibition By Me William Shakespeare, A Life in Writing is a collaboration between King’s College and the National Archives, and is probably the best portrayal we are likely to get of Shakespeare in our lifetime. It brings together a handful of rarely seen contemporaneous documents, including his will and material relating to courtly events and controversial incidents in his life, along with four of his six known signatures.
“These documents shed a lot of light on Shakespeare’s life, especially when considered side by side,” says McMullan. “We see him implicated in the theft of wood from a theatre, only to use it to build the Globe on the other side of the River Thames. We can place him at the coronation of King James I because he was given a gift of red cloth for processional use. And there are also documents that relate to a dispute over a dowry, where Shakespeare conveniently couldn’t remember anything.”
The exhibition is one of the highlights of this year’s Shakespeare 400 celebrations. Other events and projects include theatrical, orchestral and dance performances, film screenings, art exhibitions, talks, tours and conferences.
One of the treats in store for Shakespeare aficionados is weekend screenings of classic films made of Shakespeare’s plays being shown at the Barbican, London. And the Globe Theatre has commissioned a series of 10-minute films of the bard’s 37 plays, which will be shown along London’s South Bank. These activities are also designed to rope in visitors less familiar with the playwright and his work.
Shakespeare’s life and work cut through so many disciplines and themes that he has become an ideal cultural figure to form innovative partnerships around. And the quartercentenary has provided the perfect opportunity for museums, galleries and libraries to create partnerships and discover new ways of working, including taking fresh approaches to their existing Shakespeare-related archives and collections.
“His influence filters into so many art forms that there is always the potential to attract new audiences,” says McMullan. “Our collaboration with the National Archives has been fascinating for us as academics. At King’s College we have the knowledge of his plays and can place them in their historical context, but the archivists we’ve been working with have been so knowledge- able about, and excited by, the materiality of each document. Recherché subjects such as the chemistry of Elizabethan ink, or how to read cursive 16th-century script, don’t go unexplained.
“It’s been a transformative experience. I’ve learned so much, and not just about individual documents. I have written about the myths surrounding Shakespeare, par- ticularly those relating to his later life, and to have the documents describing them so close at hand has been extraordinary.”
Shakespeare 400 is focused mainly on London, but there are also events planned in the Midlands, where the bard had his roots and retained family and business connections throughout his life. The Library of Birmingham has more than 44,000 Shakespeare-related books and items – from a rare 1623 first folio edition of all the playwright’s works, to theatre playbills and programmes – making it one of the largest Shakespeare collections in the world.
Abundance of information
“Not enough of our library users are aware of the significance of our Shakespeare collection,” says Tom Epps, the cultural partnership manager at the Library of Birmingham.
A new exhibition, in partnership with the British Library in London, is looking to redress this with a display in its purpose-built exhibition space.
“The 400th anniversary presents us with the opportunity to tell the story of the collection: why it was collected and why it is important,” Epps says.
“In the exhibition we also weave in the narrative of Birmingham, which in Shakespeare’s day was a small Warwickshire town not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. As it rapidly developed during the industrial revolution, Shakespeare became a kind of cultural motif for the town, and we wanted to explore that. So we’ve investigated his role in making Birmingham a cohesive place, granting it its ‘city-ness’, if you like.”
The Library of Birmingham’s exhibition is part of a 12-month project funded by the British Library Trust that builds on British Library-branded Business and Intellectual Property Centres in eight public libraries around the country, including that of Birmingham. “Around 80% of the material on show is ours – but working with the British Library has given us access to its collection as well as its curatorial and conservation expertise,” Epps says. “The depth of knowledge at the British Library has helped us better understand how an exhibition is put together, how to make material accessible to a wider public and which items are stable enough to display.”
From the British Library’s perspective, the project chimes with its Living Knowledge vision for the future mission statement published in 2015. “One of our aims is to take our collections out of London and make them more available, so it’s great to have our star items complementing Birmingham’s material,” says Claire Robe, the cultural engagement manager at the British Library.
“This is a pilot project for us and its success will determine what we can do with other city libraries in the future. We want to build a cultural offer from this base, so the Shakespeare exhibition has been a good lesson for us in working out what we are likely to be able to achieve.”
The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, part of the University of Birmingham, has launched an online exhibition that explores Shakespeare’s identity and how local people view and value him.
“The Shakespeare Institute is co-hosting the World Shakespeare Congress in July,” says Karin Brown, a librarian at The Shakespeare Institute. “That event should draw people from all over the world, so with all the global cultural activity going on and with big organisations putting on large-scale exhibitions, we decided it would be a good idea to bring our content back down to a local level and ask people what Shakespeare meant to them and asked them to contribute items related to him they keep in their homes.
“Creating a dispersed collection like this will bring a different archival perspective,” Brown adds. “People can offer objects that haven’t much intrinsic value but have emotional importance. I know there will be fascinating material out there, from cheap souvenirs to significant paintings, and this gives people a chance to tell the stories behind the objects they own.”
At the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) base in Stratford, a new family- friendly visitor attraction in the restored Swan Wing opens in June. The Play’s The Thing (a line from Hamlet) features costumes and props, and reveals behind-the- scenes secrets of the stage and the sound effects used, such as how snapping a carrot represents the sound of a bone cracking.
“We know people love to see the processes behind the shows,” says Geraldine Collinge, the director of events and exhibi- tions at the RSC. “And the anniversary has given us the chance to open our archives so that visitors can see the whole process of a production, from preliminary designs and drawings to finished sets, from costume fit- tings right through to publicity shots,” she says. “Displaying all the aspects of a theatre production together is exciting. We want to offer a way into Shakespeare for people who are perhaps not ready to watch a play.”
Collinge says that it has been an especially informative process because theatre makers and museum curators have worked together on it. “It’s important for us to show how innovation does not necessarily revolve around new discoveries and can be as simple as reframing our history.
“For instance, we found some beautiful, but mothballed, Russian set designs from the 1920s, which are still striking and radical, so we have put them on display in the show.” Celebrations are also taking place elsewhere. The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh is holding an exhibition of theatrical memorabilia from 17 March. With a focus on actors who have interpreted Shakespeare over the past 400 years, the show will draw on the library’s early illustrated Shakespeare editions, printed memoirs, theatrical playbills, programmes and souvenirs from theatres including The Old Vic theatre in London and the RSC.
The National Library’s copy of the 1623 First Folio will be making a special day-long guest appearance for the public on 22 April (the day before the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) while its rare copy of Richard II has been lent to the exhibition at the National Archives. The National Library has also provided digital images for an online exhibition, Shakespeare Documented, which is curated by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
Back in Stratford, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust owns the largest Shakespeare- related museum and archive in the world, with more than a million items. The trust also manages the RSC’s archive. A new website project this year will see the trust bring Shakespeare-related documents from a variety of sources together.
“It has been a massive undertaking – we have been working more collaboratively online to try and join up the many disparate Shakespeare collections,” says Diana Owen, the chief executive officer of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “This has included digitising 450 documents for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition.”
Reimagining New Place
The trust has been developing a different kind of site too: it owns New Place, the house that Shakespeare made his final home in Stratford-upon-Avon. The house itself was demolished centuries ago, so the trust has been working on the redevelopment of the gardens and Nash’s House, the neighbouring Tudor mansion house. With a £5.25m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to reimagine the site and commission artwork for it, the project has been the overriding focus of the 400th anniversary for the trust.
“Instead of rebuilding New Place we have tried to stimulate people’s imagination with visual clues and emotional connections to Shakespeare and his time,” says Owen.
New sculptures have been commissioned, including a “floating” silver ship that evokes the shipwreck in The Tempest and a silver globe with an outline of the world as Shakespeare would have known it. The centrepiece is a 4.5-metre-high solid bronze cast of an actual tree by artist Jill Berelowitz.
“The tree branches arch over to mark the spot where the house stood and creates a visual metaphor for Shakespeare’s domes- tic and writing life,” says Owen. “Some of the pieces are more abstract evocations of Shakespeare’s world, but the tree sculpture makes a powerful and moving statement that helps you understand what an amazing place it was and how much it meant to him.”
Wherefore art thou?
In November 1967 Sir Peter Hall filmed the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) first colour film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Compton Verney estate in Warwickshire. Photographs from location shoots that have never been seen in public before will be displayed in the art gallery’s new exhibition, Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy.
As well as the photographs, more than 70 works including paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, and contemporary pieces have been brought together for this major exhibition.
“We are working in association with the RSC and focusing on lesser known works,” says Antonia Harrison, the curator of the exhibition. “The works are drawn from across the country and date from the 18th-century resurgence of interest in Shakespeare, depicting scenes and characters from his plays, right up to 21st-century commissions, such as a spoken-word piece from poet Kate Tempest based on the character of Caliban in The Tempest, and a reimagining of Ophelia drowning, but in our own lake on the estate (weather permitting) by photographer Tom Hunter, who usually photographs much more urban scenes.”
The exhibition, which opens on 19 March, is constructed as a series of eight acts relating to some of the plays that the RSC is covering in its Shakespeare 400 repertoire.
“Artists such as Henry Fuseli and John Singer Sargent took inspiration from Shakespeare in the sense that they visually froze heightened moments from scenes in the bard’s plays, and got really close to the emotional core of Shakespearean language and action,” says Harrison.
“We also have audio pieces recorded by RSC actors to set the atmosphere. In terms of the way we work, it has been a markedly different experience for us, both in the opportunity to pool our expertise with the RSC, but also in using a more theatrical design approach and employing new multimedia and sound techniques.”
“What we know about Shakespeare is what we can glean from surviving documents when his life intersected with officialdom and the law,” says Gordon McMullan, the director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London and the academic director for Shakespeare 400, a consortium of cultural, creative and educational organisations that are marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death this year.
“These records could be seen as banal, but because they reveal real events in Shakespeare’s life, they’re actually really exciting,” McMullan adds.
The exhibition By Me William Shakespeare, A Life in Writing is a collaboration between King’s College and the National Archives, and is probably the best portrayal we are likely to get of Shakespeare in our lifetime. It brings together a handful of rarely seen contemporaneous documents, including his will and material relating to courtly events and controversial incidents in his life, along with four of his six known signatures.
“These documents shed a lot of light on Shakespeare’s life, especially when considered side by side,” says McMullan. “We see him implicated in the theft of wood from a theatre, only to use it to build the Globe on the other side of the River Thames. We can place him at the coronation of King James I because he was given a gift of red cloth for processional use. And there are also documents that relate to a dispute over a dowry, where Shakespeare conveniently couldn’t remember anything.”
The exhibition is one of the highlights of this year’s Shakespeare 400 celebrations. Other events and projects include theatrical, orchestral and dance performances, film screenings, art exhibitions, talks, tours and conferences.
One of the treats in store for Shakespeare aficionados is weekend screenings of classic films made of Shakespeare’s plays being shown at the Barbican, London. And the Globe Theatre has commissioned a series of 10-minute films of the bard’s 37 plays, which will be shown along London’s South Bank. These activities are also designed to rope in visitors less familiar with the playwright and his work.
Shakespeare’s life and work cut through so many disciplines and themes that he has become an ideal cultural figure to form innovative partnerships around. And the quartercentenary has provided the perfect opportunity for museums, galleries and libraries to create partnerships and discover new ways of working, including taking fresh approaches to their existing Shakespeare-related archives and collections.
“His influence filters into so many art forms that there is always the potential to attract new audiences,” says McMullan. “Our collaboration with the National Archives has been fascinating for us as academics. At King’s College we have the knowledge of his plays and can place them in their historical context, but the archivists we’ve been working with have been so knowledge- able about, and excited by, the materiality of each document. Recherché subjects such as the chemistry of Elizabethan ink, or how to read cursive 16th-century script, don’t go unexplained.
“It’s been a transformative experience. I’ve learned so much, and not just about individual documents. I have written about the myths surrounding Shakespeare, par- ticularly those relating to his later life, and to have the documents describing them so close at hand has been extraordinary.”
Shakespeare 400 is focused mainly on London, but there are also events planned in the Midlands, where the bard had his roots and retained family and business connections throughout his life. The Library of Birmingham has more than 44,000 Shakespeare-related books and items – from a rare 1623 first folio edition of all the playwright’s works, to theatre playbills and programmes – making it one of the largest Shakespeare collections in the world.
Shakespeare’s life and work cut through so many disciplines and themes that he has become an ideal cultural figure to form innovative partnerships around."
Abundance of information
“Not enough of our library users are aware of the significance of our Shakespeare collection,” says Tom Epps, the cultural partnership manager at the Library of Birmingham.
A new exhibition, in partnership with the British Library in London, is looking to redress this with a display in its purpose-built exhibition space.
“The 400th anniversary presents us with the opportunity to tell the story of the collection: why it was collected and why it is important,” Epps says.
“In the exhibition we also weave in the narrative of Birmingham, which in Shakespeare’s day was a small Warwickshire town not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. As it rapidly developed during the industrial revolution, Shakespeare became a kind of cultural motif for the town, and we wanted to explore that. So we’ve investigated his role in making Birmingham a cohesive place, granting it its ‘city-ness’, if you like.”
The Library of Birmingham’s exhibition is part of a 12-month project funded by the British Library Trust that builds on British Library-branded Business and Intellectual Property Centres in eight public libraries around the country, including that of Birmingham. “Around 80% of the material on show is ours – but working with the British Library has given us access to its collection as well as its curatorial and conservation expertise,” Epps says. “The depth of knowledge at the British Library has helped us better understand how an exhibition is put together, how to make material accessible to a wider public and which items are stable enough to display.”
From the British Library’s perspective, the project chimes with its Living Knowledge vision for the future mission statement published in 2015. “One of our aims is to take our collections out of London and make them more available, so it’s great to have our star items complementing Birmingham’s material,” says Claire Robe, the cultural engagement manager at the British Library.
“This is a pilot project for us and its success will determine what we can do with other city libraries in the future. We want to build a cultural offer from this base, so the Shakespeare exhibition has been a good lesson for us in working out what we are likely to be able to achieve.”
The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, part of the University of Birmingham, has launched an online exhibition that explores Shakespeare’s identity and how local people view and value him.
“The Shakespeare Institute is co-hosting the World Shakespeare Congress in July,” says Karin Brown, a librarian at The Shakespeare Institute. “That event should draw people from all over the world, so with all the global cultural activity going on and with big organisations putting on large-scale exhibitions, we decided it would be a good idea to bring our content back down to a local level and ask people what Shakespeare meant to them and asked them to contribute items related to him they keep in their homes.
“Creating a dispersed collection like this will bring a different archival perspective,” Brown adds. “People can offer objects that haven’t much intrinsic value but have emotional importance. I know there will be fascinating material out there, from cheap souvenirs to significant paintings, and this gives people a chance to tell the stories behind the objects they own.”
At the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) base in Stratford, a new family- friendly visitor attraction in the restored Swan Wing opens in June. The Play’s The Thing (a line from Hamlet) features costumes and props, and reveals behind-the- scenes secrets of the stage and the sound effects used, such as how snapping a carrot represents the sound of a bone cracking.
“We know people love to see the processes behind the shows,” says Geraldine Collinge, the director of events and exhibi- tions at the RSC. “And the anniversary has given us the chance to open our archives so that visitors can see the whole process of a production, from preliminary designs and drawings to finished sets, from costume fit- tings right through to publicity shots,” she says. “Displaying all the aspects of a theatre production together is exciting. We want to offer a way into Shakespeare for people who are perhaps not ready to watch a play.”
Collinge says that it has been an especially informative process because theatre makers and museum curators have worked together on it. “It’s important for us to show how innovation does not necessarily revolve around new discoveries and can be as simple as reframing our history.
“For instance, we found some beautiful, but mothballed, Russian set designs from the 1920s, which are still striking and radical, so we have put them on display in the show.” Celebrations are also taking place elsewhere. The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh is holding an exhibition of theatrical memorabilia from 17 March. With a focus on actors who have interpreted Shakespeare over the past 400 years, the show will draw on the library’s early illustrated Shakespeare editions, printed memoirs, theatrical playbills, programmes and souvenirs from theatres including The Old Vic theatre in London and the RSC.
The National Library’s copy of the 1623 First Folio will be making a special day-long guest appearance for the public on 22 April (the day before the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) while its rare copy of Richard II has been lent to the exhibition at the National Archives. The National Library has also provided digital images for an online exhibition, Shakespeare Documented, which is curated by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
Back in Stratford, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust owns the largest Shakespeare- related museum and archive in the world, with more than a million items. The trust also manages the RSC’s archive. A new website project this year will see the trust bring Shakespeare-related documents from a variety of sources together.
“It has been a massive undertaking – we have been working more collaboratively online to try and join up the many disparate Shakespeare collections,” says Diana Owen, the chief executive officer of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “This has included digitising 450 documents for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition.”
Reimagining New Place
The trust has been developing a different kind of site too: it owns New Place, the house that Shakespeare made his final home in Stratford-upon-Avon. The house itself was demolished centuries ago, so the trust has been working on the redevelopment of the gardens and Nash’s House, the neighbouring Tudor mansion house. With a £5.25m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to reimagine the site and commission artwork for it, the project has been the overriding focus of the 400th anniversary for the trust.
“Instead of rebuilding New Place we have tried to stimulate people’s imagination with visual clues and emotional connections to Shakespeare and his time,” says Owen.
New sculptures have been commissioned, including a “floating” silver ship that evokes the shipwreck in The Tempest and a silver globe with an outline of the world as Shakespeare would have known it. The centrepiece is a 4.5-metre-high solid bronze cast of an actual tree by artist Jill Berelowitz.
“The tree branches arch over to mark the spot where the house stood and creates a visual metaphor for Shakespeare’s domes- tic and writing life,” says Owen. “Some of the pieces are more abstract evocations of Shakespeare’s world, but the tree sculpture makes a powerful and moving statement that helps you understand what an amazing place it was and how much it meant to him.”
Wherefore art thou?
In November 1967 Sir Peter Hall filmed the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) first colour film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Compton Verney estate in Warwickshire. Photographs from location shoots that have never been seen in public before will be displayed in the art gallery’s new exhibition, Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy.
As well as the photographs, more than 70 works including paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, and contemporary pieces have been brought together for this major exhibition.
“We are working in association with the RSC and focusing on lesser known works,” says Antonia Harrison, the curator of the exhibition. “The works are drawn from across the country and date from the 18th-century resurgence of interest in Shakespeare, depicting scenes and characters from his plays, right up to 21st-century commissions, such as a spoken-word piece from poet Kate Tempest based on the character of Caliban in The Tempest, and a reimagining of Ophelia drowning, but in our own lake on the estate (weather permitting) by photographer Tom Hunter, who usually photographs much more urban scenes.”
The exhibition, which opens on 19 March, is constructed as a series of eight acts relating to some of the plays that the RSC is covering in its Shakespeare 400 repertoire.
“Artists such as Henry Fuseli and John Singer Sargent took inspiration from Shakespeare in the sense that they visually froze heightened moments from scenes in the bard’s plays, and got really close to the emotional core of Shakespearean language and action,” says Harrison.
“We also have audio pieces recorded by RSC actors to set the atmosphere. In terms of the way we work, it has been a markedly different experience for us, both in the opportunity to pool our expertise with the RSC, but also in using a more theatrical design approach and employing new multimedia and sound techniques.”