Unholy alliance

The British Museum has collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company on this exhibition, in order to make links between the rich array of BM treasures and Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve never been very convinced about the intermingling of video screens and art: people almost always gravitate to the moving image, particularly if words are involved and people featured. Clips of actors rolling out Shakespeare’s lines with every appearance of enjoyment are bound to capture the attention of the audience at the expense of artefacts, which simply don’t have the same drama or human interest. ‘Oh look, there’s Siân Phillips — or is it Harriet Walter?’ is a much more likely cry than ‘My gosh, it’s the eye relic of Edward Oldcorne in its silver reliquary — wasn’t that saved after his execution in Worcester in 1606?’

It is often remarked that so little is known of Shakespeare’s life that biographers and historians would be grateful for even his laundry lists to eke out the sum of real information about him. Traditionally, the way round this has been to deduce biographical detail from his published (fictional) writings, and — more reliably — concentrate on the period in which he lived. This is the approach at the BM’s often beautiful but bewildering show, which tries to evoke several things, including the theatre-going experience of Elizabethan England. Am I alone in thinking that the exhibition, though made up of a great many fine objects, lacks coherence and, ultimately, Shakespearian magic? It is too big, and too prosaic, for all its vaunted and declaimed poetry. What it really needed was a powerful (and fiercely independent) theatrical intelligence to offer a new interpretation of the Bard — as an exhibition, not a memory of plays performed. Instead we are offered a mazy pilgrimage through period artefacts, punctuated by new digital interventions: an unholy and unsuccessful mating of minds.