From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

This podcast is called Painting is Welcome.

It's fairly common knowledge that in the decades following Shakespeare's death, his work fell out of fashion.

Most scholars attribute his Renaissance to David Garrick, a leading actor and theater

manager who championed Shakespeare's work in the mid-1700s, staging a Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769.

Riding on Garrick's coattails was another artistic entrepreneur, John Boydell. In 1789, he opened one of England's first art galleries, a building devoted entirely to

paintings of scenes from Shakespeare's plays.

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery has now been recreated, in its entirety, online.

It's the work of Janine Barkas, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

We asked her in to talk about the 18th century Shakespeare craze and how Boydell capitalized on it.

Janine is interviewed by Barbara Bogave.

Well, before we get to the experience of the virtual online Boydell exhibit, I'd like us all to get a fix on what exactly the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery originally was, IRL, in real life.

So give us the primer.

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was the first ever museum dedicated to William Shakespeare.

It was along Paul Mall in London.

It was founded in 1789, lasted for 15 years, closing in 1804, and charged hundreds of visitors a day, a shilling to see life-size paintings of the greatest and saddest and funniest scenes of Shakespeare on the walls.

And just paintings, because I was envisioning something like the Victorian Albert or the Smithsonian Museums, you know, lots of artifacts or props from traveling Shakespeare troops.

Yeah, there was no Shakespeareanah, but there were a few works that were chiseled in stone.

But mostly they were canvases by all sorts of artists, famous, not famous, everybody who was in his rolodex at the time.

And to put this in context of museum history, how common was it at that time, at the end,

near the end of the 18th century, to have these huge exhibitions of paintings devoted to a

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