Shakespeare in the Royal Collection
Research focuses on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collection and the stories they have to tell, primarily during the period 1714-1945.
Introduction:
Shakespeare in the Royal Collection is a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project exploring the relationship between Shakespeare and the royal family in the centuries since Shakespeare’s death. It poses the central question: What has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare?
The research team have created an online database containing all the Shakespeare-related items in the Royal Collection (including paintings, books, drawings, prints, letters, essays, decorative objects, furniture and photographs), which anyone can explore.
The online exhibition, which launches on 15 July 2021, ‘Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family’ tells eight of the most interesting stories that emerge from these objects.
3D visualisations will bring to life historic performances at Windsor Castle and will offer a captivating view of Shakespearean performances through the eyes of Queen Victoria and the young Elizabeth II, through digital reconstructions.
The visualisations are based on the team’s research into Victorian performances, royal audiences, and the history of Windsor Castle’s interior design so that spaces could be reconstructed as they appeared in the 1850s and 1940s.
What are we researching?
Shakespeare addresses royal history in numerous plays and engagement with Shakespeare’s works has been a consistent element in the biographies of royals since the playwright’s death. Shakespeare has functioned as a vehicle both for the development of royal ideology and for the education of young royals.
A key dimension of this history has been the inclusion of Shakespeare-related items – manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, performance records, printed books, photographs and other objects – in the Royal Collection. The number of these items is substantial, but they have, to date, been minimally, and certainly not systematically, researched.
The project seeks to analyse the place of Shakespeare in the Royal Collection by investigating the holdings and the stories they tell. The focus is the mutually enhancing nature of the relationship – the extent to which the idea of monarchy and the role of the royal family in British culture has been legitimated by association with Shakespeare, and how Shakespeare’s cultural status has been entrenched through association with the royal family.
“The research question at the heart of this project is: What has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? These two pillars of the British establishment have long had a close, interdependent relationship. ”
What will the impact be?
The project will explore how royal patronage, attendance and participation have influenced Shakespearean performance history and the development of public theatre in Britain; how the deployment of Shakespearean performance has contributed to royal legitimation; and how royal performances of Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related art reclaim and re-enact earlier moments in royal history.
Additionally, it will consider how the Shakespeare-related materials show the influence of royal patronage on the cultural role and status of Shakespeare; what the materials in the collection reveal about the negotiation of royal identities by way of Shakespearean associations; and how the collection might function as a performance archive.
Professor Kate Retford, History of Art, Birkbeck, said, "The research question at the heart of this project is: What has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? These two pillars of the British establishment have long had a close, interdependent relationship. Shakespeare dealt with royal history in plays such as Richard II. Queen Victoria watched a performance of that play some 250 years later, staged in St George's Hall in Windsor Castle, commenting on how ‘curious’ it was to see her ‘ancestors' before her.
“In his Henry IV plays, Shakespeare vividly conjured the character of Prince Hal, carousing with Falstaff and his friends before becoming the great King Henry V. Various Princes of Wales over the centuries - including the current holder of that title - have made use of this model of promise whilst in waiting for the throne. On other occasions, however, Shakespeare has rather provided ammunition: Queen Caroline’s divorce hearing in 1820, for example, was reimagined by satirists as that of Katherine of Aragon in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.
“These intertwined histories of Shakespeare and the royal family are embedded in numerous objects today in the Royal Collection: manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, performance records, printed books and photographs. Drawing on objects as various as George III's essays on English history, deeply informed by Shakespeare's representation of the Plantagenets; a watercolour of the Entry of Bolingbroke, created by Princess Victoria, and given to her mother, the Queen, as a birthday present in 1857; and a set of toothpick boxes dated to 1816, claimed to be ‘made of the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare’ at Stratford-upon-Avon, the project seeks to unpack the role of the royal family in the establishment of Shakespeare as the National Poet, and the role of Shakespeare in the development of royal ideology."
Project Fact-file
- Full project title: Shakespeare in the Royal Collection
- Project funding: £994,458
- Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Length of award: September 2018-September 2022
- Project website: https://sharc.kcl.ac.uk/
- People: Principal investigator Prof Gordon McMullan (English department, King’s College London); Co-investigator Prof Kate Retford (History of Art department, Birkbeck, University of London); Dr Sally Barnden and Dr Kirsten Tambling, Postdoctoral Research Associates.