The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery

When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new cultural experience with an ambitious project in Pall Mall: a gallery devoted entirely to scenes from Shakespeare.

Boydell commissioned leading British artists to paint pivotal moments from the plays, then sold engraved reproductions for museum-goers to take home with them. The Gallery quickly became a sensation and was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince of Wales. It also played a powerful role in transforming William Shakespeare from a popular playwright into a national icon.

The venture ultimately closed due to the economic turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and the paintings were sold at auction. But its influence endured, shaping exhibition culture, influencing a British school of art, and inspiring the visual mythology of The Bard.

Joining us to explore the rise and fall of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery are Rosie Dias, Professor of Art History at the University of Warwick, and Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

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From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 24, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Mike Rucinski of Boutique Recording in Great Malvern, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc. 

Rosie Dias is Professor in History of Art and Co-Head of the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on 18th- and early 19th-century British art, with a particular focus on printmaking, exhibition culture, and colonial art in South Asia. Rosie’s monograph Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic was published by Yale University Press in 2013 and informed a 2016 exhibition at Compton Verney (Warwickshire, UK), “Boydell’s Vision: the Shakespeare Gallery in the Eighteenth Century.”

Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an honorary governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Higher School of Ukraine, co-director of the Shakespeare Centre, China, and secretary of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Shakespeare. His previous appointments include posts at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of London, and he has held fellowships and visiting appointments in California, Sweden, and China. He comments regularly on Shakespeare for the BBC, The London Review of Books, and for other publications, and he has written program notes for, among others, the RSC, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Old Vic, the Sheffield Crucible, Peter Stein, TR Warszawa, and the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. His books include The Making of the National Poet (1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, 2001, winner of the Bainton Prize in 2002), England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (with Nicola Watson, 2002), Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today (2006), and Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (2011). He serves as a General Editor (with Abigail Rokison-Woodall and Simon Russell Beale) of the Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare series.

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Whitney White and Shakespeare

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: When you visit a new city on vacation, or you have a little spare time on a business trip, what’s one of the first things you do? If you’re like me, you find the nearest museum or gallery and immerse yourself in some art.

Art museums with collections open to the public are actually an 18th-century invention.

In England, one of the precursors to the art gallery as we know it was a special display of paintings in London’s Pall Mall, based on scenes from Shakespeare. Printmaker John Boydell hatched the idea to commission paintings from leading British artists and display them for the public.

Opening in 1789, Boydell’s Gallery helped to fashion Shakespeare into the mythic ‘Bard’ he is today. The gallery became a cultural sensation and a destination for England’s middle class.

The gallery ran for 15 years, with new paintings added regularly. But when it closed in 1805, the paintings were sold off—in some cases, after being cut up into smaller pieces.

Now, 14 of the remaining paintings are on display together for the first time since then. The exhibit runs until August 2 here at the Folger in Washington, DC.

Joining us to talk about the significance of the Boydell Gallery are Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, and Rosie Dias, professor of art history at the University of Warwick.

Here are Michael and Rosie, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGEAV: Well, before we get to the question of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare with a capital “S” and how the Boydell Gallery fits into that evolution, why don’t we go back to the beginning of the story in 1789.  Who was John Boydell and why did he want to mount an exhibit of paintings depicting Shakespeare scenes? I’ll throw that to you, Rosie.

ROSIE DIAS: So, John Boydell was an engraver. He was a print seller and a print publisher, and by the 1780s, he had really established the most successful print publishing business in Britain. Boydell was able to, through his print business, commission artists to produce what in the period was regarded as high art—so, history painting, which is to say, scenes from history, from historical episodes, from literature, from mythology, and he opened a route for them to make a living from producing this kind of art. By the time that the Shakespeare Gallery is conceived and it’s opened, he’s really regarded in England as one of the foremost patrons of British art.

BOGEAV: Well, let me ask you this because it sounds like he’s a real businessman, but he’s also an artist. So, from the start, did this Shakespeare Gallery, did it involve his personal ambition but also a kind of nationalist agenda to raise the profile of English artists?

DIAS: Very much so. So, really, there was a lot of criticism of other art institutions in this period. The Royal Academy had opened in 1768. It was seen as really not nurturing a distinctively English school of painting because it was fundamentally established along Continental lines. It was based on academies in Italy and France. So, there was a real concern, a kind of anxiety, that that English artists were imitators of a Continental tradition rather than producing anything distinctive in their own right. When he sets up the Boydell Gallery, he’s very clear that this is to elevate the fortunes of English painting and of English painters and to carve out something really distinctive for English art.

BOGEAV: Okay. So, Michael, remind us what Shakespeare’s profile was here. This is 20 years after Garrick’s Jubilee and the anointing of Stratford-on-Avon as his birthplace. So, was a full-on Shakespeare revival still going on at the end of the 18th century? Was it even gaining speed?

MICHAEL DOBSON: By then, it’s not really a revival because the English have accepted that Shakespeare—however puzzling and in some ways obsolete and unruly and confusing his works can be—is what we’ve got.

The core of the Shakespeare canon has been popular in the theater pretty much continuously since Shakespeare’s lifetime, with the hiatus of the Civil War excepted. His face is on pub signs. There are all kinds of souvenir products. All kinds of popular prints depicting actors in famous scenes from the plays. You can buy little ceramic statuettes of Garrick as Richard III waking up before Bosworth Field. There’s lots of Shakespeare spin-off products. Books of quotations from Shakespeare. Books of quotations from Shakespeare applied topically to what’s happening in politics. Parodies of Shakespeare attacking the Prime Minister. You know, there’s lots of Shakespeare memes in late 18th-century culture.

BOGEAV: Okay, I think we get the picture. Now, Rosie, could you describe one of the paintings in the Folger exhibit for us that you especially like? Because we haven’t really created a picture in anyone’s mind yet of what you might see when you walk into the gallery, what these things look like.

DIAS: Okay, so, I’m going to look at the large painting that’s in the Folger exhibition, which is the  James Northcote scene from Romeo and Juliet. It’s over three meters wide, so it’s extremely large, and it’s the scene when Friar Lawrence has just entered the Capulet tomb and Juliet is awakening. Romeo and Paris’ bodies are in front of us in the composition. It’s a moment which foregrounds the emotional pivot of that entire tragedy. It’s that moment where she’s just speaking to Friar Lawrence, but she hasn’t quite realized that Romeo is dead.

BOGEAV: Even though he’s draped right in front of her! And she’s reaching out, her arm is reaching towards Friar Lawrence, and she’s bathed in this amazing spotlight of light. Okay, that was a wonderful description. Thank you.

And again, to place us in the time: another guest we had on the podcast talking about it said, “Going to the Shakespeare Gallery was the hottest date night event going in 1789.” Just to put it in context of art history and museum history, was this kind of art exhibit common at the time? Is this what people normally would do on a date?

DIAS: So, going to exhibitions had become increasingly popular by this time: the most famous example was the Royal Academy of Arts, which opened in 1768. The Royal Academy was frequently criticized for being a real mishmash of all kinds of things, of having no sort of logic whatsoever. So, you get high arts alongside the lesser genres. You’d often have 300 works of art just hung in a fairly random way on the wall.

What’s innovative about Boydell’s project is that it is the first exhibition that has a consistent theme. It changes slightly every year because he adds works, he takes works away so that they can be engraved, so, there is that incentive to come back every year to see what’s changed. But there is, nonetheless, this underpinning theme.

BOGEAV: So, this was a different kind of exhibition. And as I understand it, as you write, both of you, it was very, very popular. Was there even a gift shop at the Gallery?

DOBSON: Oh, yes, essentially, the whole Gallery was a gift shop. It was both an art gallery and a showroom. You could order copies of the prints and buy copies of the edition. You’re seeing these enormous full-color oil paintings on the wall and you have the opportunity to buy reproductions of them in the building so that you can have them in your very own home, no matter how small.

It’s one of the problems with Boydell’s commissioning. Because he wanted the exhibition to be spectacular and wanted the paintings to be really big, like proper great epic history paintings, they’re on an enormous scale. When the Gallery eventually failed, and all its contents had to be sold off, very few people had places big enough in which you could hang any of these paintings. You know, the Gallery had been purpose-built to display enormous pictures. So, a lot of them, if they were to have any resale value at all, when they were sold off to pay Boydell’s creditors, had to be cut up. So, you might have just a little bit or a few figures from one.

Rosie and I were lucky enough to both be involved 10 years ago in an art exhibition at a gallery near Stratford where the gallery managed to do the delightful thing of putting back together, as much as they could, Romney’s enormous painting of the shipwreck in The Tempest, which has got lots of figures in it, and Prospero is watching, Miranda’s watching. The face of Prospero was sold separately and that’s now in an art gallery in York. Some of the figures in the wreck were sold separately. Miranda went off somewhere else. What the gallery was able to do was produce a blow-up from one of the reproductions of the whole image, the size of the original painting, and then stick onto it the bits of the genuine original oil painting so that some of it was, most of it was monochrome, and then you could see the color bits at last back together in the same room after nearly 300 years.

BOGEAV: That’s such a wild part of this story that it was all cut up. They just cut up the canvases. Such desperation. It reminds me of what happened, in a later age, to the huge panorama paintings that would go lost because they were just too big.

DOBSON: Exactly, exactly.

BOGAEV: One of them got wrapped around a telephone pole or something and got stuck in someone’s basement.

DOBSON: This is supposed to be public, immersive art. You’re supposed to be completely overwhelmed by it because it towers above you and fills your entire field of view. That’s really not what you want in your vestibule back home.

BOGEAV: Right. Hard to move that kind of product.

DOBSON: Very hard, very hard.

BOGEAV: But before we get ahead of ourselves to the end of it, I am curious about the bigger picture. What did this very popular exhibit of Shakespeare scenes do for Shakespeare’s reputation, which was already flying high?

DOBSON: There’s a lot of that. It’s commercialism. You can pay a shilling, and you can see all this stuff. In fact, the Royal Academy were rather annoyed by it. Joshua Reynolds took a lot of persuading to contribute because he thought it was vulgar to just do a painting because you were paid to by a commercial printmaker like Boydell. But eventually, he accepted his fee and painted that extraordinary image of Puck looking like an infant Vulcan with very pointy ears.

It makes a big claim for Shakespeare as being a serious high artist independent of vulgar show business. This is a way of enjoying Shakespeare and admiring Shakespeare without the mediation of those rough, dodgy places that are West End theaters. The plays are cleansed of their adaptations and you’re in a social space where you might indeed go on a respectable date.

The statue by Banks, which was over the entrance to the Gallery, really makes that point in a very peculiar way because it’s a statue of Shakespeare between the muses of poetry and painting. Theater’s been written out completely. Shakespeare is now a literary figure. According to this statue, it’s just as important that he’s somebody of whom you can make statues and from whose plays and poems you can make great visual art.

BOGEAV: This is so interesting. I just want to get the timeline straight in my head. We start with Shakespeare in his own day, very popular. Then he dies, the theaters are closed for 18 or 19 years during the war and Oliver Cromwell’s time of Puritanism, and a whole generation of playwrights and actors passes. Then Garrick’s Jubilee happens and suddenly—not much Shakespeare was performed at the Jubilee—but he’s anointed as this exalted figure of Britishness. And then you have all this Restoration kind of bastardized Shakespeare where the verse is all changed and adapted and new characters added. It’s a very French farce type of Shakespeare. And he’s kind of forgotten, right?

DOBSON: Well, that’s a slight exaggeration and you’ve skipped 100 years in the chronology from the theaters reopening in 1660. [Both laugh.]

BOGAEV: That’s what we need you for, Michael.

DOBSON: Thank you so much. It’s nice to be needed for something. [Laughter.]

The theaters reopened in 1660, but they are now run by courtiers under the sign of the monarchy. Only two indoor theaters are allowed to do spoken drama at all. Some of Shakespeare’s plays people remember and they still work fine. You don’t need to rewrite Hamlet. You don’t need to rewrite Othello. You don’t need to rewrite Henry IV, Part One. There’s a core of popular Shakespeare’s plays that sticks around.

There aren’t enough new plays to keep these two new theaters in business. So, the theater managers look to the repertoire of surviving old plays from the lost old days before the Civil War and try to adapt the ones that don’t look like they’ll work on the new stages with scenery. And now that they’ve got actresses as well as actors and they don’t have to use boys dressed up for the female roles, Shakespeare’s plays haven’t got enough female roles, so, some of them get more female roles put into them. Various experimental things are done and some of these adaptations stick around and some of them don’t.

BOGEAV: And some of the endings get changed.

DOBSON: Well, Romeo and Juliet gets a happy ending briefly in the 1660s, but they played it alternately with the original ending, so, you could choose whether you wanted them alive or not.

BOGAEV: Choose your own adventure.

DOBSON: Yes. Romeo arrives, finds Juliet dead, takes the poison, then Juliet wakes up, then they have a last dialogue and then they both die. That’s what happens in the Garrick version. He wanted to write himself some really good dying speeches as Romeo and have a last dialogue with Juliet. It’s not that he gave it a happy ending.

King Lear gets a happy ending because it’s not poetic justice. Shakespeare has this bad habit of describing the awful things people do to each other and the way they’d probably turn out instead of insisting on giving the audience a moral lesson that good people are always rewarded. So, the death of Cordelia is just totally unacceptable.

But Shakespeare was always popular. French neoclassical critics thought he shouldn’t be. Voltaire, who comes to England as a political refugee, is at first very taken with the English theater, but goes back to France and decides really it’s vulgar and barbarous and there’s too much onstage killing, which is too literal and too coarse.

But Britain comes to kind of valorize all that. Shakespeare is more realistic than the French. It’s not stilted. It’s not so stylized, even though it does have great flights of poetry in it. It’s available to everybody. You just have to have common sense to enjoy Shakespeare. This is part of the story about it. It’s part of the story of the Jubilee that Shakespeare came from a very ordinary English market town and that’s what’s so great about him. He just had to tell it like it was because he was a commonsense English person from the West Midlands. How could he possibly go wrong?

So, there are great misrepresentations of the level of education Shakespeare had because he’s supposed to have been an uninspired genius who just sprang from the native soil, which is part of what’s going on in that extraordinary image by George Romney, which was the first thing you saw in the Boydell Gallery, the Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions.

BOGEAV: Right. I’m so glad you brought that up. I’m going to turn to you, Rosie, because here we’ve reached the Shakespeare as a native genius from birth chapter of this story. Help us understand that and how it’s reflected, particularly in this painting.

DIAS: So, this is an incredible allegorical painting. What we have is Shakespeare as an infant who’s surrounded by all of these allegorical figures. The two main figures that are flanking him are joy and sorrow, and then, in the background, unveiling her face is the figure of nature.

What’s really being shown here is that Shakespeare’s imagination is something that’s bestowed upon him by nature. But it’s also shaped by the tumultuous forces of emotion. You have this wonderful unity of opposites as well in the painting. We’ve got joy and sorrow, love and hatred, envy and fear, and that really, I think, underscores Shakespeare’s ability to harmonize emotional extremes in his plays so that tragedy and comedy are really coming from the from the same wellspring.

BOGEAV: Do you see this as another example of the way in which this exhibit might be trying to undercut the French claim to cultural supremacy, their artifice, whereas here you have this British natural-born genius?

DIAS: Yes, and this is something that was very much dwelt on in the press criticism—and it should be said that a lot of the press criticism was likely planted by Boydell himself through this practice that was known as puffing.

The kind of underpinning values of the Gallery and Shakespeare were regarded as naturalism, variety, and an ability to engage the emotional dimensions of art. There are particular moments that are highly melodramatic, but also sentimental. They focus on emotions that are accessible to the whole spectrum of the kind of public that would have visited the Shakespeare Gallery.

We’re not thinking about a public that’s very educated in the language of art, that has experience of doing the Grand Tour. We’re talking about largely middle-class people. He’s not expecting people to come to these works with a knowledge of high art. They’re inviting responses that any member of the audience can bring to the paintings. This is very much a democratic space as far as Boydell was concerned, to the point that he made it clear that if there were elements of the paintings that the audience felt were unsuccessful, he would alter them.

So, we have this extraordinary situation where even very eminent artists like Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli are tasked with altering their paintings. For example, the figure of Miranda in The Tempest that Henry Fuseli had painted was not regarded by some members of the audience to be sufficiently beautiful.

BOGEAV: Wow. Well, Michael, just to put a finer point on all of this, do you think the Shakespeare Gallery helped people to reject this idea that Shakespeare was just some rural, regional poet and embrace this myth that you’re talking about that he’s a natural born superhuman genius, and that he’s the poet to everyone as Rosie so well describes?

DOBSON: Well, I think Boydell amplifies and underlines that point and takes it into a new medium. And he takes it into people’s houses. Boydell’s prints really did sell. You know, there are still so many copies of reproductions of these images around that, you know, even I can afford to have a few on the odd wall in in my office. I’ve got a copy of The Infant Shakespeare in my office—partly because I think it’s so funny.

BOGAEV: So funny.

DOBSON: Yeah, Shakespeare looks so apprehensive as joy or comedy passes him this little recorder to play with when, you know, he’s really not old enough to play on a pipe. And all these shadowy figures crouching over him. He’s so daunted by the great literary destiny that lies ahead of him.

It’s funny because to us who have seen some old masters that painting The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions, it looks like a parody of an expensive Christmas card, it looks like it’s a secularized version of a nativity scene with Shakespeare as this messiah who has come to bring forward enlightenment, to show England how reality is.

But the painting is so unrealistic. It’s so allegorical that it completely trips itself up. It is not a picture of a baby in Stratford in 1564 by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a sort of imagining of Shakespeare as a youth destined for greatness that’s filtered through lots and lots of Italian paintings, allegorical paintings, paintings of pagan deities. I think it’s a hoot.

BOGEAV: It sounds super cheesy, I’ve got to say, and it prompts me to ask, Rosie, is there a consensus now about the quality of these paintings from the Shakespeare Gallery?

DIAS: So, I would say that there largely is a consensus about the quality of the paintings. I think this is a project that’s regarded really as an interesting one, as culturally very telling of a particular moment and a particular cultural imperative, which was to raise the status of English art using Shakespeare as a vehicle to do that. It’s also regarded as a key moment in exhibition history and in publishing history as well.

But in terms of the quality of the paintings, I would say they’re very uneven. There’s a certain sense in which there is an element of pastiche about many of them. Some of these artists were in it for the cash, really, and there were others who, I think, very much saw the Gallery as an important platform for their careers. For artists like James Northcote, perhaps that was the case.

There was also an issue with the engraving. So, engraving is a very, very slow process. It can take not just months, but sometimes years. And so, there were shortcuts that were made in terms of the printmaking. The prints particularly come under quite a lot of criticism at the time. There’s quite a variety of engravers in terms of skill that are used and some, particularly the book edition engravings, are done in a little bit of a rush. There was quite a lot of criticism about that.

DOBSON: The statue that was above the entrance to the gallery of Shakespeare, between the muses of poetry and painting—later in the 19th century, the building was scheduled for demolition—a benefactor saved the statue. Bought it from the old Boydell Gallery building and said, “I wish to give this as a present to Shakespeare’s hometown so that it can be put up as a monument to Shakespeare.” in what used to be Shakespeare’s garden at New Place. And there was a lot of resistance to this. The Shakespeare scholar James Halliwell said, “I’d be horrified at any of the Boydell rubbish being put up at New Place. It has no value as a work of art or any real interest in a Shakespearean point of view. It merely perpetuates a Gallery of now acknowledged failures in art.” As far as he was concerned, it was a memory of bad pictures that had nothing to do with the real Shakespeare and had no business in Stratford. But it was indeed sent to Stratford. It does indeed still sit in what used to be Shakespeare’s garden, you know, just around the corner from my office.

BOGEAV: Well, one man’s opinion.

DOBSON: Exactly.

BOGAEV: Apparently not one man’s opinion.

DOBSON: I think it’s a charming piece of kitsch.

BOGEAV: All right. Well, let’s get to the end of the Shakespeare Gallery story. It was very much a monetary endeavor. This was an entrepreneur, Boydell. Let’s follow the money, the cash. How well did the prints sell? How did Boydell make out on his investment in the paintings, Michael?

DOBSON: Well, unfortunately, this thing called Napoleon happened. Even though Boydell’s project looks terribly nationalistic—it’s all about elevating British history painting and showing that we can do things the French can’t—Boydell depended on selling right across Europe. The French Revolution breaks out in the very year the gallery opens. Soon, the Napoleonic Wars, wars against France, follow, and you just can’t trade with the Continent anymore. There’s a blockade. And that’s really what does it for Boydell. He dies in 1804, pretty much bankrupt, and it all has to be sold off.

BOGEAV: That’s tragic. So, the exhibition as a money-making venture definitely failed, but how successful was it in the end as an exercise in Bardification?

DOBSON: Well, it certainly disseminates lots and lots of images from the plays, lots of canonical moments from the plays, into spaces where you wouldn’t have seen them before.

In a way, it’s more important for what it says about the notion of public culture, because it’s a gallery with claims to be national, and indeed, the building is then taken over and turned into something called the British Institute or the British Gallery, which is a clear forerunner of Britain’s National Gallery. The Boydell venture happens at the moment around other parts of Europe, where countries are deciding that the visual arts are important and ought to be made available to everybody.

The same year that the Boydell Gallery opens, in Florence, the Medici’s collection of paintings, which they stored in the office wing of their palace, opens as a public gallery, the Uffizi, to be the Tuscan National Art Gallery. In Munich, the Bavarian Royal Collection is nationalized and opens as what becomes the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

This is the beginnings of London finally having a national gallery—and when London does acquire a national gallery, it also has a little supplement called the National Portrait Gallery, the first exhibit in which is a portrait of Shakespeare, and one of the prize exhibits in its next spin-off venture, what becomes the Tate Gallery, is an enormous portrait of Hamlet by Thomas Lawrence. Shakespeare gets into the visual arts as the thing that marks British art as British and as public.

BOGEAV: Okay, so you framed that in terms of the arts. And looking ahead in the history of Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare and Bardification, there’s another chapter to this story, which involves British imperialism and colonialism. Is this Shakespeare Gallery story a significant link that establishes Shakespeare as not just a British genius but the pinnacle of human culture reinforcing the holiness or the rightness of the British colonial project? The great white bard of the great white British savior myth?

DOBSON: I don’t know how central Boydell is to this. I don’t think copies of Boydell were sent out to the colonies to instruct the natives in what pictures ought to look like.

The Shakespeare of the colonial enterprise in the 19th century is much more a classroom Shakespeare, a Shakespeare that’s about telling people about the English language and the English literary canon.

It’s a theatrical Shakespeare who then escapes from that and gets into native vernaculars and native theatrical traditions, regardless of the aims or views of the colonial power.

BOGEAV: Rosie, what are your thoughts on the ongoing significance, or the future significance, or the long tail of the Boydell Gallery?

DIAS: So, the interesting thing for me about the Gallery is what is it that Shakespeare does for British arts. Because when this project is conceived, we’ve got a real sense of collective anxiety amongst the cultural establishment that there’s nothing at this point in 1789 that could indicate that there was such a thing as an English school of painting.

What Shakespeare really brings to English art is a sense that there are many trajectories that it could take and that it’s variety, and actually, that this is a fundamental quality of Englishness—that liberty, that kind of political liberty. And we’re back again to how we’re different from the French because there isn’t this political despotism that demands that people should behave in a certain way, that their humor, for example, must follow certain rules, that it must be refined and shaped in terms of repartee humor. In the Shakespeare Gallery, when you look at those comic paintings, humor itself is something that can be varied. There is that liberty there that Shakespeare’s genius affords these artists.

BOGAEV: Michael, then I’m curious what you think. Bringing this all back to the Shakespeare Gallery, when we look at these paintings, what do they tell us about Shakespeare? Or what do they tell us about how people have used Shakespeare for their own ends throughout history?

DOBSON: Well, there is a very spectacular example of the ways in which Shakespeare’s language can spark imaginations that may express themselves in totally different media. As Rosie says, they convey something of Shakespeare’s range between tragedy and comedy and history. They give us some index of the spaces in Shakespeare that we can fill up and the things we can take out of Shakespeare and stick into a scrapbook somewhere else entirely in a completely different time. They’re a great anthology of visual gestures that take their origins in Shakespeare’s already metamorphosing plays, the way in which everything is always becoming something in Shakespeare and here it became this collection of what are often quite odd paintings and now comically dated paintings, in some instances, but it really is a very striking instance of some of the peculiar things that happen when you try to tie Shakespeare’s imagination to a notion of a single nation’s culture and a single nation’s culture’s claims to significance.

BOGEAV: Well, thank you so much for doing the impossible, which is talking about paintings that we can’t see while we’re talking about them. And also encompassing so much history in a discussion about 14 paintings. Thank you.

DOBSON: It’s a pleasure.

DIAS: Thank you.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Rosie Dias and Michael Dobson, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The exhibition Imagining Shakespeare: Mythmaking and Storytelling in the Regency Era runs at the Folger until August 2, 2026.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Mike Rucinski of Boutique Recording in Great Malvern, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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