Last modified on Fri 5 Feb 2021 05.44 EST
It is a little-known fact that Birmingham is home to the largest Shakespeare collection in any public library in the world.
Created in 1864 to celebrate the playwright’s 300th birthday, it was the world’s first great Shakespeare collection and once held such standing that the Soviet government deposited 300 items in the collection during the depths of the cold war.
But in recent years the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library has become a neglected asset, according to Professor Ewan Fernie, chair of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University and director of the Everything to Everybody project, which is striving to bring the archive into the heart of 21st-century life.
The Book of the Courtier, and
The Life of Lazrillo De Tormes, all but the last of which were among the assigned reading for Comp. Lit. 22 with Professor Trafton.
Digression: Leon Black, who endowed the chair in Shakespearean Studies that Professor Crewe held, was one of my best friends at Dartmouth. I lived with him and three other Dartmouth seniors during our last quarter before graduation. We all knew Leon was going to be successful.
Leon spent his senior year working on a dissertation exploring the theme of the mask in European art and literature. In the spring of 1973 I attended Leon’s presentation on the dissertation in Sanborn House. It featured a slide illustration and accompanying discussion of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Although the image has become a cliché since then, I was unfamiliar with it at the time.