All Roads Lead Back to the Bard

By Kallie Comardelle

As an English literature student pursuing my degree at the University of Delaware, I feel that it is both my prerogative and my responsibility to talk about the intersection between English literary history and English material culture history, and the surprising lack of connection between the two disciplines that I observed (or, rather, lack of contemporarily perceivable connection). Throughout the British Design History trip, I was on the lookout for literary scenes or figures that I was familiar with, both because that’s what I study, but also because I had an (overinflated) expectation that readily recognizable English literature scenes would show up everywhere in material culture. And to that end, English literary scenes, characters, and references were readily available — just not to the modern eye. 

The English literary canon has dominated the study of literature since the end of the early modern period (meaning since the early 1700s; the early modern period is typically understood to last from 1450-1750 CE). Before this time, readers and scholars alike primarily celebrated and studied classical literature, i.e. Greek and Roman mythology, as well as some medieval literature (one of the founding texts of the English literary canon is Beowulf — the date it was written is unknown, but the published manuscript is dated to around 1000 CE). The early modern period birthed literary titans like John Milton and William Shakespeare, among many others, and their work set the foundation for the study of literature for the next 300 years. Recently there have been moves made within English scholarship to break the literary canon, as the canon upholds the notion that the only literature worth studying is that written by wealthy, old, white, English men. But, despite the moves made to change the “must-study” list, the study of English literature created by wealthy, old, white, English men is still incredibly prevalent in both the field of literature studies as a whole, and within the American public education system. 

Because the importance of the canon has been drilled into me since I was a lowly undergraduate English major — and even before that when I was a student in the American public education system — I expected the literary scene that I grew up familiar with to be a big deal in England. I was very wrong. While on the hunt for recognizable hints of English literature within the field of material culture, my well runneth fairly dry. Most of the recognizable references to English literature that I found were effigies of Shakespeare himself (figures 1, 2). On one rare occasion, within the storage of Middleport Pottery near Stoke-on-Trent, I was able to find molds of Shakespearean figures, which were incredibly interesting given both their interpretative nature, and given the implications that people were buying porcelain figurines of literary characters like people would collect action figures or Funko pops of their favorite fictional characters today (figures 3, 4, 5). This lack isn’t to say that these references didn’t exist, but to acknowledge that some of the references that would have been understood by eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences no longer translate, as the study of English literature in America (and England, I believe, but I don’t want to speak to the educational culture of a country that I did not grow up in) is mostly focused exclusively on Shakespeare. Today, references to a Byron poem no longer resonate. References to Byron were present on the trip, especially with ceramics, and in particular on nineteenth century ceramics. Some of these ceramics, like the Staffordshire figures, or like some of the transfer printed ceramics, wouldn’t have been incredibly pricey to produce, and so fans of English literature could display these figures on their mantles and throughout their homes. I wonder, though, why these references no longer resonate. How did the massive history of British literature get watered down to only include Shakespeare? Then again, here I am in this post using Shakespeare as a metonym for British literature. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, besides the fact that I, too, am complicit in generalizing the history of British literature under the umbrella of “Shakespeare,” but I am, of course, a product of my environment, and when you read one Shakespeare play a year in high school as part of your literary education, what else are you to do except assume that literature is Shakespeare (figure 6)?