Shakespeare, Life of an Icon Exhibition Material

This article offers a comprehensive list of each piece included in Shakespeare, Life of an Icon, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger.

Introduction

Four centuries after William Shakespeare’s death, Shakespeare, Life of an Icon brings together 50 of the most important manuscripts and printed works related to his life and career—some of them never before exhibited in the United States, and some of them on public display for the first time ever.

In his lifetime, Londoners and others took note of Shakespeare—they went to his plays, bought and read his works, and compared him to other great writers. At the same time, bureaucrats recorded details of his professional and family life—real estate transactions, baptisms and burials, taxes, legal proceedings—in mundane paperwork. We will never have a photograph of Shakespeare or a recording of his voice, but we can appreciate the rarity and significance of these documents and the brief, sometimes surprising, glimpses they provide of his life and rise to fame.

Thomas Speght, who lived in Shakespeare’s time, described the key components of an author’s biography as “so much as we can find” of “his Country, Parentage, Education, Marriage, Children, Revenues, Service, Rewards, Friends, Books, Death.” By that standard, we know much about Shakespeare, although never as much as we might wish. The materials in this exhibition remind us of the difficulty of interpreting the past, and the rewards of doing so, through careful reading and small details.

Shakespeare, The Playwright

Shakespeare was an ACTOR, a PLAYWRIGHT, and a SHAREHOLDER in an acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603. His plays were performed on indoor and outdoor commercial stages in London and in many other venues as well, including the royal court, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court, public buildings and outdoor courtyards in the provinces, and private households.

The total number of Shakespeare’s plays varies somewhat, depending on who is counting them, and how. The total shifts between 38 and 40 plays as scholars reassess references to his two lost plays—Love’s Labor’s Won and Cardenio—and analyze how large a hand he had in some collaboratively-written plays.

The Shakespeare Quartos

Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime, in a small, inexpensive format called a “quarto.”

Quartos were sold in flimsy bindings or sometimes no bindings at all, making them vulnerable to damage and loss over the years. The early Shakespeare quartos are now extraordinarily rare; some survive in only a single copy. Some of the quarto plays diff er significantly from the same plays in the 1623 First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which was published seven years after he died.

Shakespeare's Earliest Critics

Shakespeare is fi rst mentioned as a playwright in 1592, when he had already written at least five plays: The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI, Parts 1 �, 2 �, and 3.

In 1598, a literary critic attributes a dozen plays to him, including one that is now considered lost, Love’s Labors Won, and compares them to the plays of Plautus and Seneca. A year later, a treatise on poetry describes Shakespeare’s play Richard II as a “well-conceipted tragedy.”

Quotable Shakespeare

Like other plays from the period, Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be read both as stories and as sources for sententiae, passages that became stand-alone proverbs when removed from the play. Beginning in 1600, a group of editors and publishers elevated English plays to a more respectable status by excerpting them in printed literary anthologies and printing “commonplace markers” (modern-day quotation marks) alongside extractable sayings in the plays themselves. These markers would indicate passages that readers could then copy into their own commonplace books, personalized collections of proverbs.

On the Stage at the Globe

Shakespeare, The Poet

Today we remember Shakespeare as the greatest PLAYWRIGHT of all time; however, in his own lifetime, he was equally revered as a POET. His first two books of poetry, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, were reprinted many times. In fact, they were more popular in print than any of Shakespeare’s plays. Many of the earliest literary critics and anthologists of English-language verse cite these two narrative poems because of their exemplary lines. Like his plays, his poems were sold unbound or in flimsy, paper bindings, making their survival unlikely unless an early owner bound them up with other booklets in sturdy bindings.

A Range of Poems

Shakespeare’s earliest publication, and by far the best-selling work in his lifetime, was the nearly 1200-line poem Venus and Adonis (1593). Because of its popularity, other printed poems soon followed. Lucrece was published in 1594 to great acclaim. His name appeared on the title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) despite the fact that only a handful of the poems were by him. “The Phoenix and the Turtle” appeared in 1601, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609.

Shakespeare, The Man

An abundance of administrative documents provide important details of Shakespeare’s economic and social status: he had a coat of arms, he was accorded “gentleman” status, he loaned money, he invested in real estate, his family lived in a big house in Stratford-upon-Avon, he moved around in London, and he bequeathed his assets to family, friends, and the poor.

Shakespeare’s personal papers do not survive, which is frustrating, but not surprising. Personal papers survived only if they became part of institutional or aristocratic archives. Shakespeare’s last direct descendant died in 1670—at which point his house, New Place, was sold. It wasn’t until the 18th century that people began to value and romanticize the personal relics of famous authors.

Shakespeare Buys A House

Shakespeare purchased New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford-upon-Avon, from William Underhill in 1597.

Shortly after the sale, Underhill was poisoned to death by his eldest son, Fulke, who was hanged in 1599 after being prosecuted for the crime. Fulke’s estates reverted to the crown until his brother, Hercules, came of legal age in 1602. In that year, Hercules confirmed the sale of New Place to Shakespeare; Shakespeare was probably motivated to create a new agreement to protect his investment. The three official copies of this 1602 agreement are reunited here for the first time in over 400 years.

Shakespeare, The Icon

Shakespeare died 400 years ago, but today more people than ever KNOW HIS NAME, and his plays are among the best-selling works of all time. Shakespeare’s ENDURING FAME was predicted by one of his playwriting friends, Ben Jonson. After Shakespeare’s death, Jonson described him as “a monument without a tomb” and proclaimed that “he was not of an age but for all time!” The first edition of his collected plays in 1623, known as the First Folio, solidified this legacy, and original copies are considered to be some of the most valuable books in the world.

Shakespeare Remembered

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52. He was buried two days later in Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon.

The epitaph on his monument, written soon after, refers to him as a writer whose wit exceeds that of all living writers: “all that he hath writ / leaves living art but page unto his wit.” Friends and colleagues acknowledged the loss of the great writer in their own epitaphs and elegies, contributing to his posthumous role as a literary icon.