Over the past few centuries, people around the world have attempted to recreate Shakespeare’s library. They have done so in print, by assembling and making collections of books; and they have done so in timber, plaster and bricks, by constructing and restoring physical spaces. The best known of the latter are Henry Clay Folger’s Shakespeare Library in Washington, and the Shakespearean buildings in and around Stratford, such as Nash’s House, Hall’s Croft, New Place and the reading room at the Shakespeare Centre on Henley Street. One of the most compelling attempts to recreate Shakespeare’s library began in an unlikely time and place: nineteenth-century Sydney.
For bibliophiles, the idea of an antipodean Shakespeare library has magical attractions, and early antecedents. James Cook made his first voyage to the east coast in the Endeavour, which carried, in the library of natural history artist Sydney Parkinson, a set of Shakespeare’s works—probably Johnson’s 1765 edition. A member of Sir Joseph Banks’ scientific team, Parkinson drew delightful images of Australia’s people, flora and fauna, but sadly perished on the return journey. Almost a century later, the last convict ship, Hougoumont, brought to Western Australia an unusually literate cargo of prisoners. According to one convict’s journal, there were many entertainments during the voyage: ‘A debating society, recitations from Shakespeare, nightly theatricals, and the publication of a weekly journal containing original poetry, critical articles, and a lively correspondence column.’
William Shakespeare lived in a culture electrified by the exploits of seamen like Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, and by the voyage books of Walter Bigge and Richard Hakluyt. In 1589 Richard Field published a Bigge book on Drake’s West Indian Voyage. The first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, Drake missed the Australian continent by a whisker, passing between Timor and the north-western coast. Though world maps showed Terra Australis Incognita from about 1490, and though Portuguese sailors may have visited the continent as early as 1521, Shakespeare never referred to it by name. He did, however, refer to the Antipodes. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick offers to ‘go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes’. (In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff declares he will make love to two women simultaneously: ‘They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both.’) The Tempest pivots on the hazards of maritime exploration and commerce.
A vibrant Shakespearean scene established itself soon after European settlement. Informal and disorganised readings and performances were ways to pass the time and maintain civilisation in the isolated outpost. Probably the earliest ‘commercial’ Australian performance of a Shakespearean play took place only twelve years after the arrival of the First Fleet. In his limerick of a career, Robert Sidaway was a baker, a watch-case maker, a convict and a theatre owner. His Sydney theatre performed I Henry IV in April 1800. According to David Malouf:
It was a proper theatre, Georgian in style, with a pit, a gallery and boxes. The price of admission was five shillings to a box, two and six to the pit, a shilling to the gallery. But patrons who had no ready cash could pay in kind, that is, in meat, flour or spirits.
A convict enterprise in the infant colony, the theatre ‘established itself rather more easily than the first church’. The cast of convicts and ex-convicts strived to behave with all propriety, but the authorities soon judged the theatre a corrupting influence and closed it down.
The authorities’ anxieties were well founded. An earlier playhouse, licensed by the Governor and erected at a cost of a hundred pounds, was managed by ‘a group of the more decent among the convicts’. According to the Barrington biographer R. S. Lambert, ‘No improprieties took place inside the theatre, but a number of convicts who stayed away from the second performance spent their time in breaking into the huts of those that attended it, and robbing them.’ This is the theatre in which Barrington is supposed to have read his ‘True Patriots All’ prologue, which alludes to Richard III: ‘“Give me a horse,” bawls Richard…We’ll find a man would help himself to one.’
Shakespeare’s plays were quickly a mainstay of the professional theatre that emerged in Australia in the 1830s. They permeated the culture in other ways, too. They were intermittently performed at benefits and other special events. Fancy-dress balls were held on the date identified by convention as the Bard’s birthday. Audiences around the country enjoyed Shakespeare-themed pantomimes and operas. Faithful citizens erected statues in the Bard’s honour. Entrepreneurs named pubs, theatres and racehorses after his plays and characters. Galleries collected Elizabethan and Jacobean art. Freemasons established Shakespeare Lodges. Shakespeare societies popped up in cities and even in country towns. Wagga Wagga’s Shakespeare Society was active in 1895 and, in different incarnations, for many decades after that.
William Walker’s 1890 Reminiscences recorded a performance of Othello at Windsor. An actor named Kemble ‘painted one side of his face black and alternated his profile to play both Othello and Iago’. When the same actor performed in Hobart, ‘enraged audiences’ bombarded him with vegetables and other food. American, English and other foreign performers toured regularly and profitably during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Oscar Asche’s ‘triumphal’ 1909 tour lasted eighteen months and packed theatres in Sydney and Melbourne with performances of The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. In 1948 the Old Vic brought out Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to perform Richard III. Led by Anthony Quayle, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company toured in 1949. The programmes for the company’s performances feature Shakespeare’s coat of arms and showcase the best of Australian industry. Theatregoers were reassured that the actresses wore Australian-made, True-to-Type foundation garments: ‘There’s a superbly fitting BERLEI behind the scenes.’
Grandsons of a Cornish farm-worker, the five Tangye brothers of Birmingham exemplified the Victorian ethic of self-help. From modest beginnings they built a company and a fortune supplying the industrial revolution with steam engines, pumps and chain hoists. Using his new wealth, Richard Tangye assembled a Cromwelliana collection whose rather mournful highlights were Cromwell’s coffin plate, death mask, funeral escutcheon and Bible. He also sponsored, with his brother George, public institutions such as the Birmingham Library, the Birmingham Art Gallery, and Britain’s first municipal School of Art.
And Richard travelled. In 1883 he published a book of his recent world tour, Reminiscences of Travel in Australia, America and Egypt. Daytime amusements on the voyage included ‘quoits, a run with the hounds, jumping in sacks by moonlight, racing in sacks’. Evenings were brightened by ‘concerts, recitations, and occasionally theatrical performances’. The township of Sydney was even more impressive. Tangye appreciated immediately the optimism and ambition of this outpost of Empire. ‘Young Australia, like his cousin in America, has an unbounded confidence in the future of his country; he has even more in himself.’ Tangye admired Sydney’s Free Public Library, which had opened in September 1869 with twenty thousand volumes and was modelled in part on the Birmingham example. The principal librarian greeted Tangye with ‘civility and helpfulness’. In 1885 the industrialist presented the library with a spectacular gift: a Shakespeare First Folio. In excellent condition and said to have cost Tangye five hundred pounds, the volume was quickly appraised at double that value by Sydney newspapers. In the burgeoning international trend of free libraries, the gift—the only First Folio in Australia—was among the foremost acts of public philanthropy. It was delivered in a purpose-built carved box made from Warwickshire timber.
David Scott Mitchell was born in 1836 in the officers’ quarters of the old Military Hospital in Macquarie Street, Sydney. His father, James Mitchell, was surgeon-in-charge. David’s mother, Augusta, was descended from Sir John Frederick, a wealthy seventeenth-century lord mayor of London. James had arrived in New South Wales in 1821 after serving in the Napoleonic Wars. By grant and purchase, he acquired more than thirty thousand acres in the Hunter Valley. Through an extraordinary stroke of luck, the land proved to be rich coalfields. Mitchell was suddenly a very wealthy man.
Augusta’s mother brought her personal library to Sydney, and continued to acquire books until her death in 1840. Many of her books passed to her grandson, David. During his childhood, a copy of Shakespeare’s works was always in the family home. David was taught to appreciate the Bard as an example of a self-educated man who overcame impediments, a quality that appealed as much to the Mitchells as it had to the Tangyes. (Moore’s Almanack listed Shakespeare alongside other self-raised high-achievers such as John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Franklin.)
At the age of sixteen, David entered the University of Sydney as one of its first six undergraduates. A formidable whist player, he won scholarships in maths and prizes in physics and chemistry. His professors, though, formally censured him for ‘gross and wilful neglect to his studies’. He nevertheless graduated BA with honours in Classics in 1856, and MA in 1859. Admitted to the Sydney Bar, he instead devoted himself to managing his father’s estates.
An 1864 photograph shows Mitchell’s penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, square-trimmed beard and slender build. Women found him charming, but his amatory ventures were disappointing. In 1865 he was rumoured to be engaged to Emily Manning, the daughter of a Supreme Court judge. Emily was nine years younger and, at a height of four foot ten, a good deal shorter than Mitchell. But the engagement was shorter still, and Mitchell never married her, or anyone else. He did, however, become close to his still younger cousin, Rose Scott. Reading The Taming of the Shrew at an early age inspired Rose to fight for social justice. ‘The craven witch, to give in in that servile manner and worse still to turn the tables on her own sex! From that moment,’ Rose wrote, ‘I was a rebel against all injustice and wrong.’
After Mitchell inherited his father’s assets, he retreated into an uneven kind of bibliophile seclusion, attended by his faithful housekeeper, Sarah, and venturing forth mainly to buy books or to go to his club. Apart from letters from Rose, most of his contact with the outside world was via booksellers or games of cards.
The strongest early influences on Mitchell’s book collecting were Dibdin and the Shakespeare biographer Charles Knight. Mitchell owned the volumes that turned Dibdin into a proper bibliomaniac: William Beloe’s Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books (1807–12) and Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1823). Without these, Dibdin wrote, ‘he would despair of ever attaining the exalted state of Bibliomania’. Mitchell read in Beloe:
Perhaps there is no book in the English language which has risen so rapidly in value as the first edition [he meant the First Folio] of the works of our great natural Poet. I can remember a very fine copy to have been sold for five guineas. I could once have purchased a superb one for nine guineas. At the sale of Dr Monro’s books it was purchased for thirteen guineas; and two years since, I was present when thirty-six guineas were demanded for a copy.
Mitchell also owned Dibdin’s key works, including Bibliomania (1811, a heavily marked-up copy) and Bibliographical Decameron (1817). Under these influences, Mitchell’s foremost passion was Elizabetheana. An early purchase was a Shakespeare Fourth Folio. At the same sale Mitchell bought Conolly’s A Study of Hamlet (1863), a presentation copy to Charles Dickens. The rate of Mitchell’s buying accelerated, and his home at 17 Darlinghurst Road began to bulge with all manner of books. A. H. Spencer, who early in his career visited the home as a messenger boy for booksellers Angus & Robertson, described it thus: ‘Books, pamphlets, maps, pictures, newspapers, manuscripts, filling a vast amount of shelving and stacked upon the floor, tables and chairs in every room, and up the staircase.’
In October 1898, Mitchell offered to gift his collection to the Public Library of New South Wales, on condition that a new wing would house the collection and that the books would be made freely available for study. He granted seventy thousand pounds to maintain the bequest. In 1899 a special act of parliament was passed to facilitate the gift and to mirror the British Museum’s collection policies insofar as that would make the collection accessible to students.
The Public Library already had significant strengths in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Apart from the Tangye First Folio, the collection included a Second Folio that had belonged to Essie Jenyns, a popular Australian actress in the 1880s. Four admirers presented Jenyns with the volume in 1887. She married one of the four when she retired from the stage the following year.
The task of moving the ‘fortress of books’ from Darlinghurst Road attained epic proportions. After packing the books into damp-proof metal boxes, carriers loaded them on drays and transported them to the vaults of the Bank of Australasia where they waited until the Mitchell Library stacks were ready. The final move was completed in April 1908, and the new building was officially opened in March 1910. Sadly, Mitchell had died three years earlier.
The Mitchells and the Tangyes supplied a new vision of Shakespeare’s library, and a new vision of Shakespeare himself, as the self-made man, the worker-hero. Apart from the Tangye First Folio and Mitchell’s collection of Shakespearean and Elizabethan books, the Mitchell Library now features a beautiful, one-to-one scale replica of Shakespeare’s library—a physical reproduction of what his bookroom at New Place might have been like.
Planning for the ‘New South Wales Shakespearean Memorial Library’ began before the First World War as a way to celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. As initially conceived, the library would house the more than 1300 special items of Shakespearean interest in the Mitchell Library. The Shakespeare Tercentenary Memorial Fund set a target of £25,000, which was to be raised through a public appeal. The war intervened, however, and the appeal raised only £1425. The Fund handed over the money to the trustees of the Public Library.
Plans were scaled back. There would be a Shakespeare Room instead, within the walls of the Mitchell. The room was completed in 1942, and it is just the right size, with just the right level of provincial Elizabethan opulence, for Shakespeare’s library. Two whole walls and much of a third are lined with sturdy bookshelves. Over the entrance there is a fine carving of the Shakespeare coat of arms—this is, after all, a proper gentleman’s library. Symmetrically, the inner lintel displays Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms. Her arms are repeated on the wooden cornice, alternating with those of the Earl of Southampton. The Shakespeare arms are repeated, too, in the stained-glass doors of the Shakespeare Room.
The room was modelled on Cardinal Wolsey’s closet at Hampton Court Palace. The ornate coffered plaster ceiling is striking, as is the extensive woodcarving in Tasmanian blackwood, treated to mimic English oak. Carved pillars stand inside the door, and the walls are decorated with elaborate, Tudor-style carving: intricate linen folds and other period motifs, rendered in blackwood by the master carver Charles Sherline. The stained-glass window, Arthur Benfield’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’, depicts a speech from As You Like It. Beneath the window sits a handsome, mediaeval-style window seat. The room features Elizabethan relics: a chair made from Shakespeare’s mulberry tree—an organism that seems to have produced a supernatural quantity of timber—and, in pride of place, the Tangyes’ carved First Folio box, made from oak grown in the forest of Arden. The library’s trustees published an artist’s impression of the Bard in his new library—sitting on his mulberry chair, absorbed in a book.
Henry Gullett, former president of the Shakespeare Society of New South Wales, commissioned a complementary statue by the sculptor Sir Bertram Mackennal. Unveiled in 1926 in Shakespeare Place, between the Mitchell Library and the Royal Botanic Gardens, the statue features six bronze figures: Shakespeare, Hamlet, Portia, Romeo, Juliet and Falstaff. The inscription quotes Prospero’s poignant speech: ‘Our revels now are ended…we are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ In 1959 the statue was moved to make way for an expressway.
When planning began, in the first decades of the twentieth century, for Australia’s purpose-built capital city, many names were mooted. Ugly compromises like ‘Sydmelperbaneho’ were quickly rejected in favour of three frontrunners. One was the mildly gynaecological ‘Myola’. Another was ‘Canberra’, which, as every Australian schoolkid knows, means both ‘meeting place’ and ‘breasts’. King O’Malley was the driver behind the other frontrunner. A member of parliament and an American by birth, he pushed for the capital to be named ‘Shakespeare’, after ‘the greatest Englishman who ever lived’. David Garrick had erected a temple to Shakespeare in his garden. O’Malley would have turned the whole of Australia into a Shakespeare monument.