Gallery Six: The Pantaloon
Shakespeare beautified, appropriated and commemorated
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice
Even when it was the object of careful thought, text ceased to be the driving factor in certain editions of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Instead, Shakespeare’s words have become a vehicle for sumptuous production: for beautiful book design, specially cut type harking back to the earliest printed books, and for striking or beautiful illustration. From visual celebration of the Shakespearean text we merge into a celebration of Shakespeare the writer: a celebration seen also in previous anniversaries of his birth and death, in 1864, 1916 and 1964.
In particular, there were plans for a Shakespeare National Theatre in Bloomsbury to mark the 1916 Tercentenary. War meant the scheme had to be put on hold, but Israel Gollancz, chair of the committee, created the YMCA ‘Shakespeare Hut’ on Gower Street, where Shakespeare’s plays were performed for Anzac troops.
Yet Shakespeare’s popularity was not restricted to the English speaking world; translations of his work were produced across the world, with texts often appropriated and incorporated into local cultures – so much so that Shakespeare was claimed in Germany by Sturm und Drang writers such as Goethe and Schiller, and the world’s first learned Shakespeare society founded in Weimar in 1864.
