Enfilade

From Oxford UP:

Sally Barnden, Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, and Kirsten Tambling, eds., Shakespeare’s Afterlife in the Royal Collection: Dynasty, Ideology, and National Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0198923152, $40.

This 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.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction — Sally Barnden, Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, and Kirsten Tambling

1616
1  The ‘Disappointment’ of Charles I’s Shakespeare Second Folio — Gordon McMullan

1700
2  Henry V and Early Hanoverian Self-Fashioning — Emrys Jones
3  ‘A Wild and Unruly Youth’ — Kate Retford
4  Moral Painting — Shormishtha Panja
5  David Garrick and the President’s Chair — Anna Myers
6  Queen Charlotte and the Royal Narratives of Boydell’s Shakespeare Prints — Rosie Dias
7  George III and the Other ‘Mad King’ — Arthur Burns
8  Disability and Mutable Spectatorship — Essaka Joshua
9  Fake and Authentic Shakespeare — Fiona Ritchie

1800
10  ‘Well-Authenticated Blocks’ — Mark Westgarth
11  Why Did George IV Own a Shakespeare First Folio? — Emma Stuart
12  From Performance to Portfolio — Kate Heard
13  Hamlet Disowned — Michael Dobson
14  Princess Victoria and the Cult of Celebrity — Lynne Vallone
15  Shakespeare in the Rubens Room — Eilís Smyth
16  Monument and Montage — Sally Barnden
17  Puck and the Prince of Wales — Gail Marshall
18  Much Ado about Tapestry — Morna O’Neill
19  Disappearances and The Durbar — Vijeta Saini

1900
20  ‘All England in Warm Sepia’: Queen Mary and the Church of the Holy Trinity — Kirsten Tambling
21  Shakespeare in Miniature — Elizabeth Clark Ashby
22  Shashibiya — Eleine Ng-Gagneux
23  Cultural (Dis)inheritance and the Decline of Empire in The Prince’s Choice — Kathryn Vomero Santos

Bibliography