Shakespeare Duck

One of my current favourites is the Shakespeare Duck available from the Shakespeare Gift Shop. It does not strictly have the Shakespeare connection. This is more part of a range of merchandise that equates 'Shakespeare' with 'Englishness' and so allies his image with other icons of national interest. In this case, a bath time toy, evocative of childhood, possibly a tin bath, possibly the nineteen fifties. This is a duck dressed in a dark blue doublet with wide collar. In one wing it carries a quill pen and in the other a sheet of paper with the legend 'to quack or not to quack'.

What I like about it is that it demonstrates scholarship's more playful side. We are not all that serious, poring over dusty tomes and quibbling over textual emendations. That we accept such quirky stuff shows the whimsical sprite that is the modern Shakespearean.



Duck available from Shakespeare Giftshop or online at http://shop.shakespeare.org.uk/shop/product/4652/Shakespeare-Duck/