Shakespeare's Afterlife in the Royal Collection

Abstract This unique collection of essays explores a series of objects in the Royal Collection as a means of assessing the interdependent histories of the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife across a sustained historical period. Between the early eighteenth and late twentieth centuries, Shakespeare became established and entrenched as the English national poet. Over the same period, the royal family sought repeatedly to legitimate the monarchy and to demonstrate its centrality to British, and specifically English, nationhood. This volume argues that these two institutions—the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife—were much more closely interwoven than has been realized to date. The twenty-three essays that comprise the volume’s contents map the mutual development over time of the relationship between the royals and Shakespeare—arguably the United Kingdom’s most sustained hegemonic cultural institutions—demonstrating the extent to which each has gained sustained value from association with the other and showing how members of the royal family have individually and collectively constructed their identities and performed their roles by way of Shakespearean models. Each compact essay is inspired by an object in (or formerly in) the Royal Collection and uses that object as a starting point to explore two interconnected questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare?