Abstract
‘Curating Will & Jane’ provides an overview of the exhibition, Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity, showed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Fall 2016. Shakespeare and Austen became literary celebrities roughly 200 years after their deaths, and the Will & Jane exhibition tells the story of that process through the display of many and various objects—from porcelain figurines and portraits to advertisements and bobbleheads—that are part of the marketing and cultural dissemination of literary fame. The authors of the article also reflect, as literary-scholars-turned curators, on what they learned about how material culture produces and records celebrity when the objects of study range beyond standard printed artifacts.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay was first published in Eighteenth-Century Life (Duke University Press) in 2016, a few months in advance of our exhibition. Handsomely bound offprints of the essay were also sold, in lieu of an exhibition catalogue, by the Folger Shakespeare Library’s gift shop during the run of our exhibition. We thank editor Cedric Reverand for chaperoning these earlier versions and also for granting permission to update the essay for inclusion in this collection.
- 2.
Attendance was boosted by local and national coverage, including a multi-page illustrated review in the New York Times the day before the opening: ‘Will & Jane, Dynamic Duo of Letters’ (5 August, 2016), C17. The review by Jennifer Schuessler appears online as ‘Lit’s Dynamic Duo, Will and Jane, Shared Path to Pop Stardom’ (4 August, 2016): https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/books/will-jane-two-literary-superheroes-united-in-pop-culture.html.
- 3.
For Austen materials our exhibition relied upon generous loans from Goucher College Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, Jane Austen’s House Museum , the Chawton House Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the Library of Congress and several private collectors. Unless otherwise stated, all of the Shakespeare items mentioned in this article are part of the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
- 4.
For the rise of Shakespeare to the status of literary celebrity, see Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For the parallel story of Austen’s ascendancy, see Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009), and Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
- 5.
Although playwrights played fast and loose with his texts, Shakespeare’s name had been a touchstone for English literary excellence from the opening of the theatres in 1660. Garrick’s promotional skills, however, brought the fervour of Bardolatry to this public image over the course of the Drury Lane manager’s career. Fiona Ritchie’s Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University, 2014) augments Dobson’s study by detailing the impact of women in the early rise of Shakespeare. See also Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012).
- 6.
John Boydell published a mezzotint version of this portrait in 1769, which circulated widely as a celebrity pinup. The Folgers purchased this painting, a copy of Garrick’s first portrait by Gainsborough, for $1000 in 1926. The original was destroyed in a fire at the museum in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1946. An identically sized copy also hangs at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire.
- 7.
See Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
- 8.
Although R. W. Chapman, in Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), assessed the unfinished sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (ca. 1810) as a ‘disappointing scratch’, this diminutive portrait (measuring a mere 4 × 3 inches) is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London as the only ‘authentic’ image of the author (212). For a summary of how the large ‘Rice Portrait of Jane Austen’ as a young girl, despite its strong family provenance and repeated use as a frontispiece since 1884, suddenly became ‘verboten’ in 1948, see Johnson, Austen’s Cults, 44–52, quoted at 50.
- 9.
The watercolour miniature that is based on Cassandra’s sketch and sweetens Jane’s features was created by a Mr. Andrews of Maidenhead in 1869. It sold in December of 2013 at Sotheby’s for £164,500 and remains in private hands.
- 10.
Nicholas Ennos, Jane Austen: A New Revelation (Manchester: Senesino Books, 2013), promotional blurb. For a fuller description of this book, see Janine Barchas’s review, entitled ‘Conspiracy Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery’, on the website of the Vermont chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (henceforth, JASNA): https://janeausteninvermont.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/book-review-nicholas-ennos-jane-austen-a-new-revelation-conspiracy-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery/.
- 11.
Nicholas Rowe, The Works of Mr William Shakespear; in Six Volumes: Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writing of the Author (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), and Jane Austen, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1818). The Austen copy (in original wrappers) was loaned from the A. and H. Burke Collection, Goucher College, Baltimore.
- 12.
We paired a Folger Prattware pomade jar depicting Shakespeare’s house (nineteenth-century ceramic, 10.5 cm) with a silver-trimmed pillbox showing the Steventon Rectory on the lid, borrowed from the A. and H. Burke Collection, Goucher College, Baltimore.
- 13.
William Henry Ireland, ‘Love Letter and Verses to Anne Hathaway’, in Forgeries by William Henry Ireland of Documents Pretended to be in Shakespeare’s Hand, a manuscript, Folger, S.b.157 Cs570, document #6. For an account of this late eighteenth-century literary hoax, see Bernard N. N. Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery (New York: Norton, 1965). The early drafts of Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) reside at the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, Texas.
- 14.
Jon Spence, Becoming Jane Austen (London: Hambledon, 2003).
- 15.
Roach, It, 39.
- 16.
For detailed accounts of these couples and their parallel passion for collecting, see Stephen H. Grant, Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and Juliette Wells, Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (London: Continuum, 2011), especially chapter 2, ‘Alberta H. Burke, Austen Omnivore’.
- 17.
The Burkes’ well-worn and extra-illustrated copy of Geoffrey Keynes’s Jane Austen: A Bibliography (London: Nonesuch, 1929) was borrowed from the A. and H. Burke Collection, Goucher College, Baltimore. The Folgers annotated James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips’s A Calendar of the Shakespearean Rarities, Drawings, & Engravings Formerly Preserved at Hollingbury Copse, near Brighton (London: Longmans, Green, 1891) in precisely the same manner, adding the names and addresses of then-current owners of key pieces that they wanted.
- 18.
Louise West pleaded with members of the Jane Austen Society: ‘While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow … It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!’
- 19.
William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper, 1891), 63.
- 20.
The Stratford mulberry tree that Shakespeare supposedly planted was cut down in 1756, inciting nationwide lament. A local entrepreneur named Thomas Sharp bought the wood and turned it into mementos for tourists. A thriving industry ensued in an impossibly large number of relics claiming to be made from the tree. The Folger owns many ‘mulberry wood’ items, including a range of carved goblets. Serendipitously, during a July 2015 visit to Chawton to give a preview talk about Will & Jane, we found that Jane Austen’s House Museum was selling in its shop the last of the wooden relics (carved acorns and letter openers) made from the two oak trees that Jane Austen is thought to have planted beside the boundary wall of the cottage but which had to be felled in 1986–1987.
- 21.
For an account of the controversy over this lock of Jane Austen’s hair in 1949, see Wells, Everybody’s Jane, at 54–5.
- 22.
The History of Shylock the Jew, and Anthonio the Merchant, with that of Portia and the Three Caskets. Taken from Shakespeare, and Adapted to the Minds of Young Children (London: Printed for the booksellers, 1794).
- 23.
Charles Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare: Designed for the Use of Young Persons (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807).
- 24.
In 1998, Royal Doulton produced a porcelain figurine of ‘Elizabeth Bennet’ (eight inches tall) bearing a remarkable resemblance to Jennifer Ehle. In turn, Franklin Mint in the late 1990s offered a ‘limited edition of 9,500’ porcelain figurines of ‘Emma Woodhouse’. Franklin Mint’s Emma (11 inches) is the spitting image of Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress who played this heroine in a 1996 film. These figurines were borrowed for our exhibition from Joan Doyle, a member of JASNA in Philadelphia, and proudly displayed alongside their Georgian counterparts in Shakespearean roles.
- 25.
The scene occurred in the BBC’s six-part Pride and Prejudice television adaptation, written by screenwriter Andrew Davies and first aired in 1995. The shirt worn by actor Colin Firth and the bonnet worn by actress Jennifer Ehle were rented from Cosprop in London, the original supplier of costumes in 1995.
- 26.
The Shirt received its own press coverage in the form of a tongue-in-cheek announcement in the New York Times (Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Mr Darcy’s Shirt Is Coming to America’, 8 March 2016) and a follow-up spoof in The New Yorker magazine (Sarah Schmelling, ‘The Darcy Shirt, a Tour Rider’, 3 May 2016) that ventriloquized the garment’s own celebrity demands during the exhibition, including the need to be (lightly!) moistened with Derbyshire rainwater at hourly intervals’.
- 27.
Joseph Saunders, Mr Garrick as Steward of the Stratford Jubilee, September, 1769, 16 × 12 inches.
- 28.
‘A List of the Horses Enter’d at the Jubiliee Race, to Run on Shottery Meadow near Stratford-upon-Avon, on Friday the 8th of September, 1769’ (Stratford-on-Avon: J. Keating, 1769).
- 29.
Anonymous print of Mr Garrick delivering his Ode at Drury Lane Theatre on dedicating a building & erecting a Statue to Shakespeare (late eighteenth century). The 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee medallions owned by the Folger remain uncatalogued, but digital image file 6379 in Luna, the Folger’s open-access database, 6379, shows the Jubilee medallion.
- 30.
The Procession at the Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon (1769), engraving, 3.5 × 6.5 inches.
- 31.
For more information about the popular 1770s stage performances of The Jubilee, see Cedric D. Reverand II, ‘Joshua Reynolds, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sarah Siddons, and the Battle of the Tragic Muses’, in An Expanding Universe: The Project of Eighteenth-Century Studies: Essays Commemorating the Career of Jim Springer Borck, ed. Kevin L. Cope and Reverand (Norwalk: AMS Press, 2017), 241–68.
- 32.
Ticket for John Boydell’s Shakespeare Lottery, 1804–1805.
- 33.
According to Jocelyn Harris, in ‘Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture: Shakespeare, Dorothy Jordan, and Elizabeth Bennet’, Sensibilities 42 (2011): 15–44, Austen’s exposure to celebrity culture and Shakespeare in performance also influenced her heroine in Pride and Prejudice . This is a reprint of Harris’s article in a special issue on ‘Shakespeare and Jane Austen’ of Shakespeare 6 (2010): 410–30.
- 34.
Paula Byrne, in Jane Austen and the Theatre (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), observes how ‘Austen’s use of the names Yates and Crawford in the context of her private theatre may well have been noted with amusement by readers familiar with the famous eighteenth-century theatrical dynasties’ that consisted, first, of the tragedienne Mary Anne Yates (1728–1787), often compared to Siddons, and Yates’s husband Richard Yates (1706–1796), who was a popular comedian at Drury Lane; and, second, of Mrs. Ann Crawford (1734–1801), known as the ‘lover of the stage’, and her handsome husband Thomas ‘Billy’ Crawford (1750–1794) (204).
- 35.
Playbill for a performance of Merchant of Venice at Drury Lane on 5 March 1814. The letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, dated 5–8 March 1814, belongs to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
- 36.
Not shown in the nearby illustration are mezzotint by Henry Hoppner Meyer depicting Edmund Kean as Shylock in Merchant of Venice (1800?), 6.25 × 5.25 inches; anonymous stipple engraving of Mrs Crawford in the caracter [sic] of Cleopatra (late eighteenth century), 4.25 × 3.5 inches; and enamel pin of actress Mary Ann Yates as Calista (1777), 1.4 inches.
- 37.
For an account of the manuscript’s discovery and early critical reception, see Brian Southam, ‘Sir Charles Grandison and Jane Austen’s Men’, Persuasions 18 (1996): 74–87. The play manuscript is owned by Chawton House Library.
- 38.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright (Chicago: Morrill, Higgins, 1892). Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, n.d. [ca. 1880s]), private collection. Both copies still contain the ex libris of the American Library Association’s War Service Library programme that operated from 1917 to 1920.
- 39.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, in Hearst’s International Magazine (1924), H. Dunscombe Colt Kipling Collection, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
- 40.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Forces Book Club (London: Penguin, April 1943), and Persuasion , Forces Book Club (London: Penguin, June 1943). William Shakespeare, Henry V, was among the 1322 titles of the American Armed Services Editions printed between 1943 and 1946. It was reprinted, in virtually identical format, as an ASE revival edition by Dover Publications in 2002 and distributed to active troops by the Legacy Project, Washington, DC.
- 41.
In Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Douglas Lanier argues that ‘kitsch ought to be taken seriously as an object of study’ because it breaks down the division between high- and low-brow cultures (3).
- 42.
Tinselled prints refer to small engravings decorated with pieces of brightly coloured tinsel or paste jewellery, glued on as a craft activity. In a celebrity pinup, tinselling adds a three-dimensional as well as multicoloured look to costumes and props.
- 43.
Examples included: Laurence Olivier (as Darcy and Hamlet); Colin Firth (Darcy and Lord Wessex); Dame Judy Dench (Lady Catherine and Queen Elizabeth I); Emma Thompson (Elinor and Beatrice); Gwyneth Paltrow (Emma and Juliet); and Kate Winslet (Marianne and Ophelia).
- 44.
See Grant, Collecting Shakespeare, at 77, for a much longer list of former celebrity owners of association copies collected by the Folgers.
- 45.
James Cartwright Cross, The History, Murders, Life, and Death of Macbeth: and a Full Description of the Scenery Action, Choruses, and Characters of the Ballet of Music and Action, of that Name, as Performed … at the Royal Circus, St. George’s Fields, London (London: Stevens, 1809). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries web series can be viewed at: http://www.pemberleydigital.com/the-lizzie-bennet-diaries/.
- 46.
Francis Godolphin Waldron, The Virgin Queen, a Drama in Five Acts; Attempted as a Sequel to Shakespeare’s Tempest (London: Printed for the author, 1797).
- 47.
Jo Baker’s Longbourn, A Novel was published in 2013, while Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was first performed in 1966.
- 48.
Not pictured here are Macbeth: A Burlesque. By a Lover of Fun ([London], 1866), and The Rise and Fall of Richard III; A New Front to An Old Dicky. A Richardsonian Burlesque (London, ca. 1870).
- 49.
See Linda Berdoll, Mr Darcy Takes a Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues (Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2004), or Arielle Eckstut and Elfrida Drummond, Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2004).
- 50.
Statement from UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, quoted in ABC News article on 2 August 2013: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2013/08/kelly-clarkson-blocked-from-taking-jane-austens-ring-from-uk/.
- 51.
For our reflections on how the exhibition’s coupling of Shakespeare and Austen proved, in the end, more than the sum of its parts, see our short opinion piece in The Washington Post: Barchas and Straub, ‘Will & Jane: Making Literary Celebrity Work for the Humanities’, 27 October 2016. Online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/10/27/will-jane-making-celebrity-work-for-the-humanities/?utm_term=.7bf2a8f10ecc. The article also contains a splendid photo of one of the DC buses covered with the exhibition logo.
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Barchas, J., Straub, K. (2019). Curating Will & Jane. In: Cano, M., García-Periago, R. (eds) Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25689-0_16
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