Shakespeare was born in 1906 in the working class area of Kates Hill, Dudley, the fourth of eight children of John Thomas Shakespeare and his wife Ada. His family subsequently moved to council housing in the nearby Wren's Nest Estate area. In 1920, after a chance meeting at the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery with Ivo Shaw, the principal of Dudley Art School, he was offered a place at the school where his fees were waived for his eight years attendance where he showed a talent for figure drawing and portraits. Eventually he attended Birmingham School of Art, where he studied anatomical drawing under Harold Holden from 1923 to 1927 and obtained an Art Masters Certificate in Anatomical Drawing, and qualified as a teacher. He taught part-time, mostly at Birmingham Art School and occasionally at Kidderminster College. For the rest of his life he continued to paint with a view to making that his career and produced a number of paintings each year that were submitted to the Royal Academy, and often accepted for exhibition. In 1933 he produced his most controversial painting, a self-portrait in which, it has been suggested, he is posing as the demonic figure Mephistopheles. In the same year, he had his first exhibit at the Royal Academy, "A Mulatto", a portrait of a lady which was later bought by Dudley Art Gallery. He also exhibited at the Paris Salon and at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, of which he was elected an associate in 1936. During this period, he was living in the family council house on the Wren’s Nest. Despite his success at having his paintings included in prestigious exhibitions, few of them sold and his only significant income was from his teaching. He had no studio and often painted in his small bedroom. When World War II broke out in 1939, he enlisted in the Royal Navy, and trained at HMS Vernon while continuing to paint in his spare time. In May 1943, whilst stationed ashore at Roedean School in East Sussex, he was killed in a bombing raid while he was walking alone opposite Marine Gate in Brighton..
Work
General
Shakespeare's work after leaving art school concentrated on figure drawings and portraiture, this continued until he started on his Thirties at Leisure series in 1936. His major works outside this series included the following:
From 1936, Shakespeare embarked on a series of oil paintings showing groups of people at leisure. These compositions were the result of intense work with many preliminary drawings of the component figures. It has been noted that the drawings themselves are of considerable merit in their own right. He painted one or two of these compositions each year and submitted them to the Royal Academy and often they were accepted. They are remarkable in their colour and figure arrangements and together they present a remarkable picture of leisure activities in the period leading up the Second World War. This series included the following works:
There were two other paintings made in Sussex during Shakespeare's war service with a tenuous relationship to this series:
December on the Downs
The Ante Room HMS Vernon
Legacy
In an obituary, Ivo Shaw was quoted as saying: "He was the best painter in oils the School had produced". Many of the paintings he left behind are held at Dudley Museum and Art Gallery. The Gallery mounted exhibitions of his work in 1979 and 1999 which featured both the paintings from their colection and others which were loaned from private owners. In 2009, his work was featured in an episode of BBC TV's Flog It!.
