When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new cultural experience with an ambitious project in Pall Mall: a gallery devoted entirely to scenes from Shakespeare.

Boydell commissioned leading British artists to paint pivotal moments from the plays, then sold engraved reproductions for museum-goers to take home with them. The Gallery quickly became a sensation and was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince of Wales. It also played a powerful role in transforming William Shakespeare from a popular playwright into a national icon.

The venture ultimately closed due to the economic turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and the paintings were sold at auction. But its influence endured, shaping exhibition culture, influencing a British school of art, and inspiring the visual mythology of The Bard.

Joining us to explore the rise and fall of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery are Rosie Dias, Professor of Art History at the University of Warwick, and Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 24, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Mike Rucinski of Boutique Recording in Great Malvern, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Rosie Dias is Professor in History of Art and Co-Head of the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on 18th- and early 19th-century British art, with a particular focus on printmaking, exhibition culture, and colonial art in South Asia. Rosie's monograph Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic was published by Yale University Press in 2013 and informed a 2016 exhibition at Compton Verney (Warwickshire, UK), "Boydell's Vision: the Shakespeare Gallery in the Eighteenth Century."

Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies andDirector of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an honorary governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Higher School of Ukraine, co-director of the Shakespeare Centre, China, and secretary of the UK's All Party Parliamentary Group on Shakespeare. His previous appointments include posts at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of London, and he has held fellowships and visiting appointments in California, Sweden, and China. He comments regularly on Shakespeare for the BBC, The London Review of Books, and for other publications, and he has written program notes for, among others, the RSC, Shakespeare's Globe, the Old Vic, the Sheffield Crucible, Peter Stein, TR Warszawa, and the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His books include The Making of the National Poet (1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, 2001, winner of the Bainton Prize in 2002), England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (with Nicola Watson, 2002), Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today (2006), and Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (2011). He serves as a General Editor (with Abigail Rokison-Woodall and Simon Russell Beale) of the Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare series.