Seeking and Finding: Using the Collection in an Undergraduate Writing Class

When opportunity comes knocking, one would be a fool not to take it. After all, who knows when or where else a similar chance will come. This familiar adage so aptly explained by Menas in Antony and Cleopatra, rang true last fall at the Folger Shakespeare Library for students from George Washington University. Dr. Rachel Pollack’s first-year University Writing class “Art in the Age of Shakespeare” devoted their fall semester to researching the culturally rich and often enigmatic world of Shakespeare, and the Folger Shakespeare Library provided her students with an immeasurable resource. The library opened its doors for the class to view rare materials covering a diverse range of the Bard’s world including witchcraft, nationalism, and even gender nonconformity.

For the first research paper of the semester, Dr. Pollack assigned each student to write an additional chapter on a new object to include in Neil McGregor’s book Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects.  This assignment involved picking a specific artifact from Shakespeare’s time and detailing how it encapsulated a facet of daily life in Renaissance England. It was for this project that students first visited the Folger and examined items including Elizabeth I’s 1579 New Year’s Gift Roll, miniature portraits by court painter Nicholas Hilliard, and the royal warrant for Sir Walter Raleigh’s release from the Tower of London. In student James Dechary’s words “It was really inspirational to learn about a historical figure like Elizabeth I in class, and then get to see her real signature on a document the next day. My research and understanding of Elizabethan England was shaped in large part by studying and handling original materials at the Folger.”

Later in the course, Dr. Pollack gave the class more freedom to explore their individual research interests in the form of a group exhibition project. For this assignment, students proposed an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library and each was required to select five artifacts to put in the show. Professor Pollack did provide one stipulation, however – at least two of these artifacts had to come from the Folger’s collection. It is in this way that the disparate topics and items above came together, and were connected back to the Bard in equally unexpected ways.

For instance, Dechary’s research on the Age of Exploration drew him back to the Folger to examine the frontispiece for The Mariners Mirrour. While previous Folger research on the work focused on its relevance to navigational history, Dechary looked at it as an example of patriotism, investigating explorers like Sir Francis Drake and the emergence of England as a colonial empire. He also utilized previous research done at the Folger as as a supplement to other scholarship, using New World of Wonders : European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700 to tie the piece back to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and how it portrays indigenous people within the archetype of the “noble savage,” an image propagated by still more contemporary artifacts which can be found at the Folger and in other collections.

Maya Williams had the opportunity to actually wear one of her research objects: a mourning ring crafted in 1692. In her research, she used this object to explore Elizabethan attitudes on death and mourning, explaining how disease and high death rates made mortality a common and widely-accepted fact of life at the time. She then linked this context with the ubiquitous theme of death in Shakespeare’s works, specifically a moving monologue in King John about the loss of a child, written by a grieving Shakespeare who had just lost his own son. Maya was excited for the opportunity provided by the Folger to interact with her research object, saying that “Seeing and especially holding the mourning ring made all the difference in writing about it; photographs do not do its beauty justice.” In addition to providing sources and materials for her topic, the Folger also helped Maya to develop her research skills: she commented that “one of my classes this semester has a semester-long research project and I feel very prepared for using the library’s resources because of all that research and stack-searching I did.” 

Another example of these unexpected contributions of the Folger Library to the research conducted by the class comes from Isabelle Jurgens’ work examining Shakespearean women. While during the Bard’s lifetime, they might be considered to be docile homemakers and nothing more, Shakespeare challenged this stereotype with characters like Lady Macbeth. Jurgens contrasts their controversial portrayals as ambitious, powerful and potentially hysterical individuals with their expected role. It is here that she works in Klinikē, Diet of the Diseased, which highlights treatments for disease during the seventeenth century, hysteria being just one such example. While Lady Macbeth’s violent tendencies are in such obvious defiance of the patriarchy that Shakespeare implied them to be disordered, the more typical women within the Bard’s writing have similar undercurrents of rebellion, with perhaps the most iconic of them all, Juliet, acting as proof. By killing herself over her forbidden lover, she too does not fit within expectations for women in the Shakespearean age.

Romeo and Juliet found its way into Ryan Hustedt’s research in an equally unexpected way, through the 2022 Broadway musical & Juliet, which flips the script on the play’s heterosexuality by writing many of the characters and surrounding figures, including Romeo himself, to be queer. In Hustedt’s research into homosexuality in Renaissance England, the Folger and Shakespeare’s writings both proved to be of great value – the library’s 1617 letter from Queen Anne of Denmark to George Villiers, in which she begs with the Duke to sway the King’s opinions, demonstrating the fact that prominent members of English society were aware of this high-profile case of suspected same-sex attraction.

Quotes from both Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice supplemented this research into early modern perceptions of sexuality, despite the rudimentary understanding of the topic that Shakespeare had, which would have been typical for the time. Anna Harris found similar value from viewing Folger materials for her research into gender nonconformity, saying, “it is one thing to look at a source with the detachment of digital media, but a completely different experience being in the same room as such materials.” Anna ultimately made use of a Richard James Lane lithograph of Macbeth that she had viewed at a Folger session for her final paper.

For one student, their research didn’t just culminate in their final paper, but actually helped to shape their performance of one of Shakespeare’s most well-known roles. While Amanda Kelly was playing one of the three witches in the GW Shakespeare Company’s production of Macbeth, she was researching the history of Shakespeare’s witches and their depictions through the Folger’s collection of original prints. “Being able to research how different generations portrayed the witches through art at the Folger… I was able to see how Shakespeare’s witches have been masculinized and demonized throughout the centuries since the publication of Macbeth.” This inspired her to approach both her paper and role through a feminist lens, in her words, “playing the witches in a way that emphasized their power and wisdom, rather than uglifying them as villains.” For Amanda and every other student in the class, the Folger provided a bridge between their research topics and the Bard’s writings.