Shakespeare

The Shakespeare sculpture stands in Poets’ Corner, within Westminster Abbey in London’s City of Westminster. Its life-size white marble figure shows the playwright in period clothing, with one leg crossed and an elbow resting on three untitled books. A bay wreath, dagger and dramatic mask surround the figure with symbols of immortality, tragedy and theatre.

William Kent designed the monument, and Peter Scheemakers carved it in 1740. The Shakespeare Ladies Club drove the project, raising funds through benefit performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres. Carved heads of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry V and Richard III decorate the pedestal beneath an architectural frame. Shakespeare’s left hand points towards a scroll carrying lines from Prospero in The Tempest. An inscription records the memorial’s erection 124 years after his death, while another states that Shakespeare lies buried at Stratford-on-Avon.

The sculpture commemorates a writer who was born in 1564 and died in 1616, but Westminster Abbey is not his burial place. Look closely between the marble figure’s feet for “T T 1787”, probably scratched by a Westminster schoolboy. Railings once stood before the monument, and the marble received its last full cleaning in 1997.