These Gloves May Have Belonged To William Shakespeare And Are Kept At Penn State University
A pair of leather gloves with embroidery at the wrists is thought to have belonged to the famous English playwright William Shakespeare. Or, at the very least, they were worn by Shakespearean actors long ago.
The gloves rest on top of a pillow of red satin in a wooden box with a glass top. They are part of the Shakespeare collection at the libraries of Penn State University.
Penn Libraries has one of the largest Shakespeare collections in the world. The collections are kept in the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library and the Edwin Forrest Library.
They include writings about Shakespeare, all the English-language versions of his plays and poems, and translations in various world languages.
Alicia Meyer, curator of research services in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, wanted to learn more about the gloves. Over the course of several months, she researched the gloves with the help of some library conservators.
“Our suspicion was that this was a mythology created around the gloves, that they belonged to Shakespeare. It’s impossible to prove who they belonged to, but one of the things I thought we could maybe do was figure out if they were from that time period,” Meyer said.
They carried out an analysis by comparing the gloves with other gloves from around the world from the same time period as Shakespeare. They also tested the gloves in the conservation laboratory to see what materials they were made of.
A technique using ultraviolet light and another involving X-ray fluorescence were used to determine the chemical composition of the gloves. The tests confirmed that the embroidery incorporated metals.
“We were able to take a closer look at the embroidery and were able to tell there’s gold and silver,” said Tessa Gadomski, a conservation librarian.
EJRodriquez – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The leather was also examined more thoroughly. During the post-industrial era, certain tanning agents were used in leather creation. They included chromium or titanium. None of these elements were found in the leather gloves.
Instead, the main elements detected were calcium and iron, indicating that they were not from the post-industrial era. The gloves have some stains on the inside. Evidence of minor repairs suggests that they were worn but not worn often.
Meyer believes the gloves date back to the early or mid-17th century, overlapping with Shakespeare’s lifetime.
According to Meyer, gloves may have been important to Shakespeare because his father was a glove maker. They also signaled a higher social status and may have been worn as part of costumes on stage.
An 18th-century Shakespearean actor named David Garrick reportedly received the gloves from descendants of Shakespeare. They were gifted to him in 1769 to honor his work portraying Shakespeare’s characters.
Garrick passed the gloves on to the Kemble family of British-born actors. They came into the possession of Frances Kemble, an actress and abolitionist.
She gave them to Horace Howard Furness, a Shakespearean scholar. His brother, Frank Furness, designed Penn’s Fisher Fine Arts Library and the box for the gloves. H.H. Furness’s son ensured that the gloves were donated to Penn Libraries.
Among the collections, other objects said to be related to Shakespeare include a box supposedly crafted from the mulberry tree outside of his home and a vial with a piece of wood from the room where he was born. The connection between these items and the playwright also cannot be proven.
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