Shakespeare as Man and Monument in Two London Museum Exhibitions: Theatricality and the Interplay of Subject and Object in the National Portrait Gallery’s Searching for Shakespeare (2006) and the British Museum’s Shakespeare: Staging the World (2012)

Abstract

The National Portrait Gallery’s Searching for Shakespeare in 2006¹ and Shakespeare: Staging the World at the British Museum in London in 2012,² invited visitors to make connections between surviving records of early modern material culture and the regard for and use of Shakespeare today. Each required the visitor to bring previous knowledge and past experience to bear, along with a willingness to create and acknowledge new layers of understanding prompted by these exhibitions. Each used very different curatorial strategies to skirt potentially dangerous receptive implications. Because this article’s main interests are in the areas of overlap between artifact and performance, the greater weight of attention below falls to the exhibition at the British Museum.