After Shakespeare
15 July 2016 – 15 January 2017
Noel Shaw Gallery, Baillieu Library, The University of Melbourne
To mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, the Baillieu Library exhibition After Shakespeare explores the author’s posthumous legacy, both in terms of writers who imitated or adapted his works (that is, literally wrote ‘after’ his style) and in terms of Shakespeare’s reputation and significance in the four centuries after his demise, with a particular emphasis on how his work has been received in Australia.
Bringing together for the first time two of only five known Australian copies of the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1632), a unique promptbook for a slated Gold Rush era performance of Antony and Cleopatra at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal in 1856, and numerous production artefacts and ephemera, After Shakespeare offers a rare glimpse of important Shakespeariana from the University of Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria and the Melbourne Theatre Company.
