ABSTRACT
Artists came to terms with Shakespeare's writing by producing paintings, engravings, sculptures, drawings and photographs, at a time when England was beginning to portray Shakespeare as a national genius not least through other means, such as festivals and new editions of his plays. None of Shakespeare's plays were performed, and the general tenor of the event was as sybaritic and playful as it was elegiac and commemorative. The Shakespeare Gallery, the brainchild of entrepreneur John Boydell and several Royal Academy artists, opened in June 1789 at 52 Pall Mall in London with initially 34 paintings. As painting and engraving gave way more often to photographs of plays in the nineteenth century, the ways in which these images mediated memory became increasingly personal and emotional and less collective and national in character. A certain quality of this collective memory appears in the work of biographers who demonstrated their memory of plays through reference to paintings and prints of actors in role.
