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To generalise wildly, most of us can imagine what a Shakespeare play looked like 400 years ago – breeches, ruffs, dudes dressed as chicks. And anybody who goes to the theatre in 2016 knows what one looks like now. But in between?
This smart new exhibition at the British Library aims to shed some light on the reality of Shakespeare’s four century-plus hold on our imagination, which it notionally does by focusing on ten key performances over the years.
It doesn’t achieve its goal particularly literally – there’s very little specific documentation of individual theatre productions until the twentieth century. The exhibition springs into life at the end with rooms dedicated to Peter Brook’s game-changing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Mark Rylance’s game-restoring all-male ‘Twelfth Night’ and the Wooster Group’s avant-garde riff on ‘Hamlet’. Before that, we get a lot of books and letters (this is a library, after all) documenting themes and milestones: the history of Shakespeare plays abroad, the history of women in Shakespeare plays, the history of black actors in Shakespeare plays.
I often caught myself daydreaming about what a more spectacular, in-depth V&A version of this show might look like. But its wealth of lively documentation does much to fill in the blanks in the Bard’s history, from weird seventeenth-century German versions of his work to the faked ‘lost’ play ‘Vortigern’. It may be overwhelmingly dependent on the written word, but perhaps that’s appropriate for the greatest writer in the English language. And it’s hard to think anyone with any sense of human history won’t get a thrill when they’re confronted with one of the legendary 1623 folios of his work, surely one of the more important books ever created.