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The Wrong Stuff: Staffordshire Figures at the Folger Shakespeare Library
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2015
Extract
Atop a raised pedestal leans the man himself (Fig. 1). He wears pink breeches, white hose, an orange cloak draped open to the ground, and a blue jerkin beneath it, from which a muslin-colored shirt protrudes, these last two liberally gilded. His posture is in obvious if distant emulation of the Kent and Scheemakers memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey: the left elbow rests on a closed book with gilt-edged pages, the legs are crossed at the knee, and the ball of the left foot is perched in front of the right, jauntily askew, a position that makes the paint loss of its black slipper especially pronounced. Both hands rest at waist level, one clutching a page of manuscript at which the other points. The pose is puzzling, since the “writing” that appears there is just a scrawl of lines and dashes that shows where text ought to be, but conspicuously isn't. Left to index nothing that anyone has bothered to transcribe, the gesture is a lazy indication of literary noteworthiness, not unlike the women who sit at the poet's feet, gazing upward in an attitude of vague, noncommittal reverence. They might be heroines from the plays or they might not be; their contrasting costumes and identical expressions convey nothing beyond the usual laudatory relation of figural base to subject. Between them, garlanded with oak leaves and acorns, is the dial of a clock, its numbers and hands painted into place with the same gold that decorates the author's ensemble. The time is, and forever shall be, nine minutes past five.
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- Re: Sources: Ellen MacKay
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References
Endnotes
1. For a rich set of considerations of this arrangement, see Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Paul Holberton, 2007).
2. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 4.
3. Ibid., 48, 4.
4. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Three Employments,” in Essays of Montaigne, 4 vols., trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves & Turner, 1902), 3:261–76, at 274–5.
5. Ibid., 275. Martin Mueller's choice of this quotation for his epigraph in an essay on the future of the EEBO archive has significantly influenced my thinking in this essay; see Mueller, Martin, “The EEBO–TCP Phase I Public Release,” Spenser Review 44.2 (Fall 2014)Google Scholar, www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-44/442/digital-projects/the-eebo-tcp-phase-i-public-release/, accessed 25 November 2014.
6. An excellent account of the history and economics of this genesis is found in Schwarzbach's, F. S. essay “Twelve Ways of Looking at a Staffordshire Figurine: An Essay in Cultural Studies,” VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal 29 (2001): 6–60Google Scholar.
7. Morgan, Simon, “Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17.2 (2012): 127–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. Ngai, Sianne, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811–47, at 814Google Scholar. On the primitiveness of Staffordshire figures, see Herbert Read's preface to “the first monograph to be devoted to Staffordshire pottery figures,” which he describes as “rather lonely remnants of English peasant art”; Staffordshire Pottery Figures (London: Duckworth, 1929), n.p.
9. Carson, Susannah, “A Pair of Loyal Companions,” Victorian Homes 29.1 (2010): 20–2, at 22Google Scholar.
10. McWilliam, Rohan, “The Theatricality of the Staffordshire Figurine,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10.1 (2005): 107–14, at 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11. Ngai, 813.
12. Schwarzbach, 8.
13. Ibid., 45.
14. Ibid., 48. The phrase “creative work” is a reference to Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 167. Elaine Freedgood makes a similar claim in her study of the way things work in fictional realms: “[W]e often read the welter of things in Victorian novels as symptomatic of what we reflexively understand to be the bad materialism of commodity culture.” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 140.
15. Leah Price, ed., Unpacking my Library: Writers and Their Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 65. Unsurprisingly, this conviction holds just as strongly in the other direction. Describing the moment that the books in her household had to make way for her extensive Staffordshire collection, Myrna Schkolne draws a hard line between objects of substance—the resources of her life's work (Schkolne is the author of multiple collectors’ guides to Staffordshire figural pottery)—and mere clutter: “The books had all been great reads once upon a time, but realistically we were never going to read them again. Of course, my reference library … remains, filling shelves that line my office. But beyond my office, shelves in the Schkolne household display figures, not books.” Myrna Schkolne, “Sailor Sale?” Staffordshire Figures, 1780–1840, 18 November 2008, www.mystaffordshirefigures.com/blog/sailor-sale, accessed 16 October 2014.
16. Clay Shirky, “Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags,” Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet, 4 October 2007, www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html?goback=.gde_1838701_member_179729766, accessed 27 October 2014.
17. Harriet Schechter, Let Go of Clutter (New York: McGraw–Hill, 2001), 11, quoted in Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 14. I am very grateful to Scott for making his excellent book accessible to me prior to its publication.
18. The abecedarium as a recasting of a quotation from Leibnitz (an “alphabet of human thoughts”) is discussed in Selcer, Daniel, “The Uninterrupted Ocean: Leibniz and the Encyclopedic Imagination,” Representations 98.1 (2007): 25–50, at 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Helpfully, Foucault defines the archive as the absence of precisely this manner of chaos: “the archive is … that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass” but remain “distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities”; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 129.
19. Georgian and Other Furniture and Silver, Shakespearean Memorabilia, Old English Porcelains, Paintings, & Rugs … [From] the Folger Shakespeare Library … and from Other Owners (New York: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., 1964), 19–20.
20. These are the titles for call numbers ART 255868 and ART 262229, respectively. The Hamnet catalog is online at http://shakespeare.folger.edu/.
21. P. D. Gordon Pugh, Staffordshire Portrait Figures and Allied Subjects of the Victorian Era (New York: Praeger, 1971), H490, plate 2.
22. The example commonly raised by Staffordshire cognoscenti is the shared molds from which Ben Franklins, George Washingtons, and, on occasion, Thomas Jeffersons were minted during the high postrevolutionary demand for American statesmen. See, for instance, Jones, Vere, “Ceramic Fame and Infamy: Staffordshire Figures,” Antiques Journal 35 (July 1980): 12–15, 46, at 14Google Scholar. Another is the relabeling of the figure of opera singer Maria Malibran as Queen Victoria. Pugh explains, “After the Queen's accession on June 20th, 1837, the potters anticipated a big public demand for a figure of the young monarch and rose to the occasion by modifying the existing figure of Maria Malibran.” The modification amounted to the addition of a crown on the figure's settee. Pugh, plate 2, A118.
23. Pugh annotates a picture of both figures with the following account: “the pairing of figures of Garibaldi and Shakespeare can be explained on the grounds that Garibaldi visited England in 1864, the year in which the tricentenary of the birth of Shakespeare was being celebrated” (plate 94, C293-4). Evidence for this pairing is found in the Folger catalog, in a note for a “William Shakespeare Staffordshire pottery figure decored in polychrome and gold” (ART 255868): “This is possibly one of a pair of figures including Garibaldi.”
24. “Free Exhibition of Select British Manufactures,” Illustrated London News, 18 March 1848, 187.
25. Ibid., 188 (from Richard II and Henry IV, part 1), quoted in Pugh, 80.
26. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 129.