William Shakespeare Statue - Leicester Square, London, UK - Dead Poets' Society Memorials on Waymarking.com

Wikipedia has an article about the statue that tells us:

A statue of William Shakespeare, sculpted by Giovanni Fontana after an original by Peter Scheemakers, has formed the centrepiece of Leicester Square Gardens, London, since 1874. The marble figure, copied from Scheemakers' 18th-century monument to Shakespeare in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, stands on a pedestal flanked by dolphins at the centre of a fountain. It is the result of improvements to the gardens made by the financier Albert Grant, who bought the Square in 1874 and had it refurbished to a design by James Knowles.

The scroll held by Shakespeare is inscribed with a quotation from Twelfth Night (Act IV, Scene II), "THERE IS NO DARKNESS BUT IGNORANCE", where the original in Poets' Corner has a misquoted passage from The Tempest. The Leicester Square statue also differs from its model in omitting reliefs of Henry V, Richard III and Elizabeth I from the plinth on which Shakespeare rests. The inscription on the pedestal in Leicester Square reads:

"THIS ENCLOSURE/ WAS PURCHASED, LAID OUT/ AND DECORATED AS A GARDEN/ BY ALBERT GRANT ESQ[UI]RE M.P./ AND/ CONVEYED BY HIM ON THE 2ND JULY 1874/ TO THE/ METROPOLITAN BOARD OF WORKS/ TO BE PRESERVED FOR EVER/ FOR THE FREE USE AND ENJOYMENT/ OF THE PUBLIC"

The statue is listed at Grade II. In 2012 it underwent restoration, and the cleaning was completed and new water features added in 2014.

As mentioned, the statue is Grade II listed with the entry at the English Heritage website telling us:

Memorial sculptural fountain in centre of garden with busts to four corners. 1874 garden design by James Knowles with fountain sculpture by G. Fontana. White marble. "Stratford" statue of the Bard on tall square pedestal with dolphin supporters at angles over stepped circular plinth rising from inner basin, outer basin as flower bed compartmented by volute scrolls, the outer rim with pedestalled vases. The marble busts on granite plinths part of the same 1874 layout: Hogarth by J. Denham, John Hunter by T. Woolner, Isaac Newton by Calder Marshall, Reynolds by H. Weekes.

The 3rd Dimension website of the PMSA further advises:

New water features, which send jets of recycled water two metres into the air, have been installed into the paving around the grade II listed Monument to William Shakespeare in Leicester Square, London.

It is intended that these features will give the statue of the playwright and the fountain above which he stands, greater impact and will create more interaction with the public. This was part of a £17m. renovation plan for the Square which was first drawn up well before the London Olympics. Lighting is an important part of this redevelopment and the statue and fountain will be lit at night.

The statue of Shakespeare, the only outdoor statue of the bard in central London, and the original fountain and basin were painstakingly restored by PAYE, a leading stonework and restoration company. The work which involved steam cleaning the dirty Sicilian marble, using poultices on the deeper dirt and intricately hand-carving repairs in new marble took nearly a year to complete.

The Square was reopened by Westminster City Council Deputy Leader, Cllr Robert Davis, himself a sculpture and fountain enthusiast. Davis observed that: ‘As Shakespeare himself declared, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players” and nowhere is this truer than in Leicester Square – the home of the UK’s film and entertainment industry.’

Leicester Square was first laid out in 1670, but was redesigned in 1874 by Albert Gottheimer and his architect Sir James Knowles. An unscrupulous speculator, Gottheimer was given the title of Baron by the King of Italy and was known as Baron Grant. Plans for the original ornamental fountain and gardens were described by Knowles, but the addition of the statue of Shakespeare was not revealed until a few days before the Square opened. The monument and fountain were designed by Knowles. The statue is by the sculptor Giovanni Fontana, who had worked for Grant and Knowles at Kensington House (demolished), and is a variant replica of that designed by William Chambers and carved by Peter Scheemakers in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Dr. Philip Ward-Jackson in his excellent survey, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster, vol.1, in the Public Sculpture of Britain series reveals Knowles’ ‘pretentious’ intentions for the original fountain which he found in contemporary accounts: ‘The idea which the designer of the fountain wished to convey…was of the Poet, standing isolated and colossal, cut off from the rest of the world by the quasi-Castalian springs which rise at his feet, but brought close to all men in his works, symbolized by the grass and flowers which spring round the margin of the fountain, and which its water bedews and nourishes. The dolphins playing close below him imply his Arion-like attraction for the ‘sane and simple’ animal part of us…’. Grant’s paper, The Echo, reported that the dolphins emitted water through blow-holes in their heads rather than through their mouths and by doing this were following ‘nature and the example of the ancients.’ Ward-Jackson also noted that any praise for the scheme at the time was rather reserved and related to it as a public amenity rather than to the merits of the fountain. It is to be hoped that the new revamp will have changed this opinion.

PAYE, the contractors that carried out the renovation work, have a project card about the job. It mentions how parts of Shakespeare's anatomy were removed and replaced with new marble.