Shakespeare and the Royal Actor: Performing Monarchy, 1760-1952

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. It provides an account of the relationship between the Shakespearean afterlife and the royal family through the lens of a broadly conceived theatre history suggesting that these two hegemonic institutions had a mutually sustaining relationship from the accession of George III in 1760 to that of Elizabeth II in 1952. Identifications with Shakespearean figures have been deployed to assert the Englishness of a dynasty with strong familial links to Germany and to cultivate a sense of continuity from the more autocratic Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart monarchs informing Shakespeare's drama to the increasingly ceremonial monarchs of the modern period. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: Player Queens 2: Libertines 3: Warlike Effigies 4: Domestic Virtues 5: Royal Bodies Epilogue

About the Author :
Sally Barnden has taught Shakespeare and early modern literature at King's College London, the University of Oxford, Queen Mary University, Brunel, and Central School of Speech and Drama. Her first book, Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, and her scholarship has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Theatre Journal, and in the collection Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis. As part of the AHRC-funded project 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection,' she co-created a database and virtual exhibition, which are available online at www.sharc.kcl.ac.uk.

Review :
With exemplary insight and clarity, Sally Barnden tells the compelling story of the mutually-sustaining--and sometimes mutually-complicating--relationship between the British royal family and Shakespeare. Drawing on a wonderfully wide-ranging archive of images and texts, Barnden shows us how the British royals have repeatedly looked to Shakespeare as means of negotiating their own history--a process that has, in turn, changed the versions of Shakespeare we've come to see and read. I really enjoyed reading this book. It's lively, engaging, and full of good gossip. Sally Barnden's excellent book Shakespeare and the Royal Actor is written in a spirit of amused incredulity, demonstrating how important Shakespeare's role has been in establishing an archaic, backward-looking world.