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 20th century.
You can consult some of the articles and published research produced by this project on the News and Announcements page. There is also a select bibliography of Shakespeare memorialisation-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 Shakespeare website 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 was Co-Investigator for the Australian Research Council grant, ‘Monumental Shakespeare’, with Philip Mead, Principal Investigator. Gordon is Professor of English at King’s College London and director of the London Shakespeare Centre. He is a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3E, and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and early modern drama. With Philip Mead, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan, he is co-author of Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (Bloomsbury Arden, 2018).
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.
Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson
University of Brighton.
Ailsa Grant Ferguson is Principal Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. She was research associate at King’s College London for the ‘Monumental Shakespeare’ project. Her work for the project led to a monograph, The Shakespeare Hut: A Story of Memory, Performance and Identity, 1916-1923 (Bloomsbury Arden, 2019). Her first monograph, Shakespeare, Cinema, Counterculture was published by Routledge in 2016, and she has co-edited Shakespeare and Gender with Kate Aughterson (Bloomsbury Arden, 2020).
a.grantferguson@brighton.ac.uk
Dr Anna Kamaralli
University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, Australia.
Anna Kamaralli’s Shakespeare and the Shrew (2012), explores the performance of Shakespeare’s defiant women throughout history and examines their contemporary relevance to attitudes about unconventional women. Anna is adjunct senior lecturer at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, Australia. She previously held a research position at the University of Western Australia, and has been a Teaching Fellow at the School of English, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She has edited Much Ado About Nothing for the Arden Performance Editions, and her scholarly articles have appeared in Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Bulletin.
https://orlandocreature.wordpress.com