This bust of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is by Enoch Wood (1759-1840), one of the greatest Staffordshire potters, a talented modeller and an artist of considerable merit who produced relief plaques and fine portrait busts. He also ran a highly successful business manufacturing wares of all types with a large American export trade. He produced more than 500 designs of mostly English, French and American scenes for transfer-printed wares. Wood was a philanthropic benefactor who came to be known as the ‘Father of the Potteries’; when he died his home town of Burslem went into mourning for a week.

Several different figurines and busts were produced of William Shakespeare by Staffordshire pottery firms, especially around the time of the tricentenary of his birth in 1864. This appears to have been based on an engraving of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare which some consider to be the most reliable record of his appearance. Now in the National Portrait Gallery, it was owned by the actor Thomas Betterton, painted probably between 1603 and 1610, showing Shakespeare as a rather swarthy middle-aged Jacobean man with a receding hairline, goatee beard and moustache. Another famous early depiction of Shakespeare is the copper engraving by Martin Droeshout published as a frontispiece to the First Folio in 1623, but since the artist was only fifteen when Shakespeare died, he probably worked from descriptions of Shakespeare by his friends.