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.