Shakespeare in the Royal Collections (ShaRC)

Shakespeare and the royal family have long had a close, interdependent relationship: Shakespeare addresses royal history in numerous plays; engagement with Shakespeare's works has been a consistent element in the biographies of royals since the playwright's death; and Shakespeare has functioned as a vehicle both for the development of royal ideology and for the education of young royals. A key dimension of this history has been the inclusion of Shakespeare-related items - manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, performance records, printed books, photographs and other objects - in the Royal Collections (RC). Following the RCs' involvement in the Shakespeare Quatercentenary of 2016, it became clear that the extent of the RCs' Shakespeare-related holdings was much more substantial than had been realised by scholars; that there has been limited public access to these holdings to date; that the materials have been minimally, and certainly not systematically, researched; and that there is considerable scope for increased understanding of the history of Shakespeare and of the monarchy as key, mutually sustaining symbols of national identity.

This project seeks to analyse the place of Shakespeare in the RC by investigating the holdings and the stories they tell, defining the term 'Shakespeare-related' in the contexts and history of the collection, undertaking interdisciplinary research into the holdings and creating substantially enhanced public access to those holdings by way of a set of digitised, annotated images on a dedicated website. The project will contribute to the democratisation of the collection by substantially increasing both scholarly and public understanding of royal interaction with Shakespeare. Our focus is the mutually enhancing nature of the relationship - the extent to which the idea of monarchy and the role of the royal family in British culture has been legitimated by association with Shakespeare and Shakespeare's cultural status has been entrenched through association with the royal family. Our central research question, then, is twofold: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare?

In answering these key questions, and taking the Shakespeare-related holdings in the RC as our primary source of evidence, we will show how royal patronage, attendance and participation have influenced Shakespearean performance history and the development of public theatre in Britain; how the deployment of Shakespearean performance has contributed to royal legitimation; how royal performances of Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related art reclaim and re-enact earlier moments in royal history; how the Shakespeare-related materials show the influence of royal patronage on the cultural role and status of Shakespeare; what the materials in the collection reveal about the negotiation of royal identities by way of Shakespearean associations; and how the collection might function as a performance archive. In the process, the project offers a unique, and valuably disorientating, opportunity, by incorporating into the field of study objects that would normally be neglected in the focus on the many works by major artists that form the most publicly visible elements in the collection. We will offer insight into the logic and ideological deployment of the Shakespeare-related holdings and thus to gain understanding of the nature of the RC as a whole, leading in turn to valuable enhancements in the theoretical understanding of the nature and function of collecting.

We will increase public understanding of these materials and the issues they raise across the UK and internationally by way of a website; 3D digital visualisations; a series of scholarly publications, talks, lectures and colloquia; a public exhibition; a TV documentary; and educational materials directed to students in schools, FE colleges and universities.

The project aims to have impact on a range of publics by encouraging them to reflect critically on the relationship across time between Shakespeare and the royal family and on the mutual benefits for both in the development of their cultural status in the UK - that is, on the extent to which the phenomenon known as 'Shakespeare' has achieved its culturally hegemonic status by way of royal patronage and to which the royal family in turn has deployed Shakespeare both for identity-construction and as a means to sustain the ideology of monarchy and the claim for dynastic continuity. We will achieve this impact by working with two project partners - the Royal Collections Trust and Shakespeare's Globe - to create a series of public-facing outputs, including an interactive website, a set of 3D digital visualisations, a TV documentary and an exhibition showcasing the outcomes of the project.

The project will benefit the cultural sector through the value it adds to Globe Exhibition, and thus to the visitor experience at the Globe, and, above all, to the Royal Collections. One of the primary expectations of the Royal Librarian when he was appointed in 2014 was that he would work to increase public access to, and in general to democratise, the Royal Archives and Royal Collections, and our project is designed overtly to assist with this. We will do so by way of the exhibition and, in a sustained way, the website, which will provide a publicly accessible database of all the Shakespeare-related holdings in the RC and will include the creation of a set of innovative 3D visualisations of key performance spaces at Windsor Castle designed to make visible the changes in context across time for royal engagement with, and performance of, Shakespeare's works.

Through the website we also seek to ensure that our research has tangible educational value - in particular, we will seek to work with the Association of London Colleges and the English Association's Transition Group to create materials designed for FE students and for school students preparing for the EPQ - and that it provides the best possible platform for further research by others - not only RC personnel and academics but also independent researchers - into the materials; our partnership with the RC will ensure that the website will be sustained indefinitely.

Project partner Shakespeare's Globe will host and co-curate with the team an exhibition in autumn 2021 of selected items from the Shakespeare-related holdings in the RC, to be held in the redesigned and newly reopened Globe Exhibition space. The show will be curated wth two particular aims: one, so as to have a significant impact on visitors' understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare and the royal family and on the effects of this relationship on British cultural history; two, so as to be reproducible for an American audience if, as we hope, it transfers to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, after the period of the award. The Globe has approximately a million visitors every year, a quarter of whom visit the Exhibition, and Mark Sullivan, project partner, is confident that visits to the Exhibition will increase by up to 100% when it is relaunched; thus our exhibition can be expected to have very substantial six-figure footfall over its three months' duration.

The independent producer Steven Clarke, whose credits include James Shapiro's 'The King and the Playwright' documentaries for the BBC, will seek to make a major TV documentary expressing the results of our investigations, directed to a wide and diverse public both in the UK and in other countries and designed to avoid the uncritical tendency of mainstream royal documentaries. Clarke is highly confident that the BBC or Channel 4 will be keen to commission a programme or programmes based on our research, which would bring it to the attention of very diverse and substantive audiences.