The Wrong Stuff: Staffordshire Figures at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Abstract

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.