Shakespeare Memorial

Related to City Art

Installed 1926

City centre Public art Statues

Bronze statue of William Shakespeare on a white marble pedestal surrounded by a selection of his characters, viewed from below. In the background is a sandstone building.

Bronze statue a Shakespeare character. It is an older, heavyset man in period costume with a beard and a hat and cape. He is smiling and raising his right hand to his chin.

William Shakespeare, pen in hand, presides over a selection of his characters from atop a marble pedestal.

Macquarie Street

Sydney 2000

Directions and transport

Artist: Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal

Artwork description

This bronze memorial statue features a life-sized figure of William Shakespeare, who stands with pen in hand atop a supporting marble pedestal. He is surrounded by a selection of characters including Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Portia and Falstaff.

It was unveiled in 1926 and an article in the Sydney Morning Herald described it ‘in the circular sweep between the Garden Palace Grounds and the Mitchell Library, at the hilltop where the long Figtree avenue descends to Woolloomooloo …’.

In 1959 the memorial was repositioned in Shakespeare Place opposite the State Library of NSW to make way for the Cahill Expressway. Initially when it was erected Shakespeare faced east, towards the ridge above Woolloomooloo but in 1959 it was turned to face west, looking toward the city.

Commissioned in the pre-war fervour for ‘Empire’ at a time when Australia was looking only to England for its cultural history, Shakespeare’s role as a man of ‘greatness’ was consolidated. Henry Gullet, president of the Shakespeare Society of NSW from 1904 to 1911 and key influencer in the project, regarded ‘Shakespeare as not only the typical man of letters, but also, and even more, the typical Englishman’. In that serene and somewhat enigmatic personage he saw ‘enshrined humour, tolerance, wider understanding of human nature, soundness of mind and body, and equal development of all his faculties that belong to the English race in all its exemplars’.

Artist

Sculptor Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal (1863–1931) was the most successful Australian artist of his time. Born in Melbourne, he studied at the National Gallery School and Victorian Academy and in 1883 at the Royal Academy and British Museum in London.

Working mostly in Europe from 1882 Mackennal executed many private works and public monuments, and with the patronage of King George V became a leading civic sculptor in Britain. He was the first Australian to be elected an associate of the British Royal Academy, the only Australian to be elected to full Royal Academy membership and the first to be knighted.

Henry Gullett was the driving force behind the Shakespeare memorial statue. He held the view ‘that statue was the finest memorial that any generation of men could raise to one of their own race who had greatly deserved of them’. He was integral in beginning negotiations with Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal for the casting of a replica in bronze, of a Shakespeare memorial statue that he had made for India.

However, negotiations were halted abruptly when Gullett died of heart failure in August 1914. Endeavouring to realise their father’s objective, the women of the Gullett family maintained contact with Mackennal, who continued to work on the statue despite World War 1 and numerous other commissions.

The marble pediment, after being cut and polished in Italy, was shipped to Sydney in around 1924 and was placed in storage. The 5 bronze figures, which were cast in England, arrived soon after.
- An inscription on the central main block reads:
  
  Shakespeare 1564-1616
  Presented to the City of Sydney by Henry Gullett, August 1914
- On the base of the main block, a quote from The Tempest (Act IV, Scene 1) by William Shakespeare is inscribed:
  
  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
  As I foretold you, were all spirits and
  Are melted into air, into thin air;
  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
  As dreams are made on, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep.