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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Orfew, post: 2883221, member: 74968&quot;][ATTACH=full]691422[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Coins in Shakespeare</p><p>J. Eric Engstrom</p><p>Dartmouth College Museum</p><p>1964</p><p>67 pp</p><p><br /></p><p>As some of you know I have been assembling a collection that includes &quot;Historical figures as dramatized by Shakespeare&quot;. Someone made a suggestion that I might find this book interesting as it combines 2 my my interests: the plays of Shakespeare and coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>The book is short but does in face contain some interesting and entertaining information. It is organized into several sections including : Coins contemporary with Shakespeare&#039;s settings, Coins in Shakespeare, Allusions to coin minting and money of account in Shakespeare, and A guide to numismatic passages in Shakespeare.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the first main section the author shows coins that are contemporary with the times depicted by several plays. For example, for Timon of Athens the author shows an Athenian Tetrarachm, and for Julius Caesar a lifetime denarius is depicted. The author provides pictures and descriptions of coins for several other Shakepearian plays with an obvious nod to the history plays. I found this section very interesting as it closely follows my goals in collecting the coins of historical figures dramatized by Shakespeare.</p><p><br /></p><p>The second section is very entertaining indeed. At least I found it so, but then I have&nbsp; loved the works and words of Shakespeare for decades. In this section, the author organizes the names of the coins alphabetically. For each coin the name is provided with a photo and this is followed by several quotations from plays where the coin is mentioned. For instance, for Angel (a gold denomination) the author uses several lines including &quot;The humor rises. It is good. Humor me the angels.&quot; (Merry Wives of Windsor. After this the author proves a few sentences on the meaning behind the passages and how these are connected to the coins themselves. In some cases the author explains the puns Shakespeare used that included coins and also points out when the meanings are ambiguous. Tis section was my favourite. I loved revisiting these lines from Shakespeare, some of which I had not read in many years. It was a great deal of fun to indulge both my love of coins and Shakespeare at the same time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Allusions to coin minting and money of account in Shakespeare provides references to coin related words that appear in the plays. For example, the author gives examples of words such as coin, coinage, coined, coining, counter, counterfeit etc. This is a useful section but for me was not as fun as reading the quotations.The final section is A guide to numismatic passages in Shakespeare. In this section arranges the plays in order of composition. For each play a list of the denominations that appear in the play are given along with the act scene and line numbers. The author states that these references are by no means complete. I have just begun to explore this section and cannot wait to open my complete works of Shakespeare and track down these references to coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>In short, this is a very entertaining and educational book for me. It is short and it is one of only a few books on coins that I wished was not quite as short as it is. It is definitely a niche book. It is very good on a very narrow topic and so may not be useful as a general book on coins. However, it suits my purposes perfectly. If you have an interest in both Shakespeare and the coins associated with his plays it is definitely worth the investment.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I had to give a grade I would give it an &#039;A&#039; as it does provide some interesting insight into coins and Shakespeare. I found the book entertaining and far too short. I may in fact try to collect some of the coins mentioned in this book as they will be a nice corollary to my historical figures as dramatized by Shakespeare collection.</p><p><br /></p><p>I almost forgot mention that the author is not only an author but at some time was a coin collector as well. In fact I have a coin from his collection, it is a denarius of Vespasian.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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