Shakespeare’s Chair: Material Culture and Literary Phantasms

Abstract

Out of no fewer than five so-called “Shakespeare’s chairs” that have been preserved or at least referred to in sources, the most remarkable one is probably the chair purchased by Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1831) in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1790, today housed in the National Museum in Krakow.1 Despite its long and turbulent history, a large fragment of the chair has survived, having been kept in a reliquary-like case prepared especially for it at the beginning of the nineteenth century (figure 1). Moreover, the number of preserved documents related to the object is exceptional. The two most important ones are an extensive, extremely detailed, vivid, slightly amusing, and slightly gruesome description of the circumstances of the purchase, written by Izabela Czartoryska herself around 1820, and a certificate of the chair’s authenticity issued in Stratford in January 1791.2 The other available documents contain only passing references to the chair, but still throw some light on its history. Izabela’s account is well-known and has been frequently cited and repeated in academic literature.3 Thus far, it has never been questioned. In this essay, I present ample evidence to suggest that many elements of the story are inaccurate, to say the least, while its most extraordinary and exciting fragments are entirely fictitious. I aim to reconstruct as faithfully as possible the circumstances of Izabela Czartoryska’s purchase of “Shakespeare’s chair,” to describe its later fate, and to propose an explanation for the fantastic story about its acquisition. From a broader perspective, the essay is concerned with the problem of a material relic as an essential element of a poet’s cult.4