Celebrating William Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday: One for the Books at Penn Libraries |
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April 15, 2014, Volume 60, No. 30 |
The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts will celebrate the Bard’s 450th birthday at 5:30 p.m. on April 23. Along with the opening of an exhibition, Shakespearian Residues, the birthday party will include refreshments and selected short readings from various Shakespeare plays featuring Penn faculty, library staff and the Underground Shakespeare Company. The exhibit will be on display from April 23 through June 9, 2014, next to the Rittenhouse Orrery on the 6th floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.
To RSVP for the birthday (appreciated but not required) and for more information visit: www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/shakespeare450.html |
For this exhibit, commemorating the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Kislak Center has chosen to honor a selection of “Shakespeariana” from its collection, including early editions, romantic images, quirky artifacts such as Yorick’s skull, used in 19th-century productions of Hamlet, along with works inspired by the Bard. Shown here are a couple of the items that will be exhibited.
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Shakespeare's gloves (left) 16th-century leather gloves allegedly owned by Shakespeare, authentic to the time period. |
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Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Libraries |
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Penn Libraries holds one of the world’s largest Shakespeare collections. Housed in the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, which is devoted to the study of Shakespeare and other Tudor and Stuart dramatists, the collection includes most writings about Shakespeare and virtually all English-language editions of his plays and poems, including the first four folios, some early quartos and other editions up to the present time. Also among its holdings are superb examples of scholarship about Shakespeare by former and present Penn students and faculty.
Translations of Shakespeare into many world languages are a special focus of the collection at the H. H. Furness Memorial Library.
Promptbooks, biographies, photographs, letters, scrapbooks and playbills offer rich resources for early stage history. In addition, the Library gathers primary and secondary information about the history of the Renaissance, especially in England but also on the Continent, and Shakespeare’s predecessors, contemporaries and successors among English Renaissance literary writers, particularly dramatists. It also contains more than 2,000 microfilm dissertations on Shakespeare and English drama from the middle ages through the Restoration.
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Penn's Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library contains a replica (above) of London's Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's theatre company performed. Photograph by Marguerite F. Miller |
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Hamlet (above), lithograph poster for Ambroise Thomas's Opera (Paris, n.d.). Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Libraries |
The H. H. Furness Memorial Library was donated to the University of Pennsylvania in 1931 by Penn Trustee Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865-1930) and his wife, Louise Brooks Winsor Furness, after his death. The majority of the expansive collection was amassed by his father, Horace Howard Furness, Sr. during his lifetime (1833-1912); he had been elected a Penn Trustee in 1880.
Much of the Furness Memorial Library collection, has been digitized thanks to leadership of Rebecca Bushnell, former dean of SAS, in collaboration with others, making a virtual version accessible to all on the University Libraries’ website, www.library.upenn.edu
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(Above) some of the 16th-century linen-fold paneling from their family's library which had subsequently been in the Furness Building (now the Fisher Fine Arts Library) that housed the University's Library from 1891 until 1962 when Van Pelt was built. The Victorian building was designed by Frank Furness, brother of H.H. Furness Sr. It was enlarged to house the Shakespeare Library; the addition was completed in 1932. Photograph by Marguerite F. Miller |
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