PHILADELPHIA — For nearly a century, a swashbuckling-style pair of gloves rested in a reliquary in the University of Pennsylvania library. Far from lost, but largely forgotten, the mystical gauntlets were disturbed over the decades only by the awestruck scholars and devotees who came to ponder, “What if?”
After all, it couldn’t be true. They couldn’t really have belonged to the great writer, the Bard himself. They couldn’t really have been William Shakespeare’s gloves.
Or could they?
Recently, the enduring mystery surrounding “Shakespeare’s gloves” has taken on new life. Earlier this year, two Penn researchers at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts endeavored to discern the true provenance of the stately looking silver leather gloves with silver and gold brocade that have long been a source of literary curiosity.
The duos’ dogged detective work and rigorous scientific testing revealed tantalizing new details. Their digging has also cast new light on the uniquely Philadelphia story attached to the gloves, a Shakespearean tale with Philly twists that, like the gloves, were largely lost to time.
“I don’t want to ruin the dream that they could have belonged to Shakespeare,” said Alicia Meyer, a curator of research at the Kislak Center, who spearheaded the effort. “There’s no reason to think they couldn’t have, except that it’s so wild and crazy.”
Few relics survive
Few relics tied to Shakespeare, who shuffled off the mortal coil in 1616 at age 51 or 52, have survived the centuries. Objects dating to Shakespeare’s lifetime, including dice, pottery, and buttons, have been displayed at the writer’s birthplace and family home in Stratford-upon-Avon in England. A signet ring, which possibly belonged to Shakespeare, was unearthed in 1810 in a church field near his home. The writer’s signature is extremely rare, existing only in legal documents.
Perhaps the biggest prize for Shakespeare trophy hunters could be the great writer’s skull, which some historians believe was stolen by grave robbers some 200 years ago, and never found.
Skull aside, there’s just not a lot out there.
“In terms of Shakespeare’s stuff, we don’t have it in the way we want it,” Meyer said. “And that’s not rare for the time period.”
That Penn may possess a Shakespearean grail is no surprise. Its Shakespeare collections, derived mostly from the donated archive of Horace Howard Furness, are world-renowned.
Furness, a Philadelphian who died in 1912, was the greatest Shakespearean scholar of his time. He edited the first Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, a herculean tome annotating nearly every line of Shakespeare’s plays with hundreds of years of literary and historical references.
“It’s bananas,” Meyer said. “Now, we google these things.”
Among the Shakespearean jewels found at Penn’s H.H. Furness Memorial Library is a copy of the First Folio, an anthology of his plays published shortly after his death on leather-bound rag paper. There’s also a third edition of Hamlet, printed in 1611, one of only 19 copies in the world. The school boasts other Shakespeare relics, including logs cut from a mulberry tree said to have grown in Shakespeare’s home, and a small box cut from the same wood.
But nothing like the gloves. They caused a stir when Furness’ son donated them, along with the rest of his father’s Shakespearean trove, in 1931.
“Experts were wading through the traditions and statements of witnesses who over the centuries gave statements about the gloves,” Meyer said.
But when early 20th-century scholars could provide no definitive answer, the gloves were stored in a wood and glass box outfitted with a pillow of red satin. The regal case was constructed in the workshop of Furness’ brother, the famous architect Frank Furness.
“It was sort of laid to rest here in the library,” Meyer said.
Reconnecting threads
Meyer, who was a fellow at Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington before joining the Kislak Center last year, broke out the gloves in April to show the students of professor and Shakespearean scholar Zachary Lesser.
“We were all like, ‘Ah, everyone thinks these are Shakespeare’s gloves; that can’t possibly be true.’ And I was looking at them for a really long time, and thought, ‘it’s actually extremely rare for people to have so confidently said that they were Shakespeare’s in the past.’ That’s what caught my eye. I thought it was weird that this story exists.”
So Meyer began digging, reconnecting the threads that brought the gloves to Philadelphia and Penn in the first place.
According to lore, the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon had given them to English actor David Garrick in the 18th century when the star made a pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s hometown. The town gifted them to Garrick, the Laurence Olivier of his day, Meyer said, as a thank you for returning the playwright to popularity. Garrick eventually gave them to actress Sarah Siddons, a great tragedienne of the time. Not to be out-regifted, Siddons later gave them to British actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, who settled in Philadelphia.
“The worship of relics is not the most exalted form of human devotion but the meanest garment that ever clipped he whom we love,” Kemble wrote Furness, when she gifted him the gloves as a thank you for his toil on the variorum.
“She’s basically saying, ‘We don’t want to worship objects, but here are Shakespeare’s gloves,” Meyer said, with a smile.
Kemble, though, signed her note, with a maddeningly cautious caveat: “They may be genuine.”
“Even Furness was skeptical,” Meyer said. “They were serious people and wanted to do their due diligence.”
Searching for clues
Still, the gloves became a cherished relic. In 1937, noted British Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans made his own pilgrimage to behold the gloves. Seizing the moment, the thespian boldly slipped on the centuries-old gloves. A perhaps nervous and quick-thinking librarian informed the actor that anyone who dared wear them was cursed to die in a year.
Meyer enlisted the help of conservation librarian Tessa Gadomski. She brought the gloves down to Penn’s Steven Miller Conservation Laboratory to study them with technology normally used to treat and care for the school’s rare books and papers.
Examining the gloves under ultraviolet light, Gadomski searched for clues of any postindustrial materials, which would show the gloves were likely made or repaired after Shakespeare’s time. And found none.
Next, she used x-ray fluorescence technology, testing the gloves with a handheld spectrometer — imagine a superhero’s ray gun — to determine the elemental building blocks of the gloves. She searched for signs of chromium or titanium, commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century tanning techniques. Again, she found none.
“So really just ruling out anything that was not from that time,” she said.
From a visual analysis, Gadomski concluded the gloves were likely made from sheepskin.
“That would make a lot of sense for the time period we’re thinking about,” she said. “And that part of the world.”
While the takeaways from the tests were slightly less definitive than Gadomski and Meyer would have liked, they also didn’t prove that the gloves couldn’t be Shakespeare’s.
“It does tell us that the materials can be from Shakespeare’s time,” Gadomski said. “It’s still a possibility.”
