Curating Will & Jane

“Curating Will & Jane” provides an overview of the exhibition, Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity, opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in August 2016. Shakespeare and Austen became literary celebrities roughly 200 years after their deaths, and the Will & Jane exhibition tells the story of that process through the display of many and various objects—from porcelain figurines and portraits, to advertisements and bobbleheads—that are part of the marketing and cultural dissemination of literary fame. The authors of the article also reflect, as literary-scholars-turned-curators, on what they learned about how material culture produces and records celebrity when the objects of study range beyond standard printed artifacts.