Department of English Chair James Kearney and library curator David Gartrell trace the Bard’s cultural legacy from a 1685 Fourth Folio to modern cinema
Department of English Chair James Kearney and UC Santa Barbara Library curator of rare books and manuscripts David Gartrell have co-curated Infinite Variety: The Many Lives of Shakespeare’s Texts. The new exhibition explores the many forms and afterlives of William Shakespeare’s art, tracing a continuous lineage of adaptation from historic manuscripts to 21st-century digital media drawn from the library's Special Research Collections.
“I love thinking about this exhibition gallery as a conversational space, a collaborative space — where Shakespeare speaks to and inspires these other writers and artists, who in turn speak to and with and through Shakespeare,” Kearney said. “And I love the idea of Kurosawa’s 20th-century Macbeth script and Shakespeare’s 17th-century folio in a room together, conversing across cultures and centuries.”
The centerpiece of the collection is an original 1685 Fourth Folio, generously loaned by longtime university supporter Sara Miller McCune. The exhibition is on display until June 12 in the Sara Miller McCune Arts Library and features upcoming events including a student performance of “The Strangers’ Case” on May 1 and a screening of "Storytelling for the Screen: Hamnet" on May 14. Read the full story on The Current.
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