Rare artefacts that inspired some of the greatest work by Shakespeare are to go on display in a major new exhibition at the British Museum, The Telegraph reported.

The blockbuster show will feature 190 exhibits, including important paintings from national and private collections, rare jewels and manuscripts including a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

Objects linked to Shakespeare’s work will include a previously unseen page from a 16th-century souvenir album, featuring a racy image of a Venetian woman.

The image shows a luxuriously-dressed Venetian woman, who appears to be an aristocrat.

But when a panel is lifted at the front of her dress, it reveals a scandalous image of a woman wearing men’s breeches as underwear, together with “chopines” - platform shoes that were associated with easy virtue - suggesting she may be a courtesan.

Venetian courtesans were known to wear men’s underclothes under their finery to titillate their clients.

The album, on loan from the National Library of Scotland, belonged to Sir Michael Balfour, a wealthy Scottish diplomat and a courtier to King James VI and I, who completed the Grand Tour of Venice some time between 1596 and 1599.

Playing on the ambiguity of women’s virtue, the picture is believed to have provided Shakespeare with inspiration for his Venetian tragedy, Othello, which features a courtesan, Bianca.

Several of Shakespeare’s plays also feature cross-dressing heroines, including Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It.


Dr Dora Thornton, curator of Renaissance at the British Museum, said: “Shakespeare reflects the popular image of Venice as a “Sex and the City” location - the ultimate modern city to his audiences.

"He held Venice up as a mirror to London, a place to both admire and criticise, and setting a play in Venice that was performed in London, he was also talking about London.

“The exhibition attempts to show how the world came to London 400 years ago through the realms of Shakespeare’s plays and present a dialogue between the objects and his text, exploring how objects from his real world took him to places in his imagination.”

Shakespeare: Staging the World, which opens next month, will feature actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company performing excerpts from the playwright’s works, which will be screened alongside items including a silver communion cup from which Shakespeare is thought to have received communion and the lantern which Guy Fawkes is believed to have carried under the Houses of Parliament during the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James, which Shakespeare alludes to in Macbeth.

Also on display will be the Ides of March coin, a rare a gold coin dating from 43-42 BC commemorating the murder of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC, one of the most infamous political assassinations in history.