Q&A: Peggy O’Brien on a fantastical Shakespeare map

Among the fascinating items in the Shakespeare Exhibition Hall is a new and somewhat unexpected Folger treasure: a huge, detailed fictional map with the title A Fantastical World of William Shakespeare that includes more than 140 characters from all of Shakespeare’s plays, located in a made-up landscape of cities, islands, and other spaces.

We had the chance to talk with Peggy O’Brien, who recently retired as the Folger’s Director of Education, about this wonderful map, how it came about, and how visitors are responding to it. O’Brien, along with Greg Prickman, the Folger’s Eric Weinmann librarian and director of collections and now interim director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, led the development of the new exhibitions that are now on display.

As O’Brien notes, the map drew on the imaginative efforts of University of Massachusetts / Amherst Professor Adam Zucker and illustrator Joe Lillington. Lillington also describes the challenges of creating the map and depicting the figures and scenes in an Arena Illustration blog post.

I wanted to ask you about the fictional Shakespeare map. How did it come about?

We knew that we wanted to have a section of the Shakespeare exhibition that had to do with the plays, because most people meet Shakespeare through a play—there’s no formal research, but we think that most often people meet Shakespeare via a play in school. The other thing we always knew was that in this section, we wanted to have something where visitors could look at all the plays at once. In our conversations with a company that we worked with, Storythings, the idea of a fantastical map came up. Greg and I were pretty taken with that idea, because a goal of this exhibition is to give people different lenses through which to see Shakespeare, and also the Folger and the Folger collection.

So we needed a brilliant scholar with a sense of humor and the right artist. Adam Zucker, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had been a resident scholar in the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute in 2018. I called him. And he said, Ah, okay, so there would be an “Isle of Tyrants”—Macbeth and Richard III would be on that. I said yes, that’s the whole idea!  So hard work went into what the “neighborhoods” were going to be and what characters would live in which neighborhoods. And Storythings found Joe Lillington, the illustrator. He had done some other work and we liked the way that it looked—it wasn’t cute and it wasn’t cartoony, it was warm and clear and expressive. And he started designing the neighborhoods and the rest of the map as well as populating it.

We wanted something that a visitor who didn’t know a lot of Shakespeare could make sense of. There would be enough for them to hang onto. But also, if you knew a lot about Shakespeare, there would be a lot of Easter eggs and fun things to discover.

The other reason we really like the map in the exhibition is that it’s big. It goes from floor to ceiling, and kids can come right up close to it. It’s not under glass. You can touch it, you can put your hands on it. There’s stuff at the very top and bottom too; there’s a character leaving, pursued by a bear, at the very bottom left. So there are things to look at for all heights and ages.

A last piece was that there are four different skin colors distributed among  those little tiny characters. And there are some different kinds of facial characteristics, too, because all kinds of actors, who look all different kinds of ways, have played and will play all these parts.

I noticed that there’s one, there may be more than one, character using a wheelchair.

There are at least two wheelchairs and there might be three. And there might be somebody with a cane also. Shakespeare didn’t write a character with a wheelchair. But our sense was it was in the same vein as people’s skin color. Students, professional actors, community theater groups include many differently abled folks, and all of them have played or will play these Shakespearean characters.

So we’ve talked about the map as a whole. Within it, are there neighborhoods that are your favorites?

One is the Family Therapy neighborhood. It’s a group, and Shakespeare’s the therapist, and Hamlet and his father’s Ghost is in it, and the Lear girls are in it, who definitely need a therapist—their father also really needed a therapist. I just love that because it presents to visitors, from the perhaps seemingly august Folger Shakespeare Library, a kind of offbeat, humorous way to look at what’s going on in these plays. And the whole map does that. The scholarship that goes on at the Folger, the scholarship we support, and the collection, which is the foundation of everything, is very serious, but it does not always have to be solemn. There’s a difference.

Another neighborhood that I really like is the Theater District. Those are plays that have plays in them. And there’s something lovely, I think about that. What we chose to include there, in a more focused way, is the play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  And I love that, because that’s a play that a lot of people have seen, that lots of summer Shakespeare festivals do. And Pyramus and Thisbe—I feel that because of the student Shakespeare festivals that we have at the Folger, I have seen thousands of kids do them. And so we have A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that wall and the lion. And then you can see around the sides, there are people from “The Mousetrap” in Hamlet waiting to go on.

And then there’s another neighborhood that is called Friends and Frenemies—Helena and Hermia, and other pairs of characters  who are both.

Not to give away too many Easter eggs, but for example, Richard III on the Isle of Tyrants…

He is next to a sign that has a horse with a red X through it.

Oh my goodness.

Cheeky, isn’t it? Or, way up in the upper left, there are these two little tombstones, and one has an R on it and one has a G on it: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.”

I know it’s been a short time since the Folger reopened, but how has the map worked out so far? What have you seen visitors do who are looking at the map?

It is very early, but people seem surprised by it and very taken with it. It is evoking a lot of curiosity, with people coming up really close and pointing at things. And then kids pointing at it—all different ages of people. And that’s exactly what we wanted.

What I also love is that in that section, there’s the map and then in the cases are items that reflect not all the plays, but a lot of the plays—objects that will rotate on and off display. We wanted to show the breadth of where all these plays have been. There’s a broadside from a production of The Taming of the Shrew that took place onboard a ship, the H.M.S. Resolute, in 1853, with the parts all played by crew members. There’s a wonderful  photograph of Kawakami Otojirō, a very well-known Japanese actor, who played Hamlet’s father’s Ghost in a 1905 production in Japan. It’s a fabulous photograph. There’s Madame Modjeska’s girdle that she wore as Cleopatra.

So people have an interest in the map; they’re trying to do a little figuring out about it, and they are looking at the key. They also are poring over the things in those cases. And there’s something about the fact that both of those things are happening at the same time, that is very moving to somebody like me. People don’t look at that map and say, oh, ha ha, whatever, and keep going. They really pay attention to it, like they do with the things in the cases. And those are two very different lenses through which to look at Shakespeare’s plays, and visitors are giving them equal attention.

Do you get a sense that people who know a lot about Shakespeare are drawn to the map as well?

A couple of us gave tours to groups of local scholars. A number of these professors said, I definitely want to bring my students here to see this—all the exhibitions. But when I got to the map, they were like, whoa, wait a minute. There were about 25 of them, and they were immediately saying, oh my gosh, look at that. They went right for the Easter eggs. It was so much fun for me to see. So we know that there are responses across the board.

How are kids responding, particularly young children?

My response to the question about children and the map is based on how tall they are. There are loads of kids in the exhibition spaces, which is so pleasing to us, I can hardly say. So many people have said to me, people who don’t have anything to do with kids, how fabulous it is that there are kids in there. They’re all over the place.

Anyway, the map has to do with how tall they are, because the map goes all the way up or most of the way up to the ceiling. So what you see kids doing is pointing to certain pieces and saying to a grownup, what’s going on here? They might say, what is that bear doing down there?  Or a grown-up might be asking a child that.

That’s how I’ve seen young kids interact with it, talking to a grownup. And then the grownup may be saying, oh, yeah, let’s see what that is. Let’s see if we can figure that out. That’s the kind of piquing curiosity that we wanted. And that, in terms of my anecdotal observation, is what’s happening.  We feel like we’re off to a good start.