Shakespeare's Diary

Dear Diary: Ye gads! the damn bloody fool Southampton is driving me mad as Ophelia! He be a charming bloke, with delicate folds of curling hair better suited for a woman than a man, and I daresay he has the financial resources needed to stage my plays, but he breaks the straws of my patience with his poking and prodding, wanting to know every last word of my latest play. He's almost as bad as Her Majesty! I expect I'll have to dedicate yet another comedy or poem to him. He likes to have his locks stroked. Back to work... 'Whether 'tis nobler the soul...the spirit?...the mind?...to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...'

Okay, so obviously that isn't really a passage from Shakespeare's diary. Such a book probably doesn't exist. However, on Friday I went to The Morgan Library to do some dissertation research, and I took some time to walk through two of their current exhibitions that have nothing to do one another: diaries and Shakespeare. The Morgan Library is a delightful NYC museum, not typically on the tourist's radar. It is a museum with a collection of primarily works on paper: drawings, watercolors, prints, books, manuscripts, sheet music, and so on. It was established by J. P. Morgan when he turned over his father's library and collection to the City. His father was the famous J. Pierpont Morgan, the banker, whose voracious collecting amassed an incredible array of material in all media, many of which went to other institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can go to The Morgan and see his Gilded Age library and other rooms from his home and many paintings from his Renaissance art collection, while also seeing excellent exhibitions on a variety of subjects.

The exhibition The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives brings together works by people as disparate as Charlotte Brontë to Tennessee Williams. The idea of the diary here is broadly defined, from actual bound journals recording the thoughts of the famous and ordinary, to illustrated manuals, study works, calendar journals, religious treatises, etc. The exhibition is interesting conceptually, especially for anyone who is a journal writer (I've been keeping them sporadically for nearly 20 years now!). But the actual installation is a bit dreary and uninteresting, short of seeing the handwriting of these people. For all the hype of connecting diaries to the current world of blogs and social networking as the exhibition claims, it was disappointing that they didn't put a station up that allowed people to leave their own thoughts or contribute to a journal of some sort. The online version of the exhibition, however, is superb. With zoomable digital images and more narrative to learn about individuals and their diaries, it may be worth spending your time visiting that version of the exhibition than going to the museum itself.

In sharp contrast, however, the very focused exhibition The Changing Face of William Shakespeare relates to the scholarship done to authenticate the now-famous Shakespeare portrait, about which I blogged two years ago (see the image above). The exhibition argues that the now-called Cobbe portrait is perhaps the best and earliest representation of Shakespeare himself. This small exhibition of a few oil portraits, prints, books, and manuscripts shows how derivatives of this picture over time help reinforce the belief that this portrait is as close to the most accurate representation of the bard. The show itself is small, but in this case intimacy works well, especially because the actual portrait of Shakespeare is simply beautiful and you feel as if you're in the presence of someone regal. The painting practically glows, and the artist's attention to detail in areas like facial hair truly are best seen in person. The painting make you realize that even if this isn't Shakespeare it was undoubtedly someone perceived as important because of the attention paid to the subject's physical appearance and cultural standing.

Library Bytes: Collapse in Köln

Word about the physical collapse of the building for the Historical Archive of Köln (Cologne), Germany on March 3 only seems to be hitting the American newsbytes in the past day or so. I checked with a few people today and no one had even heard about it before today. The picture you see here (taken by Federico Gambarini) is one of the images available with this article from the London Times from last week reporting on the catastrophe. All the staff and researchers got out in time, although early reports said that two construction workers were trapped. I have not read that anyone died in the collapse, so it seems the biggest misfortune is the devastating loss of material that was held in this archive. According to the article in the Times, among the holdings of this archive were some original manuscript writings by Karl Marx and handwritten musical scores by Jacques Offenbach. Reporter Roger Boyes notes one particular group of records whose potential loss is a serious tragedy: "The archives included the minutes of all town council meetings [for Cologne] held since 1376. Not a single session had been missed, making the collection a remarkable resource for legal historians." An update from the director, Dr. Ulrich S. Soénius, came through a email listservs today that salvage operations are in effect. They've been surprised by the fact that some of the archives seem to be completely intact or suffered only minimal damage, although many others have been completely destroyed. A full assessment will probably takes months to determine. The sad part is that apparently none of this material was ever digitized, which means that which was lost is now permanently lost. This is the type of situation that demonstrates the importance of digitizing such materials for future generations, but of course this takes a lot of money. What shocks me most, however, is that this six-story building was only constructed in the 1970s. Germany has enormous stone cathedrals dating back over 1,000 years that have withstood the tests of time, but a 35-year-old building comes tumbling down. I don't know much about architectural engineering, but there seems to be something seriously wrong with that.