Gallery Three: The Lover

In search of the perfect Shakespeare

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow

The first serious scholarship around the texts started to appear in the eighteenth century, with editors such as Nicholas Rowe, Lewis Theobald, William Warburton, Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone attempting to produce ‘clean’ versions. Shakespeare became part of the literary canon. At the same time, his plays were adapted freely for performance purposes and audiences fell in love with his work all over again, thanks to actors such as David Garrick who organised the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford upon Avon in 1769 and built a temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames at his home in Hampton.