A statue of the 'Young Will' placed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford in 1564.
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'To selfie or not to selfie - that’s the question'... for Stratford tourists who pose with a life-sized scuplture of William Shakespeare.
American actor and director Lawrence Holofcener gifted the artwork to the town to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death, on April 23, 1616.
The statue of the Bard as a young man on a bench was put in Bancroft Gardens on February 23 to mark Holofcener’s 90th birthday.
“People should be able to take selfies with Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre in the background,” a council spokesman said.
Holofcener was the sculptor behind the famous Allies piece in Bond Street, London, where people can sit between life-sized sculptures of Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt."
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"William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as both the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.Such theories are often criticised for failing to adequately note the fact that few records survive of most commoners of the period.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. Then, until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as his. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which the poet presciently hails the playwright in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have been continually adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted through various cultural and political contexts around the world."
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About the sculptor -
"Lawrence Holofcener (February 23, 1926 – March 4, 2017) was an American-British sculptor, poet, lyricist, playwright, novelist, actor and director. He held British and American dual nationality. As a singer and songwriter he was better known as Larry Holofcener. He died in March 2017 at the age of 91. As a tribute to his transatlantic love affair with England, his obituary was also published by UK's The Daily Telegraph.
Lawrence Holofcener's first exhibition was in 1979 at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. It was followed by many shows, awards and commissions. During his exhibition at AT&T's Education Center in Princeton, New Jersey, Lawrence produced The Box, a piece which was added to their collection.
In 1985 at the Chichester Festival Theatre, Laurence Olivier unveiled Holofcener's portrait, "Faces of Olivier", and ten years later to the day on Bond Street in London, Princess Margaret unveiled his portraits of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. "Allies" has fast become one of London's tourist attractions. Commissions include Queen Victoria for the Isle of Wight's Museum of Island History and Coburg, Germany, as well as a life-size bronze of Thomas Paine at Bordentown, New Jersey.
Other life-size portraits of Thomas Chatterton, William Tyndale and William Penn are in Bristol, England. In 1998, Holofcener embarked on a major series celebrating the contributions made by 20th Century icons, among them Albert Einstein, John F Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, the Three Tenors and John Lennon."
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