Button Badges

The humble button badge has a lot to offer the collector and aficionado. It is cheap, for one thing. The huge choice available means you can make a collection unique to oneself: collecting by portraits, by play, by quotations, even by red-writing-on-black. Neither is their sale limited to the specialist outlet. Online retailers such as CafePress offer many designs. Many of them treat Shakespeare as a kind of life coach: Shakespeare is declared to be one's 'homeboy', one is exorted to 'Read More Shakespeare', ask oneself 'What would Iago do?' or root for 'Team Shakespeare'. Here quotation is mantra - 'to thine own self be true', 'We know what we are but not what we may be' and 'There's small chioice in rotten apples'. Everywhere are the ubiquitous 'Insults' sold alongside 'Love' as a four pack where you can inform your 'Sweet Love' that they 'smell of mountain goat'.

Badges have traditionally been used in popular culture as a mark of allegiance, a way of advertising one's partisan politics. The RST has exploited this with its Julius Caesar badge. Most of their merchandising ties in with the season's programme and this is no exception, matching the production's contemporary politics with a political campaign-style, larger than usual size depicting the head of the dictator himself. Their range of badges tends to run to the more universal appeal. For the infants there is the 'Billy's Badges' set, with four cartoon icons of bard, skull, pig and the declaration that you 'heart' Billy. There are two that I take to be aimed at parents with younger children: a pink badge for the girls with 'Though she be but little, she is fierce' and blue for the boys with 'Prone to mischief'. For the teens there is the Twilight-homage of doomed love with 'Team Capulet' and 'Team Montague'.

The Globe Theatre also produces badge sets, also set around specific productions. The Hamlet set provides an interesting slant on the play as a meditation on death with two badges depicting skulls and the words 'To sleep, perchance to dream' and 'He is dead and gone'. The Midsummer Night's Dream set exploits the visual trickiness in the play with its quotations of 'what visions have I seen!' - angels waking one from a flowery bed,  being ill-met by moonlight and mortals being fools with their hearts true as steel. The 'Something Wicked' badge set uses Macbeth and distils the play into viscera and shadows - 'Never shake thy gory locks at me', eye of newt, toe of frog, fair is foul and stars should hide their fires.

It should never be forgotten that badges are an indispensible accessory for the vain blogger. A subtle advertisement of one's cultural credentials, without anything so vulgar as actually saying you like Shakespeare. And essential for that most glorious feat of one-up-manship - that you get the joke.




Badges mentioned are to be found in the relevant gift shops but can be ordered online at: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+shakespeare+buttons, http://www.rsc.org.uk/shop/
http://shop.shakespeare.org.uk/shop/ and http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/shop
Photograph taken from RSC website.