Memorials to William Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

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  Memorials to William Shakespeare began appearing within a few years of his death in 1616, and by the twentieth century they had spread across six continents. A bust in a small English church, a statue in the middle of New York's Central Park, a bronze figure bowing in Ballarat, Australia. Each one tells a slightly different story about who Shakespeare was and what he meant to the era that raised him up.

  Why does a playwright dead for four centuries still command bronze and marble from sculptors around the world? What do the choices made by each generation, the pose chosen, the characters grouped at the base, the quotes inscribed on the pedestal, reveal about the people doing the commemorating? And how did the erection of a statue in Central Park in 1872 embarrass the entire city of London into action?

  Those are the threads this documentary will follow, from a wall-mounted bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, to a tin statue in Ontario, Canada.

• 2. The First Monument

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  Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon holds the earliest known memorial to Shakespeare, a funerary monument mounted on a wall directly above his grave. The exact date of its construction is uncertain, but it must have been completed between Shakespeare's death in 1616 and 1623, when the First Folio of his works mentioned it in print.

  The sculptor was Gerard Johnson. His monument features a bust of the poet holding a quill pen in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, with both arms resting on a cushion. Above the bust sits the Shakespeare family coat of arms. On either side of the coat of arms stand two allegorical figures: one representing Labour, carrying a spade, the other representing Rest, holding a torch and a skull.

  The skull is easy to read as a conventional memento mori. But the combination of Labour and Rest flanking a playwright's family crest carries its own specific weight. This was not merely a civic monument. It was a claim about the dignity of literary work, placed inside a church where Shakespeare himself had been baptised. The same church where he was baptised is the church where his monument now stands, a pairing that gave the memorial a biographical completeness no later statue could replicate.

• 3. Poets' Corner and the Shakespeare Ladies Club

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  William Kent designed the statue that now stands in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, and sculptor Peter Scheemakers carried the design into marble, installing the finished work in 1740. Funding came from several directions, including Lord Burlington and Alexander Pope. But some of the most energetic fundraising was done by the Shakespeare Ladies Club.

  The club organised at least two benefit performances to raise money for the project. On the 28th of April 1738, they staged Julius Caesar at Drury Lane. The following year, on the 10th of April 1739, they held a performance of Hamlet at Covent Garden. Together these events helped make the monument possible.

  Kent's design shows Shakespeare leaning on books and pointing to a scroll. The scroll carries a slightly misquoted version of Prospero's lines from The Tempest, the passage about the globe dissolving to leave not a wrack behind. The pedestal features carved heads thought to represent Queen Elizabeth I, Henry V, and Richard III. The Abbey statue proved influential enough that a variant of Kent's design was installed in a Glasgow theatre in 1764, a monument now held by the Theatre Royal in Dunlop Street.

• 4. David Garrick's Private Temple

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  In 1757 the English actor David Garrick commissioned a marble statue of Shakespeare from the French sculptor Louis-Francois Roubiliac for a Palladian Temple to Shakespeare at Hampton. Garrick himself is thought to have posed for the statue. When he died, he bequeathed it, along with his books, to the British Museum in 1779. In 2005 it was transferred to the British Library.

  Garrick also commissioned Roubiliac to produce a bust of the poet for his Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1769. That bust is now held by the Garrick Club in London.

  In 1788 a different kind of commission filled the exterior wall of John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery building. The architect George Dance the Younger placed there Thomas Banks's sculpture Shakespeare attended by Painting and Poetry, for which Banks was paid 500 guineas. The work showed Shakespeare reclining against a rock, positioned between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting. A panelled pedestal beneath it carried a quotation from Hamlet: "He was a Man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again". After Boydell's building was demolished, the monument was relocated to the garden of New Place in Stratford.

• 5. The Embarrassment of Central Park

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  New York City's Central Park statue of Shakespeare was commissioned in 1864, as a celebration of the tricentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1564. Funds were raised by a performance of Julius Caesar in which Edwin Booth played the lead role, with John Wilkes Booth playing Mark Antony. The statue itself was designed by John Quincy Adams Ward and erected in 1872. In 1873 commissioners proposed that the Mall become a designated home for sculpture, and the statue was moved there.

  The erection of the New York statue placed London in an awkward position. With the removal of Banks's sculpture from its original building to New Place in 1871, London had no outdoor public memorial to Shakespeare. The appearance of the Central Park monument made that gap particularly glaring. In 1874 the financier Baron Albert Grant responded by installing a fountain with a marble statue of Shakespeare at its centre in the gardens of Leicester Square. Sculpted by Giovanni Fontana, it was modelled directly on Scheemakers's Poets' Corner monument.

  The replica in Leicester Square was not the only echo of the Poets' Corner design to appear in these decades. The Scheemakers original had already inspired the Glasgow variant of 1764. The pattern of one monument seeding another across cities and centuries is one of the most consistent features of Shakespeare commemoration.

• 6. The Gower Monument and National Identity

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  A committee formed in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1877 with the goal of erecting a memorial to Shakespeare on land donated by the bank of the Avon, within sight of the church where Shakespeare was buried. The result was the Gower Monument, unveiled in 1888, in Stratford's Bancroft Gardens.

  Lord Ronald Gower created the monument. It shows Shakespeare seated on a tall pedestal, with four characters from his plays ranged at ground level around the base: Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Prince Hal, and Falstaff. The grouping was deliberate. Each figure stood for a different mode of Shakespeare's work: Hamlet for Philosophy, Lady Macbeth for Tragedy, Prince Hal for History, and Falstaff for Comedy. The design treated Shakespeare not as a historical figure but as a container for everything the Victorian age valued in literature.

  By the nineteenth century Shakespeare's reputation had advanced to what some described as bardolatry. In 1888 a statue also appeared on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, designed by Paul Fournier, evidence that the drive to commemorate him had moved beyond the English-speaking world. The same year, the large seated statue by William Ordway Partridge was unveiled in Lincoln Park, Chicago.

• 7. Southwark and Sydney

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  Southwark Cathedral in London held a specific claim to Shakespeare that Westminster Abbey could not match: it was his parish church when he lived near the Globe Theatre, and it is also the burial place of his brother Edmund, along with other Elizabethan actors and playwrights. A recumbent statue of Shakespeare, created by Henry McCarthy in 1912, was placed in a niche carved with images of Elizabethan Southwark, depicting the Globe, Winchester Palace, and the tower of the church. An elaborate stained glass window depicting Shakespearean characters was also created. A bomb blast in World War II destroyed the original window, but it was replaced in 1954.

  In Sydney, Australia, a memorial was erected in 1926, designed by Sir Bertram MacKennal. It was commissioned by Henry Gullett, a former president of the Shakespeare Society of New South Wales, who died on the 4th of August 1914. His daughter Lucy Gullett ensured the commission was carried out using a bequest from her father's estate. The memorial depicts Shakespeare at the top and five of his characters around the base: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet embracing, Portia, and Falstaff. The statue stands in Shakespeare Place, between the Mitchell Library and the Royal Botanic Gardens. In 1959 it was repositioned to make way for the Cahill Expressway.

  In Denmark, a memorial was commissioned to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the publication of Hamlet in 1603. Designer Louis Hasselriis created the statue, funded by public subscription and erected in Elsinore, paired with a separate sculpture of Hamlet himself.

• 8. Ballarat, Philadelphia, Ontario

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  The project to build a Shakespeare statue in Ballarat, Australia, began in 1889 but was not completed until 1960. Financial problems shelved the project repeatedly. Private donations eventually raised enough to commission a bronze from Andor Meszaros, an Australian artist originally from Hungary. The statue shows Shakespeare bowing, as if at the curtain call of a performance.

  Philadelphia's memorial at Logan Circle, also dating to 1926, took a different approach entirely. Designed by Alexander Stirling Calder, it does not depict Shakespeare at all. Instead it pairs two characters: Touchstone the jester from As You Like It, representing comedy, and Hamlet, representing tragedy. Touchstone is shown lounging, head tilted in laughter, feet hanging over the pedestal top, his left arm resting on Hamlet's legs. Hamlet sits brooding, a knife dangling over Touchstone's body. The opening lines of the All the world's a stage speech from As You Like It are inscribed on the pedestal beneath them.

  In Stratford, Ontario, Canada, a tin statue stands in the gardens outside the Festival Theatre, the principal venue of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which runs every year from April to November. Between 1970 and 1993 the Bank of England placed an image of the Poets' Corner statue on the reverse of Series D twenty-pound notes, paired with an engraving of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. A playwright's face on a banknote, a bowing figure in bronze in Ballarat, a jester lounging on a Philadelphia pedestal: each iteration of the memorial impulse landed on something slightly different.