Shakespeare's Afterlife in the Royal Collection

This unique collection of essays and images explores a series of objects in the Royal Collection as a means of assessing the interrelated histories of the British royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife across four centuries. Between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the late twentieth, Shakespeare became entrenched as the English national poet. Over the same period, the monarchy sought repeatedly to demonstrate its centrality to British nationhood.
By way of close analysis of a selection of objects from the Royal Collection, this volume argues that the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife were far more closely interwoven than has
previously been realized. The chapters map the mutual development over time of the relationship between members of the British royal family and Shakespeare, demonstrating the extent to which each has gained sustained value from association with the other and showing how members of the royal family have individually and collectively constructed their identities and performed their roles by way of Shakespearean models. Each chapter is inspired by an object in (or formerly
in) the Royal Collection and explores two interconnected questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? The chapters range across the
fields of art, theatre history, literary criticism, literary history, court studies and cultural history, showing how the shared history of Shakespeare and the royal family has been cultivated across media and across disciplines.

Author Biography

Sally Barnden (BA York, MA, and PhD King’s College London) is a Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea University, and was a postdoctoral research associate for ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection.’ She is the author of Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance (Cambridge, 2020) and Shakespeare and the Royal Actor (Oxford, 2024). Gordon McMullan (BA Birmingham, MA Kansas, DPhil Oxford) is a Professor of English at King’s
College London, where he has worked since 1995; prior to that he was a lecturer in English at Newcastle University. He has held fellowships in the United States, Australia, and Denmark; he has published in the fields of
Shakespeare, early modern drama, late-life creativity, and environmental humanities; and in 2016 he received the Globe Theatre’s Sam Wanamaker Award for his creation and direction of Shakespeare400, London’s consortium marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary. He was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’ (2018-22). Kate Retford (BA, MA, and PhD University of Warwick) is a Professor of History of Art and Head of the School of Historical
Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on gender, portraiture, and the country house. Her research has been funded by the Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art, the AHRC, the British Academy, and, most recently, the Leverhulme Trust. Her recent publications include The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017) and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019). Kirsten Tambling completed her PhD in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London on the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth. She
was a postdoctoral research associate for ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’, and subsequently Associate Lecturer on the Curating the Art Museum programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has worked in various
museums and collections, including the Royal Collection Trust and Watts Gallery, where she was co-curator of the exhibition James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius (2018). She has published articles on eighteenth-century art, the intersection of art and psychiatry and the history of collections.