Ostensibly a dessert service, the thirty-eight pieces in this porcelain set suggest much about its makers and its owners. Produced at the Chamberlain's Worcester porcelain works sometime between 1807 and 1811, the set portrays forty-two scenes from twenty-nine of Shakespeare's plays. Each piece is inscribed with the mark "Chamberlain's Worcester, Manufacturers to their Royal Highnesses, the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cumberland" and bears an identification and quotation from the depicted act and scene.
The set was probably decorated by Humphrey Chamberlain Jr., from 1807 the head of the Worcester factory established by his family in the late eighteenth century. He developed a technique of painting on porcelain in brush strokes so delicate it was said they could be seen only with a magnifying glass. His virtuosity was likely reserved for the factory's most select productions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Worcester porcelain competed with the products of Sèvres in France; this set may have been among the lavish display pieces made to demonstrate the British ware's high quality.
Chamberlain's nephew later recorded that "one small dessert service painted with Shakespeare subjects by my uncle" was purchased by the prince regent for £4000, an astronomical sum in the early 1800s. Whether it was this set is not altogether clear, but only a very wealthy patron could have afforded such a service. A remarkable and beautiful example of Regency taste, the set would have been appreciated rather like a miniature gallery, each piece admired as an individual work of art.
