Compton Verney: The Shakespeare Gallery & Shakespeare in Art

Compton Verney is an independent national art gallery and ‘Capability’ Brown landscape located nine miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. Its current exhibitions celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

'With the legendary actor-manager David Garrick serving as Shakespeare's high priest, bardolatry swept mid-18th-century England to the point that painters, too, reproduced the words and scenes that actors portrayed onstage. The artists' response on canvas, of course, was not entirely devotional. Prints of their paintings also earned them a pretty penny.

In this they were helped by the public's growing familiarity with at least a dozen Shakespeare plays, notably "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Richard III."' (Alan Riding, NY Times)

This is where Compton Verney's exhibitions begin. Boydell’s Vision: The Shakespeare Gallery in the 18th Century traces the history of John Boydell’s famous Shakespeare Gallery which opened in 1789 on London’s Pall Mall. The Shakespeare Gallery was the first thematic public exhibition of its time and also the first devoted to the Bard.

Using Shakespeare as a vehicle for the development of a national school of history painting, the print publisher John Boydell commissioned prominent painters, sculptors and printmakers of the day, including George Romney, Henry Fuseli and James Northcote, to produce works depicting scenes from all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Boydell’s Vision is the first exhibition in the UK to explore the formation of this early blockbuster, and includes paintings and prints by the artists commissioned by Boydell, as well as a recent digital reconstruction of The Shakespeare Gallery as it looked in 1796.

The example of Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery provides the inspiration for the theatrical design of Compton Verney's other Shakespeare exhibition. Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy offers an opportunity for art and theatre lovers to discover his works through a unique series of theatrical encounters. These include paintings, photography, projection and a sound score and readings by leading Royal Shakespeare Company actors.

Shakespeare was a master of dramatising human emotions in their myriad forms. His plays are as relevant to us today as they were over 400 years ago and they remain a vital source of inspiration to artists. This major new exhibition focuses on pivotal Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all of which have motivated artists across the ages, from George Romney, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Singer Sargent and G.F. Watts to Karl Weschke, Kristin & Davy McGuire and Tom Hunter.

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Kate Tempest - What We Came After.

Written on the Heart

I'm looking forward to seeing Written on the Heart at the Duchess Theatre later this month.

"Across an 80 year divide, two men translate the word of God into the English tongue. For one, it means death at the stake [Tyndale]. For the other, it could mean an archbishop's mitre [Andrewes]. After almost a century of unrest, the King James Bible was intended to end the violent upheavals of the English reformation. But deep-seated conflicts force a leading translator to confront the betrayal of his youthful religious ideals, for the sake of social peace. Written by David Edgar, whose extensive work for the Company includes Destiny, Pentecost and Nicholas Nickleby, and marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Written on the Heart is directed by RSC Artistic Director Designate Gregory Doran."

Edgar is drawn to writing about the process of negotiation, about middle-aged men in conference, balancing principle with expediency:

“I’m interested by the way in which people with political beliefs come to make compromises in the way that Andrewes compromises. There are individuals, radicals in their youth, who decide that a certain amount of what they fought for has been achieved. We didn’t get everything we wanted, they say, but we’re satisfied with how far we have come. It’s this far - but no further. Yet there’s a younger, more radical generation who refuse to agree to this. You can’t have the franchise on this, they tell their elders. Don’t think that the battle has been won, just because you say so. Andrewes is somebody who believes in this far but no further and in the play he is confronted by Tyndale, the heroic Protestant martyr who stuck to his guns.”

Michael Billington, in his review of the play, states:

"Edgar stages a dream-like encounter between Andrewes and Tyndale that gets to the heart of the drama. Andrewes, guilt-haunted over his persecution of schismatics, emerges as a trimming traditionalist; Tyndale is a radical appalled to find a church that still relies on chalices and altar rails, and a new version of the Bible that sacrifices meaning to music. You don't have to be a scholar to follow the argument, since Edgar gives us plenty of textual evidence and, even if his play requires an interest in history, it exposes the divisions that today still rend the Anglican church."

Similarly, Rachel Boulding in the Church Times writes that Edgar:

"embodies the conflict in the character of Andrewes.



So he fashions an excellent history lesson, fleshing out how and why these debates are not just academic concerns, but why they matter, then and now. Thus the debate crackles into life, and Andrewes incarnates the two sides in his inner turmoil, strug­gling between guilt over his supposed betrayal of puritan colleagues, and personal ambition (there being much amused specu­lation about who will be the next Archbishop of Canter­bury in 1610)."

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Gerry Rafferty - Whatever's Written On Your Heart.