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Shakespeare & Beyond

Exploring Churchill's Shakespeare

Churchill's Shakespeare opening. Allen Packwood, Georgianna Ziegler, Robert Costa. (c) Yassine El Mansouri Photography
Churchill's Shakespeare opening. Allen Packwood, Georgianna Ziegler, Robert Costa. (c) Yassine El Mansouri Photography
Churchill's Shakespeare opening. Allen Packwood, Georgianna Ziegler, Robert Costa. (c) Yassine El Mansouri Photography

Churchill’s Shakespeare opening. Allen Packwood, Georgianna Ziegler, Robert Costa. (c) Yassine El Mansouri Photography

Our current exhibition Churchill’s Shakespeare began with a splash, as Washington Post reporter, moderator of Washington Week on PBS, and NBC News and MSNBC political analyst Robert Costa led a spirited onstage discussion about the influence of Shakespeare on Winston Churchill with the exhibition’s curator, Georgianna Ziegler, Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge.

The animated three-way conversation that ensued was part of a memorable Folger evening exploring how Shakespeare influenced Churchill, including some of Churchill’s most famous speeches during World War II. You can listen to the entire recording here:

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We’ve also included the first few minutes of the conversation below, with some images from this remarkable exhibition.

Churchill's Shakespeare exhibition, Folger Shakespeare Library

ROBERT COSTA: Good evening. Great to be here, really appreciate the warm welcome. It’s wonderful to have Jennie Churchill here and Laurence Geller and Michael and the whole team at the Folger Library, a special place. It’s special for me to be here with Georgianna and Allen Packwood. I used to bother Allen Packwood when I was a student at Cambridge. I would be the American in the hooded sweatshirt asking too many questions, but who would have thought, 10 years later, we’d be right here.

ALLEN PACKWOOD: And you’re still asking the questions.

COSTA: I am still asking questions. But Georgianna, I thought I’d start with you, because you went over to meet with Allen at Cambridge to help think through this exhibit—which is wonderful, I hope you all get a chance to spend a few minutes there afterward for the reception. And you learned that Jennie Churchill, Churchill’s mother, was part of the inspiration for Winston Churchill and his love of Shakespeare.

GEORGIANNA ZIEGLER: Yes, well, I really had a good time visiting the Churchill Archives. I’d never been there before, until I went over in April of last year. And I was quite taken with the material I was finding about Jennie Churchill. She, of course, was an American, who sort of in a Downton Abbey kind of way married into the British aristocracy. But I was interested in the fact that she was very interested in the theater. She went to the theater. She also supported the idea of putting on, of developing a National Theatre in London, and in order to raise money for that, she sponsored a big extravaganza of a Shakespeare Ball in 1911. Then that was followed up in 1912 by a kind of a Shakespeare Disneyland creation at Earl’s Court in London. And the Folger interestingly has the spectacular program. It’s more than a program, it’s a memorial volume, a souvenir from the ball. But then we also had, in our so-called “black box” collection of odds and ends, some of the little programs from Earl’s Court.