You have beguiled me with a counterfeit': The Hallmark of Truth and the Exposure of Artifice in Shakespeare's Work

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This project is an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of Shakespeare's language of deception and disguise, expressed through imagery relating to metal, jewellery, coins, assaying (testing), hallmarking and counterfeiting and demonstrated through material fabrication. A combination of close textual analysis, contextual and historical research and extensive original practices-led investigations - facilitated by creating a partnership between the Shakespeare Institute (SI) and the Birmingham School of Jewellery (SofJ), supported by the Goldsmiths' Company Assay Office (GCAO) - will provide a new, material context for Shakespeare's vocabulary from the point of view of the goldsmith or assayer, enriching academic scholarship in the field of early modern material culture.Much has been written about deceptive appearances in Shakespeare, but almost nothing has been written from this standpoint. Studies tend to be limited to individual plays (Simmonds, 1992 and Saval, 2014) or confined to a single aspect (Newman, 2019 and Roberts, 2016). In a review of more than 170 books and articles to date, I have found no wide-ranging study, least of all one that combines textual analysis with original practices-led material investigation.Throughout my Masters, I have been fascinated by Shakespeare's use of language relating to metal and jewellery, and the frequent references to assaying that are largely lost on a modern-day audience. Key words applicable to the assaying process appear 1,312 times in the 41 plays that I have analysed. Gold as a noble metal is frequently used to describe royalty; but there is also a regular, negative association with gilding that reflects the technique of applying thin layers of gold to silver, or in the case of counterfeiting, to base metal, in order to fool the buyer. Shakespeare uses this language to express character traits and to explore ideas around falseness, corruption, fooling and disguise.