Overview

This site is part of a research project about the history and contexts of Shakespeare memorialisation in the early-to-mid twentieth century, in England and Australia. Its original focus was the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1916, in London and Sydney, and the history of the memorialisations that had been planned for those two cities before the outbreak of World War I. The belated memorials of the Sydney Shakespeare monument and England’s National Theatre provided case studies in the strange and far from straightforward history of Shakespeare memorialization and commemoration in the 20thcentury.

You can consult some of the articles and published research produced by this project on the x page. There is also a select bibliography of Shakespeare memorialization-related publications on this page.

The tercentenary gave rise to intricate debates over how to memorialise England’s ‘National Poet’ in the British Isles and across the Empire. The 1916 Tercentenary exemplifies Shakespeare’s perceived value as global cultural capital, a fact exemplified in Israel Gollancz’s famous Book of Homage to Shakespeare, published in 1916. This volume’s ‘557 pages contain 166 tributes to Shakespeare by scholars, novelists, poets, literati, and public figures from [. . .] around the globe’ – the first scholarly expression of the global Shakespeare (Kahn 457).

But the Tercentenary in April 1916 also took place on the eve of the Battle of the Somme and of the Easter Rising in Dublin, and precisely a year after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, which rapidly become a defining moment in the construction of Australian identity. A further collaborative study that explores these wider contexts of Shakespeare commemoration, including the afterlife of some Shakespeare monuments, is currently being written by the members of this project. This transnational study elucidates the role of Shakespeare in upheavals of national identity, including involvement in war, linked to a period of flux where neo-colonialism and imperialism tussled with burgeoning elements of post-colonial identities.

As part of this project we are making available through the Memorialising Shakespearewebsite an interactive database of examples of Shakespeare memorialization and related materials that we have surveyed during our researches. We hope this record of Shakespeare statues, monuments, and other memorials will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the many and various forms that Shakespeare memorialization has taken. We also hope that the interactive functionality of this site will allow it to become an on-going and updatable resource about the ways in which Shakespeare is remembered.

We welcome your responses and contributions.

Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead

Contributors

  • Prof Gordon McMullan
  • King’s College, London.
  • Gordon McMullan holds an Australian Research Council grant, in conjunction with Philip Mead, for the Monumental Shakespeare project. Gordon is Professor of English at King’s College, London, general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, chief editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, and committee member of the London Renaissance Seminar. In 2009, Gordon founded the London Shakespeare Centre. He teaches a Master’s course, jointly with the Globe Theatre, in Shakespeare Studies. With the Norton Shakespeare, Gordon is responsible for the development of a ne~v text for the latest critical editions of Shakespeare’s work.
  • gordon.mcmullan@kcl.ac.uk
  • Prof Philip Mead
  • University of Western Australia, Perth.
  • Philip Mead co-ordinates the Australian Research Council funded project Monumental Shakespeare, jointly with Gordon McMullan. Philip is a Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia, inaugural Chair of Australian Literature, and a member of the 2013 judging panel for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Philip has a longstanding research interest in Shakespearean institutions in Australia.
  • philip.mead@uwa.edu.au

Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson

National Theatre Archive.

Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson is Academic Associate at the National Theatre, London, as its first ever ‘academic in residence’, where she is working on the pre-history of the National Theatre as part of the Monumental Shakespeare’s project, writing a researchers’ guide for the NT’s Archives and providing academic underpinning and research for a major ne~v play. She has taught at the University of Bristol, UK and King’s College London, specialising in Shakespeare and early modern literature.

Her research on Shakespeare has focused on counter-culture (including punk, culture-jamming and the women’s suffrage movement), postmodern culture, public memory and Shakespeare in the First World War. She also works on early modern emblem books in performance and cultural contexts, both contemporary and modern. Her first monograph, Shakespeare, Cinema, Counterculture, will be published by Routledge in 2014.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Email: agrantferguson@nationaltheatre.org.uk

Dr Anna Kamaralli

University of Western Australia, Perth.

Anna Kamaralli’s Shakespeare and the Shre~v (2012), explores the performance of Shakespeare’s defiant women throughout history and examines their contemporary relevance to attitudes about unconventional women. Anna currently holds a research position at the University of Western Australia, and has recently been a Teaching F ello~v at the School 01 English, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Bulletin.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Email: kamarala@tcd.ie

Related Pages

1

2

3

4

5

6

7