Curio

Shakespeare Room

completed 1942

Planning for the Shakespeare Room began in 1912, when members of the Shakespeare Society of NSW gathered to plan a commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April 1616. However, with the outbreak of World War I the event went almost unnoticed and it wasn’t until 1942 that this room finally opened to the public as the Shakespeare Tercentenary Memorial Library.

The design of the Shakespeare Room was inspired by the Tudor style of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s closet in Hampton Court Palace. The room is lined with Tasmanian blackwood and treated to resemble English oak. The motif of linen folds was a favourite among Tudor woodcarvers and is used throughout the panelling. Other exceptional examples of the woodcarver’s skill are the two intricately carved pillars just inside the door.

Above the door inside the room is Queen Elizabeth I’s coat of arms, which is repeated on the wooden cornice alternating with the coat of arms of the Earl of Southampton, who was one of Shakespeare’s patrons. Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms bears her motto Semper eadem (‘Always the same’) and the inscription Honi soit qui mal y pense (‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’). Outside above the doorway and on the glass doors is Shakespeare’s own coat of arms, granted to his father John Shakespeare in October 1596. The motto Non sanz droict translates as ‘Not without right’.

Shakespeare’s arms

Shakespeare’s coat of arms (reproduced above the doorway and on the glass doors) were granted to his father John Shakespeare in October 1596 after a lengthy, expensive and controversial process. The granting of arms was a very serious matter, bestowing the respectability, authority and status of nobility. The College of Heralds described Shakespeare’s coat of arms as: 'Gold, on a bend [diagonal bar], sable [black], a spear of the first steeled argent [gold with a silver tip]; and for his crest ... a falcon, his wings displayed argent [silver], standing on a wreath of his colours supporting a spear gold, steeled [silver] as aforesaid, set upon a helmet with mantles and tassles'.

The arms were granted on the basis of ‘faitheful and approved service to Henry VII performed by John's great-grandfather, and because John himself had married the daughter of one of the heirs Robert Arden of Wellingcote’.

^Footnotes

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Passionate about Shakespeare

Sydney’s Shakespeare Society of NSW was formed in 1900 to foster appreciation and study Shakespeare’s work. In 1912 the society established the Shakespeare Tercentenary Memorial Fund to finance a memorial to Shakespeare from the people of Sydney to mark the 300th anniversary of his death. In 1923 the NSW government passed an Act of Parliament that segregated the Library’s Shakespeare holdings as the foundation of a new Shakespeare collection, with the income from an endowment handed over to the Library to purchase additions.

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