Shakespeare puts all the world on stage

THE PREMISE of Shakespeare: Staging the World, an exhibition at the British Museum until the end of November, is to move the playwright into his historical moment. Through the display of maps, clothing and other objects from his world, the exhibition explores the influences on Shakespeare’s imagination and looks at how his work shaped the Elizabethan world view.

One of the initial items on display is the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Produced seven years after his death, the publication of his plays in folio form was a vital mechanism through which he entered the literary canon. It was the moment at which, the exhibition tells us, “texts originally prepared for stage performance were, at a stroke, converted into literary texts”. After that, the exhibition discards the written word and plunges into history.

The first stop is London’s Bankside, the site of the Globe and Swan theatres where Shakespeare made his mark in the 1590s. The exhibition brings to life the textures, sights and sounds of Elizabethan London: cutlery and tobacco pipes from here suggest the eating, drinking and smoking of theatre-goers.

A rapier and dagger, found in the Thames, opens up myriad connections. The Southbank was a dangerous area and Shakespeare himself was accused of assault outside the Swan in 1596. The display evokes the street-fighting scenes in plays such as Romeo and Juliet. The role of the rapier and dagger as a fashion accessory in Elizabethan England is also stressed.

Other objects are similarly illuminating. The politics of clothing is illustrated by a wool cap from the late 16th century. Clothing was highly regulated and used as a signifier of social standing. During the 1590s every male aged six and over who was not a gentleman had to wear such a hat, so virtually all of the groundlings who paid a penny to attend plays in the Globe would have worn one.

Thus when, in Coriolanus, the people throw their caps in the air in the fourth act, the play, ostensibly about Rome, is rooted in contemporary London.

Shakespeare was writing in a highly charged political climate when ideas about nationhood were being debated and formed. The exhibition shows how he fed into the dominant narrative of England as a protestant, Tudor nation developing under Elizabeth I. Shakespeare made his name through his medieval history plays of the 1590s – the tragedies came later – and Richard III was an example of how a play could act as a narrative of history.

His portrayal of the last English monarch of the Plantagenet line as a villain history, fitted Tudor propaganda, while defining how he was judged by subsequent generations.

At that time England was becoming a world power in exploration, and ideas of nationhood were being formed in relation to a growing global awareness and sense of imperial identity.

Maps played a crucial role in England’s imagining of itself. The exhibition contains the Molyneux globes, the first English printed globes, dating from 1592, which illustrate Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1577 and other voyages made by English explorers. Christopher Saxton’s landmark Atlas of England and Wales (1579), one of the earliest modern mapsalso features, while Sheldon’s tapestry map of Warwickshire, woven in the 1590s, is on display too.

The tapestry offers a birds-eye view of the areas around Stratford, including the site of the Forest of Arden which features in As You Like It, and shows how Shakespeare’s regional identity was a constant influence on the writer.

Ireland gets a mention in the exhibition, which suggests that the Nine Years’ War between 1594 and 1603 involving Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell, was the backdrop against which many of the history plays were written. One work on display is a 1594 painting of Captain Thomas Lee, who served in Ulster. It is replete with ambivalence – the incongruous image of a bare-legged Lee adorned with the luxurious clothes of the English courtier, hints at a colonial who has gone native. There is also a portrait of the Earl of Essex, the favourite of Elizabeth, who was executed for treason with Lee. Noting that Henry V was written in 1599, the year of Essex’s campaign in Ireland, the exhibition suggests that the play expresses hope for victory in Ireland as it compares Essex to the victorious Henry V returning from France: “In good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword.”

The Irish wars involved mass conscription and the sight of soldiers going or returning from Ireland would have been a familiar one, eliciting deep public sympathy.

The exhibition gives prominence to the role of James I, and the influence of the Scottish king on ideas of national identity. In 1603, when Shakespeare was at the peak of his popularity, James VI of Scotland became James I of England following the death of his cousin Elizabeth, marking the first major step in the union of England and Scotland. The shift in the notion of national identity is captured in Shakespeare’s terminology. While in the history plays he used the term “England”, plays written for the court of James I, such as Cymbeline, use “Britain”. A 1604 design for a proposed British flag, combining the flags of Scotland and England, is also on display.

Shakespeare’s troupe performed for the court on many occasions, and James I’s influence on Macbeth, the “Scottish play” is explored. The themes of witchcraft, conspiracy and regicide reflect the insecurity and paranoia of James I’s reign. He was obsessed with the threat to his position particularly from Catholic forces, something that appeared to have been borne out with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The inclusion of the three witches in Macbeth is a nod to James, who wrote Daemonologie, on witchcraft, in 1597, and presided over the Berwick witch trials. The king’s obsession with proving his lineage and legitimate succession – his mother was the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, beheaded by order of Elizabeth I – is also dealt with in the play and exhibition. John Leslie’s 1573 map of Scotland depicts the genealogy of the Scottish monarchy and shows James I as the heir to Banquo and Fleance. This opens a new perspectives on Shakespeare’s inclusion of the characters of Banquo and Fleance in Macbeth — the witches’ premonition that Banquo’s descendants will be king can be seen as a way of allaying concerns about James’ legitimacy.

The exhibition ends with The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, set on an imaginary island in the New World. It has a curious sense of placelessness as it explores the cultural encounters between Europeans and the unknown “other”.

But as the exhibition makes us remember, The Tempest, for all its geographic wanderings, was ultimately performed in the aptly-named Globe in London. His final play, like no other, reminds us that Shakespeare’s achievement was to allow theatre-goers to forge ideas about the wider world.