Exhibition of documents, including Shakespeare's will, curated by London Shakespeare Centre and The National Archives

3 February - 29 May 2016
Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing, King's College London

Review by Jenna Byers, PhD candidate in History

This exhibition is interesting, in that it is attempting to do something different to most previous Shakespeare exhibitions that I have seen. It is not about Shakespeare’s plays and, in fact, his output as a playwright is seen as almost superfluous to the purpose of this exhibition. Nor is it an attempt to extrapolate from minimal surviving evidence the gossip and intricacies of Shakespeare’s life. Rather, the exhibition is using the written evidence in an attempt to demonstrate the relationship that existed between William Shakespeare and the city of London.

And this the exhibition does, with documents like the only known record of Shakespeare’s own words made during his lifetime. This document is part of a court case where the son-in-law sued the father of his new wife for failure to pay her promised dowry. Shakespeare was called to give evidence in this case because he was a lodger in the house at the time, and he was a witness to the betrothal of the young couple. The exhibition suggests that all of this had an impact on Shakespeare, because he wrote Measure for Measure in the same period, which contains two betrothals similar to that which he would have witnessed in this house. And this is an intriguing idea.

But the exhibition is not without its flaws. For one, all of the documents are handwritten, and this can make them virtually unintelligible to the untrained eye. In order to compensate for this, the curators have put up a large number of display and explanatory panels in each room, to make sure that visitors understand what they are looking at and why it’s important. While interesting, the profusion of these panels can serve as a distraction from the documents that they are supposed to illuminate.

The exhibition also fails to explain things which would really do better with a little more interpretation. There is a video of the work that goes into preparing one of these documents for exhibition, but with no captains to make sense of the process, it’s hard to know what you’re looking at.

However, you shouldn’t let these slight issues discourage you from visiting. Seeing these documents in one place not only increases one’s understanding of the deep connection that Shakespeare had with London, it also demonstrates the difficulties that early modern historians face, attempting to tease out facts from the limited evidence that has survived. Sometimes the curators of this exhibition have drawn conclusions about Shakespeare’s life and its influence on his work, but these never feel like leaps, more like logical little steps.

This exhibition is engaging, both for those new to Shakespeare and for old hands. Everyone should take the opportunity to enjoy the unique scope of an exhibition that is looking not at Shakespeare’s impact on London, but at London’s influence on Shakespeare.