The Scholar’s Scrapbook: Reading Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century

This essay considers the relationship between scrapbooks and archival research by focusing on one of the most influential Shakespearean scholars of the nineteenth century: James Orchard Halliwell. Over his long career, he compiled hundreds of scrapbooks filled with cuttings from rare books and manuscripts. Halliwell’s scrapbook practice drew on the emergent discipline of archeology to establish a Shakespearean archive of source material. Enabled by advances in photographic technology, he used reproductions of fragments he found (some through actual digs) to ground Shakespearean studies in tangible artifacts. By translating archeology’s empiricism into literary histories, Halliwell established the robust evidentiary power of what today’s scholars call archival materials.