A bronze figure of Shakespeare stands atop a tall octagonal pedestal of polished pink granite. He is shown in Elizabethan doublet and short cloak, bare-headed, a quill in one hand and a book and laurel wreath at his feet, his weight easy on one leg. The pedestal's base carries the line "He was not of an age, but for all time," and its four upper faces hold arched bronze relief panels of Shakespearean characters — Falstaff, Hamlet, Queen Katharine, and Lady Macbeth — each labeled below in bronze. Molded granite cornices and a stepped plinth complete the monument, which stands on an open lawn near the park's carriage drives.
The Shakespeare statue was a gift of Henry Shaw, who laid out Tower Grove Park and adorned it with monuments to figures he admired. Shaw commissioned the bronze from Ferdinand von Miller II, the Munich sculptor who managed that city's Royal Bronze Foundry, and it was unveiled on April 23, 1878 — reckoned as the 314th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. The pedestal's four relief panels portray characters from the plays; the Falstaff panel takes its likeness from Ben DeBar, the St. Louis theater manager and actor celebrated for the role, and is inscribed as such. When the English Shakespearean actress Adelaide Neilson saw the statue in 1880, she called it the best likeness of the poet she had seen, and Shaw planted a cutting of Shakespeare's own mulberry near it in her honor. The monument still stands at the heart of the park.
