Rare Books @ NLS

Our Shakespeare exhibition has finished, but it still lives on in our Digital Gallery in the form of two different features.

Shakespeare Collected allows you to explore the collectors and collections we celebrated in our exhibition, through text, films, and images. You can also follow in the footsteps of the collector James Halliwell-Phillipps and build your own Shakespeare scrapbook, to be downloaded or shared. The scrapbook feature is also available as an app free from the Apple app store, with an Android version soon to follow.

The Showcase in Shakespeare Collected Showcase contains a selection of fully-digitized books and manuscripts from those displayed in the exhibition. You can read early editions of Shakespeare plays, including quarto playbooks and extracts from the First Folio of 1623. Some were annotated by editors and others used as prompt copies in 17th-century theatres. You can also see the Shakespeare scrapbook created by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps which inspired our Shakespeare scrapbook activity – we hope it will inspire you to create your own scrapbook too.

Getting Started with Shakespeare: Exploring Scenes and Sonnets is a resource aimed at primary and secondary schools, with lesson plans, images and interactive resources to introduce children to Shakespeare and help them get creative with art, drama and writing.

We hope visitors to our Digital Gallery will look at both of these features – writers of all ages can experiment with our interactive sonnets, and teachers and pupils can discover how Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print, and share scrapbooks.

Of course Shakespeare lives on in performance: I was interested to see that this week Edinburgh Theatre Arts is presenting the world premiere of a play which was displayed in our exhibition – Macbeth In Scots, using the modern translation by R.C.L. Lorimer.

I thought it would be appropriate to mark World Book Day with some quotations from our exhibition Beyond Macbeth in praise of books.

William Drummond is one of my favourite collectors – his motivation in building his collection seems to have been his love of reading all kinds of literature. He wrote two essays about libraries. The first is in the persona of the library of Edinburgh University, to which he donated a substantial part of his own personal library in 1626. In ‘Bibliotheca Edinburgena Lectori‘ (’The Edinburgh Library to the Reader’), he says

‘ Books have that strange Quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest Matter, they out-last Brass, Iron, and Marble; and tho’ their Habitations and Walls, by uncivil Hands, be many Times overthrown; and they themselves, by foreign Force, be turned Prisoners, yet do they often, as their Authors, keep their Givers Names; seeming rather to change Places and Masters, than to suffer a full Ruine and total Wrack.’

Continue reading On World Book Day: in praise of books

Until Sunday January 8th, you can see original editions of both the King James Bible of 1611 and the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays from 1623 on display at NLS – not quite side by side, but close enough to compare, in their two separate exhibitions. The King James Bible is at the centre of our Treasures display, which Anette blogged about in November, and which will close on Sunday, and the First Folio is in our Beyond Macbeth exhibition, which runs until the end of April. Both are surrounded by other early editions – the translations which preceded and rivalled the King James Bible, and the quarto playbooks in which individual plays were published.

It’s very interesting to compare the circumstances under which the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare were published in early modern Britain, and the similarities and differences in the appearance of the final printed volumes. A whole book could be written about this subject, but in this blog entry I just want to mention a couple of things which strike me – one way in which they are similar and one in which they are very different. Continue reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible

Our new exhibition Beyond Macbeth: Shakespeare in Scottish Collections is now open!

This exhibition is a collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, showcasing the two libraries’ world-class collections of early editions of Shakespeare’s plays, other early modern drama, and manuscripts relating to the study of Shakespeare. 

On display are the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623, and over 30 Quartos – the small early editions of the plays. You can also see manuscripts and other playbooks from the age of Shakespeare, and a range of other books and manuscripts showing the different ways in which people have edited, appropriated, and responded to the playwright over the centuries – including a special section on Scotland and Shakespeare.

At the heart of this exhibition are the stories of the people who brought these collections together over four hundred years -

• William Drummond of Hawthornden, Shakespeare’s contemporary, who provides us with a rare opportunity to see how Shakespeare’s earliest admirers responded to his plays
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Bute family, aristocrats whose collection shows the rise of Shakespeare’s cultural status in the 18th century – from a playwright whose plays were popular but adapted and criticized to a literary giant, early editions of whose plays were ornaments of a bibliophile’s library
• James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, an archetypal Victorian antiquarian, whose passion for discovering as much as possible about the life and times of Shakespeare led him to amass a huge array of Shakespeariana, and who donated a substantial collection to the Library of Edinburgh University
• John Dover Wilson, 20th-century academic, whose passion for Shakespeare led him not only to pursue his own scholarly research, but to share his knowledge with the vast array of correspondents from actors to politicians who wrote to him on the subject.

The exhibition runs until April 29th and is free. Read more on our exhibition webpage.

I hope to blog some more about the exhibition and the items in it during its run, but meanwhile I have to thank my co-curator, James Loxley, of the University English Literature department, and the staff of the University Library for all their help with this exhibition. And of course the Arts and Humanities  Research Council, for their generous funding.