The Relevance of the Major Scottish Collections of Printed Renaissance Drama to the Cultural History and Contemporary Reception of Shakespeare

This project will involve substantial research on the exceptional collections of Shakespearean and early modern drama material held by the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh Library. The research will be undertaken by the Principal Investigator in close collaboration with a Senior Curator in the Rare Books department at the National Library, and will provide the content and thematic structure for a major exhibition to be held at the National Library between November 2011 and February 2012. This exhibition, provisionally entitled 'Making Shakespeare: the Scottish Dimension', will be accessible to both academic and general audiences, and will be accompanied by educational materials for use by school students and their teachers. The research will also underpin a web feature to be launched at the same time, hosted indefinitely on NLS's open access website, which will allow visitors to browse digital copies of some items.

The research will be guided by four related principles. We aim to develop and deepen our understanding of the significance of particular items in the libraries' holdings and the histories of the various individual collections that make up those holdings. We are also seeking to understand the activities and attitudes of the collectors. Thirdly, we will use the fruits of these investigations to illuminate the processes by which the works of a Renaissance playwright became cultural treasures, and the practical ways in which that status was expressed and acknowledged; in so doing we will be contributing to the study of Shakespeare as a central and symbolic figure for Anglophone culture since the seventeenth century. Our fourth principle follows from this: we will be exploring the significance of the fact that these collections of materials by and about the English national poet, which to some extent derive their importance from that status, were partly gathered by Scots and are held in Scottish institutions.

In order to draw these principles together, the research will develop in two complementary directions. We will explore the significance of the bibliographical features of the early printed books that are the most prominent part of the holdings, asking what the evidence of the gathering, organizing and binding of these books can tell us about the patterns and purposes of collecting this material since the seventeenth century. At the same time, we will explore the contextual material relevant to these collections, looking in detail at the working notes, correspondence and other papers of those responsible for building them up. We have identified two individuals and a family from the 17th to 19th centuries who are central to the development of these collections, and whose papers and correspondence survive to an extent sufficient to furnish us with robust evidence. We will also look at the papers and contribution of John Dover-Wilson, Regius Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh from 1935 to 1945 and trustee of NLS, who helped to secure a significant proportion of both institutions' holdings.

The research will involve the fresh examination of these archival resources, and the study of materials relevant to the books and their collectors in other repositories elsewhere in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the USA. We will then have a deeper sense of the history of these collections, and of their place in the cultural history of Shakespeare, and we will also have identified the most striking and engaging items around which to build our exhibition. We will also carry the focus on the personalities of the collectors into the planning and design of the exhibition, with the aim of giving a series of faces and voices to the broader processes of cultural history we will be illuminating. In this way we aim to engage a wide audience with that history, and to provoke reflection on Shakespear's place in contemporary Anglophone culture in general, and in today's Scotland in particular.