The Shakespeare Room and Shakespeare Resources in the Mitchell Library + Renaissance Art for Shakespeare Plus Students at ACU in 2019

Shakespearean Art in the NSW Gallery 2019

Thank you ALL for your outstanding attendance today- just about 100% – that is a record!!!

The State Library with its wonderful Shakespeare statue outside (in one-time Shakespeare Place”) was a delight to be involved with- despite the life-endangering freeway that one has to cross to get there!!!!.

Thank you Kevin for such a wonderful exposition of all the aspects of the history of the Shakespeare Room complete with its stained glass depiction of “All the World’s a Stage” speech from As You Like It: 

Here is the bulk of Kevin’s talk with my own rendition of the Jacques’ speech “All the World’s A Stage”:

And please do not miss this amazing film which begins with the line “All the World’s A Stage”:

 

Thank you also Emma, for your marvellous presentation of so many of Shakespeare’s works from his own times and thereafter. That was such a treat for us all: to put our hands on the texts that had allowed these creative works to live into our own times. We all thoroughly enjoyed your talk and especially all the effort you had put in to such a powerfully representative selection of works by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and their contemporaries. And again it was so good to hear about Shakespeare’s Henry IV and the way that had been one of the very first plays put in Sydney (perhaps it was the first play???!!!). In 1800 an fully convict cast in a convict built theatre, putting in one of the most politically subversive plays: what an amazing event. I hope one of our students is going to write a book about that event one day!!!!:

Here is Emma’s introduction to the Library and then her follow-up talk of all the wonderful Shakespereana (does such a word exist) in the Libary: 

 

Before, this extraordinary Library visit, we all had an amazing experience exploring Renaissance art depicting so many of the social and historical contexts and obsessions of the Renaissance era. Shakespeare would have been attuned to all of this and much of it would have fed into his imagination in both his poetry and his plays. Hope you found the study sheet useful to channel your interests! I have also posted up here a number of the key works that we explored today. The questions in the study guide are designed to help you make sense of what you are looking at and to help you relate the paintings and art works to the preoccupations of Shakespeare himself in his poems and plays. It is important to work through the questions with your team mates, but the most important thing is to enjoy the experience, and to come away with a deeper sense of what life around the time of Shakespeare was actually like. I do think this was achieved by all!

I could add two simple questions to the range of questions on the study guide and these would be:

1. What is this painting/ art work telling me about human experience during the Renaissance? (Can you describe what is going on in the painting/ art work in as much detail as possible?)

2. What is special about the way this painting is telling  its story? (Is it the colour,  the texture, the originality, the point of view?)

Your quiz this week will have some questions that are directly related to this art gallery visit and to the accompanying visit to the Shakespeare Room at the State Library. Enjoy!

Here is the first of a number of key religious works- please study your sheet carefully:

Here is the most important work in the class cabinets in the centre of the room. Study carefully!!! Click on all images to enlarge!!

So here is the talk and our discussions about the works in the art gallery: 

Classical Influences in the Renaissance- and the landscape of A Midsummer Night’s Dream…. 

Religious Art: and critically compare the two Deposition scenes. What are the key differences?

Daily LIfe in the Renaissance….

And Everday Life

Aristocratic Life

Renaissance Landscapes and Still Life:

Still Life in the Renaissance:

Sir Peter Paul Rubens