In this guest post, Erica Fudge helps us celebrate William Shakespeare’s birthday by exploring the vast array of library resources that keep his works and legacy alive.
William Shakespeare’s actual date of birth is not known but the allocation of 23 April is a reflection of the date of his baptism. The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon shows that this took place in on 26 April 1564. It was usual practice for a baptism to come very soon after birth, so 23 April is a good estimate. This choice of date also serves another purpose – 23 April is the feast day of St George, the patron saint of England. So, the fact that Shakespeare was perhaps born on that date seems to cement his place as the ‘national poet’ of England.
Studying Shakespeare
In England and far beyond, Shakespeare’s plays are a staple part of the education system, at school and university level. Library shelves are full of books about his works. In recent years, publications by Shakespeare critics from across the globe are more easily accessible than ever: ebooks make current scholarship available at the click of a laptop button. And the ‘Shakespeare Industry,’ as it is often known, produces a huge amount of work. A quick search for material in English with the word ‘Shakespeare’ in the title since 2020 on the MLA International Bibliography returned 2,299 responses, and a general search for material mentioning Shakespeare since 2020 on Gale Literature, another online collection, threw up 4,553 works, all available to read immediately.
Shakespeare Quarterly (also available online) is one of the leading journals in the field of Shakespeare studies. It is linked to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC which owns 82 of the 235 known copies of the ‘First Folio’ of Shakespeare’s works. This was printed in 1623 and is the original edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, published seven years after his death. In 2020 a copy sold for $8.4 million at Christie’s in New York. The First Folio is crucial to our understanding of Shakespeare, because without it plays like Twelfth Night and Macbeth might have been lost to us. They were printed for the first time in the Folio, despite both being performed around 20 years earlier. A scan of one of the Folger Library’s First Folio' can be read via Early English Books Online (EEBO), a website that gives access to scans of thousands of other texts from the period. Through EEBO the intellectual world in which Shakespeare was writing is made available to us.
Shakespeare on stage
Even as he was writing at a time of burgeoning print culture, Shakespeare was of course writing for the theatre. His plays were created to be performed and not just read, and online resources are enabling us to encounter performances in a way that was just not available to previous generations.
Performances are like critical readings of the plays, and two examples of recent productions of Twelfth Night open up very different interpretations of this comedy about love, mistaken identity, and cross-dressing (a girl, Viola, washes up on a distant shore after a shipwreck and dresses as a boy, Caesario, for most of the play to protect herself). The Globe Theatre production of Twelfth Night from 2012 attempts to reproduce the performance style of the early seventeenth-century when the play was first performed: all the female parts are played by male actors – even that of Viola (who is therefore played by a male actor dressing as a female character who dresses as a boy). The comedy of the original text emerges from this staging in which the apparently heterosexual pairings emerge as something other than that (by the end the boy/girl/boy is betrothed to a man). A very different approach to questions about sexuality is taken by the 2017 National Theatre production of Twelfth Night (one of many Shakespeare productions available through Drama Online - National Theatre Collections). In this the male character Malvolio becomes the female Malvolia, and the comedy focuses on lesbian rather than heterosexual over-reaching. Shakespeare, it seems, has always enabled us to consider how desire works.
Shakespeare on screen
It is not just recordings of staged versions that are now available to us. Film and TV versions open up new possibilities and new meanings as well. In 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the BBC filmed The Hollow Crown. This all-star (Cumberbatch! Hiddleston! Wishaw!) production of eight of Shakespeare’s history plays covered the reigns of Richard II through to Henry VII (so the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries). It reinterpreted the texts through the technological capacities of film. It used close-ups to highlight actors’ responses that might not be so visible in a large theatre; introduced voice overs in place of the theatrical soliloquies that suggested secret thinking quite different from the original; and included battle scenes which had to take place off stage in the theatre (they were much too expensive to perform live). The seven episodes can be found on Box of Broadcasts along with many other film and television productions of Shakespeare’s plays. These include somewhat dated classics like Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, which was partly funded by the war-time government as a morale booster; or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s version of The Taming of the Shrew which used their celebrated and tempestuous relationship to great effect. And then there is also the unlikely, but rather fantastic, appearance of Keanu Reeves in the 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing. Or you might choose to watch The Lion King (either 1994 or 2019 version) which is, of course, a remake of Hamlet.
Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies in the Department of Humanities at Strathclyde. She works in the field of animal studies, and her most recent essay, ‘Aesop’s Vomit’, looks at early modern writers’ concerns that their digestive systems might threaten their status as humans.
