Emily Chan
A pair of leather gloves with embroidery at the wrists is thought to have belonged to the famous English playwright William Shakespeare. Or, at the very least, they were worn by Shakespearean actors long ago.
The gloves rest on top of a pillow of red satin in a wooden box with a glass top. They are part of the Shakespeare collection at the libraries of Penn State University.
Penn Libraries has one of the largest Shakespeare collections in the world. The collections are kept in the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library and the Edwin Forrest Library.
They include writings about Shakespeare, all the English-language versions of his plays and poems, and translations in various world languages.
Alicia Meyer, curator of research services in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, wanted to learn more about the gloves. Over the course of several months, she researched the gloves with the help of some library conservators.
“Our suspicion was that this was a mythology created around the gloves, that they belonged to Shakespeare. It’s impossible to prove who they belonged to, but one of the things I thought we could maybe do was figure out if they were from that time period,” Meyer said.
They carried out an analysis by comparing the gloves with other gloves from around the world from the same time period as Shakespeare. They also tested the gloves in the conservation laboratory to see what materials they were made of.
A technique using ultraviolet light and another involving X-ray fluorescence were used to determine the chemical composition of the gloves. The tests confirmed that the embroidery incorporated metals.
“We were able to take a closer look at the embroidery and were able to tell there’s gold and silver,” said Tessa Gadomski, a conservation librarian.
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