Dr Ian Nickson, member of the STR, informs us of an important exhibition currently showing at
Manchester Central Library. First Floor Display Cases, from 12th February 2026 – 30th May 2026

This exhibition tells, for the first time, the story of how seven personalities transformed Manchester into a global centre of Shakespearean theatre in the Victorian era.

These seven people operated in diverse fields – business, religion, theatre, architecture, academia, politics – but were united by their appreciation of Shakespeare’s cultural value and, as if imitating the seven bees atop Manchester’s coat of arms, they collaborated to create an urban, libertarian, distinctively Mancunian interpretation of Shakespeare’s works.

• Local businessman John Knowles commissioned the Theatre Royal on Peter Street in 1845 and installed a marble statue of Shakespeare above the main entrance, early evidence of a desire to link Manchester with high culture
• In Manchester, between 1864 and 1877, actor-manager Charles Calvert produced spectacular, historically accurate and commercially successful revivals of Shakespeare’s plays which, by appealing to all sections of society, developed into a ‘one-nation Shakespeare’ with global appeal
• In 1875, Calvert’s revival of Henry the Fifth was exported to the United States, prompting two New York impresarios to organise the fastest crossing of the continent by train as a publicity stunt and launching the career of the first global Shakespearean celebrity, George Rignold
• Manchester was the place that resurrected the career of Henry Irving, who arrived here in 1860 as a failing actor, and set him on the road to become the Victorian era’s most celebrated tragedian
• In 1845, a non-conformist preacher from Birmingham, George Dawson, promoted his Civic Gospel which encouraged the use of Shakespeare’s works as a Bible to guide the development of industrial cities and triggered a form of Shakespeare mania in the city
• In 1877, the second Lord Bishop of Manchester, James Fraser, became the first clergyman in the world to deliver a sermon in a theatre, promoting Shakespeare as a means of purifying the theatrical profession
• Alfred Darbyshire was an innovative local architect who collaborated with Henry Irving in 1887 to create the Irving-Darbyshire Safety Plan which revolutionised theatre design around the world
• A pioneering suffragist who moved to Manchester in 1893 from a small village in Derbyshire, Rosa Grindon found the city to be the ideal Shakespeare-centric location in which she could forge a career as the Victorian age’s leading female Shakespearean scholar.

The exhibition also includes a copy of the first photograph taken inside a theatre of a stage production anywhere in the world – an image of the tableau representing the Battle of Agincourt in Charles Calvert’s Henry the Fifth taken by Lachlan M’Lachlan in the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, in 1872.

Finally, the exhibition presents traces of Manchester’s Victorian influence that can still be found today – the portrait of Ira Aldridge in Manchester Art Gallery, the Shakespeare Window in the entrance of the Central Library, and the Shakespearean Garden in Platt Fields Park.

One aim of this exhibition is to raise awareness of the benefits to mental and physical health conferred by the Shakespearean Garden and to obtain funding for a full-time gardener who can secure the future of the garden for the benefit of the citizens of Manchester.

For more details please contact:

Dr. Ian Nickson. Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester
ian.nickson-2@manchester.ac.uk

Kattie Kincaid, Project Manager, Friends of Platt Fields Park
kattiekincaid@hotmail.com

For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home;
Others like merchants venture trade abroad;

The Life of King Henry the Fifth (1.2.187-92)