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In 1991 the Royal Doulton Company, which manufactures tableware, glassware and china collectables, discontinued "The Shakespearean Collection". The collection, launched in 1982, featured a range of six character jugs depicting well-known characters from the plays — Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Henry V, Romeo — as well as the playwright himself.¹ As with all portraiture, ascribing identity is difficult unless the subject is straightforwardly recognizable. Recognition is consequently prompted through cues in the jugs' design which, if unsubtle, contribute to the charms of grotesquerie that make the jugs what they are. The jug depicting Macbeth, for instance (Doulton Number D6667), helpfully sets in the handle three unprepossessing faces, evidently those of the witches. Indeed, the design of Royal Doulton's character jugs is rather less restrained than the Company's heritage, built on the work of artists like Charles J. Noke, George Tinworth or Mark V. Marshall, may lead one to expect. This is clear also in the jug in the collection that depicts the head of William Shakespeare (D6689). The figure of the Globe Theatre is set at the foot of the handle; closer inspection shows that the handle is shaped as a quill, that the Globe is cast as an inkwell and that a theatrical mask adorns either point of Shakespeare's collar. Clearly, jug art is less conservatively hagiographical than the art of the bust, which memorializes famous heads too but does so with rather more classical leanings and with less inclusiveness towards figures from literature or popular culture.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137033598_12

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