| Description | A collection of papers consisting of an unpublished typescript, research notes, playscripts, draft manuscripts, correspondence, news cuttings and other items all relating to Marion Harry Spielmann’s project 'Shakespeare Treads the Boards' in which he sets out to compile a bibliography of plays in which Shakespeare appears as a dramatic character, as well as collecting as many scripts relating to those plays as he could locate. |
| Administrative History | Marion Harry Spielmann (1858-1948) was a well-renowned and prolific Victorian art critic and scholar, but this project appears to be a separate interest, described by his son, Percy Spielmann, as a ‘by-path’. Marion Spielmann collected notes and scripts over a number of years, aided in his project for many years by Alfred A Reed, a bookseller specialising in Shakespeareana, but much of their work was lost during the war. After Marion Spielmann's death in 1948, it was his son Percy, again with the help of Reed, who compiled his father’s researches into an unpublished typescript entitled ‘Shakespeare Treads the Boards’, which forms the heart of this collection. Although it appears that the work was never published as intended, a final letter in the collection, from the Vice Chancellor [of the University of Birmingham] to Dr Percy E. Spielmann, acknowledges and thanks him for the gift of books and papers to the Shakespeare Institute on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth [1964], thus fulfilling his father's hope that his collection of plays would 'in due time find its way into one of our great Shakespeare Libraries’.
Dr Percy Spielmann, Marion Spielmann's only son, was a research chemist and scientific writer, but he took on this project to complete his father's work in 1947.
Little is known about Alfred Reed apart from that which can be gleaned from his correspondence. He ran a bookshop in St Martin's Lane in London for some years during the 1930s, but the war and its aftermath left him in straitened circumstances. He continued to help Spielmann with the compilation of the bibliography, and Percy is generous in his acknowledgement of Reed's contribution to the work in his Foreword to the unpublished 'Shakespeare Treads the Boards'. |
| Custodial History | As recorded above, the archive and books were gifted to the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, by Dr Percy Spielmann in 1964. The archives are now held at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the books are held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. |