Many thanks to Matt Hunter, graduate student in the Yale Department of English and author of the exhibition blog from its opening on February 1 through his final post yesterday, on April 29.    As the semester comes to a close, and students and faculty turn to writing and taking and grading exams and papers, I am taking the blog’s final month for a curator’s (or co-curator’s)  exhibition tour of Remembering Shakespeare, on view at the Beinecke Library through June 4.    In the exhibition’s last few days, I’d like to turn back for a closer look at some of the highlights of the exhibition (and some which couldn’t be included in the exhibition itself).

Two sketches, loaned by the Yale Center for British Art, are among the most extraordinary items on display in the exhibit.  Drawn by the Czech engraver Wenceslaus Hollar around 1638, these two drawings show London,  as seen by a viewer from Southwark cathedral, on the south side of the Thames, looking to the west and east across the city.   To the east, the bustling urban landscape of  Southwark, and what is now the Tower Bridge; to the west, towards what is now the Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre can be seen in the middle distance, a round building alongside its neighbor, the Swan Theatre.

Wenceslaus Hollar, View of the East Part of Southwark, Looking Towards Greenwich (London, c. 1638). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University

Wenceslaus Hollar, A View from St. Mary's, Southwark, Looking Towards Westminster (London, c. 1638). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University

The drawings capture one last glimpse of the Globe before its destruction, first shut down by the Puritans in the onset of the English civil war and then sold soon after as tenement housing.  And yet the theatre’s seeming stability in this drawing is also misleading.  The Globe, built in 1599, had already burned once in 1613 and been re-built;  the Globe—now “Shakespeare’s Globe”—re-opened in 1997 in almost the same spot.    Seen together, these drawings show the Globe as it would have been understood by theatre-goers at the time: as one building in the extraordinary, and extraordinarily volatile, landscape of London in the early seventeenth century.

Working together to purify Shakespeare’s works for children’s appreciation, Charles and Mary Lamb produced in 1831 these prose renditions of Shakespeare’s plays, Tales from Shakespeare, which collectively served to embed Shakespeare more deeply in England’s national consciousness. Among other changes in these versions of the plays, the tragic conclusions are smoothed over by the Lambs with some version of the phrase “too horrible to relate here.” Take, for instance, this version of the conclusion of King Lear:

How the judgment of Heaven overtook the bad earl of Gloucester, whose treasons were discovered, and himself slain in single combat with his brother, the lawful earl; and how Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, who was innocent of the death of Cordelia, and had never encouraged his lady in her wicked proceedings against her father, ascended the throne of Britain after the death of Lear, is needless here to narrate; Lear and his Three Daughters being dead, whose adventures alone concern our story.

It is, the Lambs suggest, for later in life that such moments in Shakespeare’s tragedies should be encountered.

The Speeches and Readings in Mr. Clarence Holt’s Entertainment, entitled ‘A Night With Shakespeare and Dickens’, pictured here, offer another example of the close association that came to grow between Shakespeare and Dickens, two authors thought to be commensurate with a national English identity. The illustrations of Shakespearean characters included here place Holt’s Speeches in the long tradition of Shakespearean illustrations, imparting a Victorian life upon some of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues.

It is only fitting that Charles Dickens, who would come to share with Shakespeare the mantle of pre-eminently English author, should produce a document quoting Shakespeare as extensively as he does in this commemorative piece, November the nineteenth, 1861, ‘The Morn that I was wedded…’ The piece, commemorating Dickens’ wedding, displays a seating chart of the guests at Dickens’ wedding dinner, an extensive quotation of Shakespeare appended to each guest’s name.

The popularity of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth owed much to the performances of individual actors and the efforts of the many publishers who worked to distribute Shakespeare’s works; but it owed something, too, to the technologies of mass production that helped to distribute Shakespeare’s works to the wide extent that they enjoyed.

This edition of Shakespeare’s works–put together by William Pickering and known, thanks to his efforts, as the Pickering edition–remains with us today as the evidence of one publisher’s attempts to cater cheaper, smaller editions of Shakespeare to broader, more popular audiences.

It did not take long for Shakespeare to make his way off of the stage and into more popular documents like this cross word puzzle from 1865, where even The Life and Death of King John finds a prominent place.

David Garrick, with so many others, helped to turn performances of Shakespeare into commodities of high cultural standing; by the nineteenth century, such performances had taken on such life, popularity, on authority that there was money to be made in selling not just Shakespeare’s works, and not even, as we have seen, illustrations of Shakespeare’s works, but illustrations of the performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Take, for instance, these souvenirs from a showing of Henry VIII, performed in 1892 and featuring the celebrated Shakesperean actor Henry Irving:

Occupying the center of our attention, here, is not the fictive role the actor has taken on–Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII, for instance–so much as the actor taking on the role Shakespeare has written.