Our Shakespeare exhibition has finished, but it still lives on in our Digital Gallery in the form of two different features.
Shakespeare Collected allows you to explore the collectors and collections we celebrated in our exhibition, through text, films, and images. You can also follow in the footsteps of the collector James Halliwell-Phillipps and build your own Shakespeare scrapbook, to be downloaded or shared. The scrapbook feature is also available as an app free from the Apple app store, with an Android version soon to follow.
The Showcase in Shakespeare Collected Showcase contains a selection of fully-digitized books and manuscripts from those displayed in the exhibition. You can read early editions of Shakespeare plays, including quarto playbooks and extracts from the First Folio of 1623. Some were annotated by editors and others used as prompt copies in 17th-century theatres. You can also see the Shakespeare scrapbook created by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps which inspired our Shakespeare scrapbook activity – we hope it will inspire you to create your own scrapbook too.
Getting Started with Shakespeare: Exploring Scenes and Sonnets is a resource aimed at primary and secondary schools, with lesson plans, images and interactive resources to introduce children to Shakespeare and help them get creative with art, drama and writing.
We hope visitors to our Digital Gallery will look at both of these features – writers of all ages can experiment with our interactive sonnets, and teachers and pupils can discover how Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print, and share scrapbooks.
Of course Shakespeare lives on in performance: I was interested to see that this week Edinburgh Theatre Arts is presenting the world premiere of a play which was displayed in our exhibition – Macbeth In Scots, using the modern translation by R.C.L. Lorimer.