Saturday on the Couch: The Shakespeare Room

If you’re in Sydney on a Tuesday, between 10 am and 4 pm, take yourself off to the Mitchell Library in Macquarie Street and visit the Shakespeare Room.

This little-known gem is a treasure.

In 1912 the Shakespeare Society in Sydney met to plan money-raising events to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. They were very successful, raising £500, and it was decided to endow Sydney with a Shakespeare Library. The events of World War 1 delayed the opening of the library till the early 1940s, rather than 1916.

The room is a small one, but extremely interesting. (Incidentally, it can be hired for small private functions.)

The room is fitted out, Tudor style. The pressed iron ceiling is modelled on Wolsey’s ceiling at Hampton Court. The panelling is Tasmanian oak and Blackwood treated to look like English oak. Elizabeth 1’s and Shakespeare’s coat of arms are displayed. All the wood carving was done by Charles Sherline, whose father did much of the carving on the Titanic.

Beautiful stained glass windows by Benfield show the Seven Ages of Man, from ‘As You Like It’. These are in rich crimsons and blues.

The room is lined with books, of course. There are many different editions, from old leather bound copies to modern editions relying on recent scholarship. I spotted the ‘Arden’ editions which were the edition to use when I was studying Shakespeare – half a page of text to half a page of textual commentary.

Open on a stand near the door, is a first folio edition.

The afternoon we visited, an older lady gave us a commentary on the room. Clearly, she loved it. We were joined by a young Italian backpacker, taking a break from her studies to travel. It seemed appropriate as so many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in Italy.

A visit to this lovely room won’t take you long, and there are other exhibitions in the NSW State Library, a pleasant café and, opposite the green expanse of the Botanical Gardens.  

Do you know of a similarly themed room in your city? 

Dymocks has numerous volumes of plays, biographies, commentaries and learned tomes about the life and times of William Shakespeare, enough to gladden any heart. They also have the highly acclaimed BBC DVD series of plays performed by actors such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Zoe Wanamaker and Diane Rigg.