Rose Theatre Research Articles

"Puzel" or "Pussel" and the Virgin Mary: 1 Henry VI and Anti-Catholic Polemic

The collaborative nature of 1 Henry VI has long been accepted, like the identity of Christopher Marlowe as one of the play’s authors. This article does not engage with the question of authorship as such, but interrogates Marlowe’s possible involvement in the Joan Pucelle scenes. It investigates what the depiction of Joan La Pucelle as a witch and a whore owes to contemporary anti-Catholic polemic, and argues that the emphasis in the play on the figure of the Virgin Mary is distinctive and significant. It proposes to contextualize the treatment of Joan Pucelle by confronting it to Doctor Faustus and The Massacre at Paris, two plays that were performed the same year as 1 Henry VI at the Rose Theatre.

‘On Pleasures Past, and Dangers to Ensue’: Site-Specific Violence and the Post-Renovation Rose Repertory

ABSTRACT Models of early modern English theatre-making rely on fantasies of repetition. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playing companies leveraged a repertory system wherein a set stable of actors performed a different playtext up to six days a week. Such repetitions make available hauntological possibilities that attach to reoccurring bodies, props, costumes, and even architecture. This article considers the repertory of plays that repeated on the stage of the Rose theatre after renovations added a roof over the stage with its attendant pillars, which afforded the Lord Strange’s, Earl of Sussex’s, and Lord Admiral’s players a new spatial, vertical dimension. In a brief post-reno period of highly regular playing, I argue that the pillars came to regularly serve as trees, arbours, and other ecological features to facilitate a character’s death. In The Battle of Alcazar, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and a single comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the pillars make possible an accretion of hauntological resonances attached to their location on the thrust. This article explores the ways in which such dramaturgical repetitions, newly available in the Rose after the 1592 renovations, would have built up returner-audiences’ associations with specific architectural features.

Architecture Against Theatre

Architecture Against Theatre

The Inconvenience of Stage Posts: Green World Locales at the Rose Theatre

A long-running debate surrounds the staging of ‘green worlds’ in early modern drama, with some commentators envisioning a bare stage while others believe that performances utilized multiple properties. One area of contention concerns the extent to which theatres used stage posts to represent trees. This article considers four plays (by Shakespeare, Munday, and Porter) performed at the Rose Theatre in the period 1594-8 and makes a case for the employment of various properties in forest scenes. Reference to the playhouse’s architecture after it was renovated in 1592, in particular the location of its stage posts, underpins the argument.

Translating and rewriting Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend at the National Theatre

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the translation strategies involved when transposing Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels into a play – the first produced in the UK. My Brilliant Friend, adapted by April De Angelis and directed by Melly Still, was based on the translation of the novels by Ann Goldstein and first staged at the National Theatre (London) in 2019/2020 following its success at the Rose Theatre, Kingston in 2017. In investigating the ‘making’ of the play, particularly through a series of interviews with De Angelis, the article examines how Ferrante’s works have been altered to suit the taste of its Anglophone audiences and what message the National Theatre is sending about the way in which the play and the use of non-standard languages in southern Italian drama have been translated on British stages. The article calls for stronger collaboration between the National Theatre, theatre practitioners, and translation scholars to foster greater cross-cultural understanding and help raise the general low status of translated theatre.

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll and Hyde: Theatre, Photography, and Composite Time

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll and Hyde:Theatre, Photography, and Composite Time Daniel A. Novak (bio) The cover of the Autumn 2020 issue of Victorian Studies features an image familiar enough to Victorianists to require almost no explanation. It depicts a man dressed in the clothes of a Victorian gentleman, his face looking upward and illuminated by an almost celestial light (as it turns out, electric light1) while another figure, his body almost transparent but still visible through the body in the foreground, crouches, hunched to half the man's height, wearing a sinister scowl (fig. 1). But, while well known, Henry Van der Weyde's photograph (c. 1887) of the actor Richard Mansfield playing both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in his theatrical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel is also an image that is difficult to categorize. It Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Henry Van der Weyde, photograph of Richard Mansfield playing both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, c. 1877. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections. [End Page 8] is a theatrical photograph, but, as David Mayer argues, like all Victorian photographs of actors, it is not a photograph of performance (227). For technological reasons, photographs of actors in costume as various characters were taken in the studio well into the late nineteenth century. What sets this image apart is that it represents a scene and a moment that could not have been performed, featuring as it does both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same time. The practice of superimposing two or more photographs—of the same person at different times, ages, and stages, or of different members of a family, or even of members of a particular social "type"—is reminiscent of the work of Francis Galton and his experiments with composite photography. Strictly speaking, however, this image is not a composite photograph but a double exposure. Susan Cook, whose essay on hidden-mother portraits appears in this forum, has linked Van der Weyde's image to narratives of double exposures in Victorian fiction, as well as the use of double exposure in Victorian spirit photography (a rich topic explored by Louis Kaplan in this forum). For Cook, the image embodies the heart of the novel's mystery. The "scandal is that the monster operates as a double exposure, not severed from Jekyll at all" (Cook 90). By contrast, Owen Clayton argues that this image should be read in the context of Francis Galton's use of composite photography, in two senses. Historically, Galton's work influenced Stevenson, who was long interested in Galton's work on heredity and even "linked the effect of foreign travel upon the individual to Galton's composite." Theoretically and visually, Galton's composites "were central to Stevenson's conception of an unstable, multiple selfhood" (Clayton 77). After all, Jekyll explicitly describes himself as a "composite" (Stevenson 85). Cook is, of course, right on the merits. Van der Weyde's image is a far less technologically ambitious double exposure. And yet, the photograph and the novel capture a paradox at the heart of Galton's project. Galton aimed to distill and make visible an essence—of race, heredity, or criminality.2 But Galton's photography often failed in its effort to distill a single, defining trait into scientific typicality and photographic visibility, instead capturing only "the common humanity that underlies" each person (Galton 135). Stevenson's novel dramatizes and theorizes both this desire and its failure. Jekyll's "beloved daydream" to separate "these elements" (Stevenson 79) turns into a nightmare. But his failure is predicted by the discoveries that drove the desire for separation in the first place. Jekyll not only admits that he is "radically both" and speculates that future researchers would find humans beings to be a "polity multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens" (79), but he also argues that the most boring and conventional of us are inevitably "composite"; only Hyde ("alone in the ranks of mankind") embodied "pure evil" (81). Van der Weyde's photograph, then, is at once an impossible fiction—stretching the boundaries of both visual embodiment and photographic and theatrical time—and...

Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook

Reviewed by: Robin Hood: Legend and Reality by David Crook John Marshall david crook, Robin Hood: Legend and Reality. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 298. isbn: 978–1–78327–543–4. £60/$99. Robin Hood scholars, overall, are a convivial and generous fraternity: a merry band of men and women. But not everything in the Greenwood is so amicable. For more than a century, there has existed a diametric difference of opinion over whether Robin Hood was 'real' or not. For the most part, historians favor an original Robin Hood [End Page 84] whose existence can be traced in medieval records of English government. Literary and cultural scholars, on the other hand, take a different view in that Robin Hood is a fiction, or, as F. C. Child, a nineteenth-century philologist and ballad scholar, so concisely put it: Robin Hood 'is absolutely a creation of the ballad-muse.' In this book, David Crook, a retired archivist with immense experience and knowledge of the records of national government, brings this understanding to make a case for a 'real' Robin Hood and to identify both him and the actual Sheriff of Nottingham. This book does more, however, than propose an historical criminal as the origin of the legend of Robin Hood. It is divided into two parts. The first half, 'The Legend and its Interpreters,' acknowledges the vital importance of the early literary material in constructing and disseminating the legend. In addition to summarizing the medieval tales of Robin Hood, this part goes on to consider the contributions made to the legend by antiquarians, archivists, folklorists, literary scholars, and historians. Much of this material is available elsewhere and is familiar to historians and literary critics alike. For students and newcomers to the romantic delights of Robin Hood, it provides a comprehensive introduction to the essential literature and its interpretations required to fully appreciate the legend. A fulsome bibliography assists investigating further. Unfortunately, in the chapter 'Chroniclers, Revellers, Playwrights and Antiquarians, c. 1420–1765,' there is an error that will mislead students new to the subject. On page 48, in a passage on the May games, Crook refers to 'The Play of Robin Hood's Death, dated 1475/6.' This reference is clearly a mistake, as no play about Robin's death exists until Munday and Chettle's The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon was performed, for the first time, in 1598. What is more, this play was written for the Admiral's Men at the Rose Theatre in London, not for a May game. The only play that matches the date 1475/6 and a May game environment is that owned by the Paston family, and that is now known as Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. The final chapter in Part 1 is given over to 'The Robin Hood Places.' It is from this point on that Crook comes into his own exercising his commitment to 'empirical historical research.' He examines in detail the earliest references to Robin Hood place names. From archival sources, he claims that 'Robin Hood's Bay is comfortably the earliest Robin Hood place name yet discovered,' dating the letter in which the reference appears to between 1346 and 1377. Part 2 uses the same methodology to explore the 'Outlaw and Evildoer of Our Land: The Original Robin Hood.' The chapters that follow contextualize the criminal environment in which the original Robin Hood would have lived in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. The first of these discusses the plethora of variations of the name Robin Hood and their wide geographical distribution—which raises the question of whether the large number listed, most without criminal records, diminishes the likelihood of any one of them being the one and only Robin Hood. The next two chapters offer a fascinating study of Robin Hood and criminality and, more specifically, law and disorder in Yorkshire between 1215 and 1225. The second of these opens with Crook's opinion that the origin of the Robin Hood legend may [End Page 85] lie in Yorkshire in the decade following the issue of the Magna Carta in 1215. Spoiler alert: I am about to name Crook...

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (c. 1928)

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (<i>c</i>. 1928)

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Investigating ‘fame-inism’: The politics of popular culture

This special section of Feminist Theory emerged from the interdisciplinary workshop ‘The Politics of Popular Culture’, organised by the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University in March 2015 as part of Hear Me Roar, Lancaster’s first feminist arts festival. This festival brought together diverse performances and audiences embracing very different approaches to and understandings of feminism. The shows ranged from the Rose Theatre’s rehearsed reading of a previously unperformed Restoration Comedy by Elizabeth Polewheedle, to the participatory ‘Bush Rush’ in the town square which invited everyone to join in a mass performance of the choreography for Kate Bush’s celebrated single Wuthering Heights. Reflecting this context, the workshop invited participants to explore ideas around gender, performance, activism, mediation and spectatorship.

Staging supernatural creatures in a computer-based visualisation of London’s sixteenth-century Rose Theatre

ABSTRACTThis paper argues for recreating performance techniques from early modern theatre by deploying a computer-based visualisation of the Rose Theatre, a London venue from the 1590s. It focuses on one spectacular performance feature in early modern theatre, the dragon, which communicated a combination of excitement, fear, and dread. This era marked a transition between the end of both pagan beliefs and an unquestioned acceptance of Christianity, and a more human-centred (and inquisitive) moment in early modern thinking. Yet the effect of such creatures does not disappear instantly: they continued to yield a fearful awe. Theatrically, this time was extremely dynamic in form and topic, but little is known about the detail of actual performative techniques used at the time. Dragons were known to have been staged at the Rose, as documented by the theatre’s owner, but no detail on its size or the manner of its ‘performance’ remains. To illustrate the potential of digital visualisations for theatre generally and to explore how this dragon may have worked in a detailed virtual model of the Rose Theatre, we track practicalities of size and manoeuvrability; venue questions regarding scale; and theatrical matters of visual impact and effect.

Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue

Shakespeare and Performance Studies:A Dialogue Susan Bennett and Gina Bloom The collaboration that led to this special issue began in 2013, when we happened to meet up at the PSi (Performance Studies International) conference at Stanford University and were struck by the realization that we were among the very few attendees who were also members of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Why was there so little crossover between these organizations? One reason is that SAA and PSi, and the disciplines they represent, have little overlap in terms of historical focus: Shakespeare Studies is primarily focused on the early modern period, while Performance Studies is largely uninterested in much before 1968. The disjunction between the two fields stems also from their histories of development. As W. B. Worthen points out, Shakespeare Studies was "constructed through centuries of textual scholarship and interpretation" whereas Performance Studies has been "engrained with a disciplinary suspicion of the regulatory work attributed to writing, textuality, and the archive in performance, and so perhaps constitutively dismissive of dramatic theatre" (2). To be sure, there have been exceptions to these rules in both the SAA and PSi conference programs, but we found it odd, given our shared interests in Shakespeare and in Performance Studies theory, that these worlds seemed to be missing opportunities for exchange and engagement. That conversation led to our decision to co-lead a seminar at the SAA conference in 2016 that would bring the two fields into a more sustained and focused dialogue. As it turned out, Shakespeareans were [End Page 367] even more eager than we had suspected to bring theories of performance into their research on Shakespeare: there was so much demand for the seminar that we ran double sessions. The presentations and conversations in those two conference sessions form the origin and inspiration for this special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin. We were encouraged not just by the large number of proposals that the topic of "Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue" received, but just as much by the enthusiasm of auditors, many of whom were quick to join in our debate. Clearly, then, there was (and is) a need and readiness in Shakespeare Studies for a deeper engagement with theories of performance. This derives, at least in part, from the sometimes slow, but certainly steady, growth in interest in performance matters within the field of Shakespeare Studies. Over the last twenty to thirty years, performance has moved, definitively, from a marginal subfield to a robust and diverse set of interests and approaches that impacts many critical nodes from the production of texts to the material conditions of early modern theaters. Moves that considered the text as the blueprint for performance and, even, tested editing practices through performance significantly changed the ways that editions of Shakespeare's plays are made and used. For instance, the New Cambridge Shakespeare series advertises its distinctive emphasis on performance, noting that "precise details of staging and performance help students visualise the plays in action" ("About NCS"). As well, a recent issue of Shakespeare Bulletin (34.1, Spring 2016), guest edited by C. K. Ash, José A. Pérez Díez, and Emma Smith, looked to invigorate conversation about "the relationship between page and stage from the position of the text-producer" (Introduction 2). Parallel to developments that opened up textual study to a variety of issues concerned with performance, other scholarly work has been attentive to the period's theater history as well as concerns of theater archaeology—the latter stimulated, on the one hand, by the threat to the remains of the Rose Theatre in 1989 when a new building was planned for its site and, on the other, in the project for a replica Globe Theatre, initiated by Sam Wanamaker and eventually opened on London's South-bank in 1997. Other emergent strands of performance criticism within Shakespeare Studies have looked to imagine the production and reception of early modern performances, merging aspects of theater history (for example, knowledge of particular actors and their signature skills) with close readings that focused on releasing the text's performance potentials. Moreover, interest in performance across Shakespeare studies has extended beyond a focus on early modern...

American Moor by Keith Hamilton Cobb at the Phoenix Theater

Reviewed by: American Moorby Keith Hamilton Cobb at the Phoenix Theater Kim F. Hall American MoorPresented by Keith Hamilton Cobb at the Phoenix Theater, New York. 04 21– 05 10, 2015. Directed by Paul Kwame Johnson. Set and lighting by Tsuba Kamei. Graphic design by Monty Stilson. With Josh Tyson (Michael Aaron Miller/Director). 2015 was quite the year for “black” Shakespeare. Several performances (The Classical Theater of Harlem’s The Tempest, produced as their annual “Uptown Shakespeare in the Park” at Marcus Garvey Park in New York City; Debra Ann Byrd and Dathan B. William’s The Sable Series: The History of Black Shakespearean Actorsat MIST in Harlem; and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvetat Shakespeare & Co. in Lennox, MA) in different ways staged complicated, loving tributes to African American relationships with Shakespeare whilst salvos from the culture wars and debates over cross-racial casting blasted from both the US and the UK. Predictable outrage followed a June 2015 Washington Postblogpost featuring [End Page 524]a Sacramento, CA public school teacher who said she would prefer to stop teaching Shakespeare and instead offer her multiethnic students a wider range of literatures that speak directly to their experiences. A few weeks later, critics on social media questioned Sir Patrick Stewart’s expressed desire to play Othello “as white” and Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses at the Rose Theatre. The black performances that summer could be read as an intervention, a much-needed transfusion of energy and introspection into a conversation as anemic as it is loud and recursive. American Moor, a solo show written and performed by Keith Hamilton Cobb, is a searingly honest, deeply humane theatrical biography told through the actor’s experiences of first discovering a love of Shakespeare and then finding that, as an African American male, Othellois both the Holy Grail and something of a mirage for any black actor who wants to explore Shakespeare’s canon. The title, American Moor, suggests the United States’ unique relationship to Othello. Since Paul Robeson’s 1943 debut on Broadway, it has been a commonplace that Othello is a “black” role, an assumption confirmed by the credits of almost any black actor. (Watching the play, I was reminded of my own amusement at looking at the Playbill for the 1997 “photo-negative” Othellostarring Patrick Stewart and discovering that almost every black actor in the cast—even the very young ones—had played Othello). Yet American Moorsuggests that, like “acceptance” of black people in the US, the acceptance of black actors as Othello is entirely conditional. In the tradition of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museumand Ntozake Shange’s Spell#7, the play turns a politically savvy eye on this question of black ownership of Othello and, more broadly, on the ways—subtle and not—in which the theater excludes black actors. We entered the theater watching Cobb stand in a corner of the almost empty stage with a copy of Othello; he waited for his Othelloaudition as we waited for him to begin. When the performance “opened,” he moved center stage to tell us “the story of my life” through his blossoming love of Shakespeare: a love he has maintained while navigating the theater’s—and America’s—assumptions about blackness, which drive black actors into an endless stream of stereotypical roles. The policing of his place in the Shakespeare world began early, when, in acting class, he elected to perform Titania’s “forgeries of jealousy” speech. In response, he was told in an agonizingly indirect fashion that he should perform something he’s more right for: Aaron, Morocco, or Othello. In the face of “the play’s relevance [being] urged … perpetually,” Cobb rejected Othello outright, seeking [End Page 525]spaces where he could display the magic of his craft and of Shakespeare’s language. American Moorgave Cobb the space to perform these denied opportunities. He appeared the ultimate code switcher, nimbly moving from Shakespeare’s most eloquent verse—Titania, Richard II, and Hamlet made an appearance—to the multiple accents of New York City. The play’s writing was equally seamless: afterward, several...

Actors' Conversations at the Rose Theatres

Kingston's Rose Theatre was opened in 2008, inspired by the archaeology of Philip Henslowe's 1587 Rose. Peter Hall described the new space as ‘intimate yet epic … a modern theatre which has all the strengths of the past’. This article reflects on the relationship between players and playgoers in the two theatres, considering particular practitioners' discoveries and the audience experience in various modern theatre spaces which have been influenced by the architecture of the Elizabethan public playhouses. In reassessing the character of the theatre dialogue between actor and audience, the article challenges previously held notions about our Elizabethan counterpart.

“The Sign of the Last”: Gender, Material Culture, and Artisanal Nostalgia in The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) is filled with shoes. Every aspect of shoes’ social lives is enacted onstage: they are manufactured before our eyes, bought and sold, given as gifts, displayed as signs of status, and flaunted as objects of fashion. This essay considers how an investigation of the shoes and other crafted objects staged in the play may shed new light on a neglected economy of female artisanal labor in early modern London and its transformative impact on the material culture of the early modern English stage. Examining a range of evidence, including a shoe found in the Museum of London’s archaeological excavation of the Rose theatre where Dekker’s play was first performed, the essay argues that far from putting us in touch with a bygone artisan’s utopia, Dekker’s play stages a native industry transformed by economic expansion, yet unhobbled by the pressures of foreign trade.

The Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: an Elizabethan black family near the Rose Theatre

This article focuses on the archival records of a black family in Boroughside, Southwark and St. Olave, Tooley Street between 1579 and 1592. Given the proximity of this precinct, immediately adjacent to Southwark with its busy theatrical connections, including the appearance in it of Phillip Henslowe's Rose Theatre in 1587 and Shakespeare's own residence close by, this article will argue that the history of this man called Resonable and his family casts an intriguing new light on the material conditions of the production of Elizabethan drama including that of Shakespeare. The article will pursue two objectives: it will sketch a history of this black family in its locale of residence, and it will construct some lines of contact between this palpable black presence right next to the venue of Elizabethan drama's and Shakespeare's earliest and most influential plays, in the most formative years of both. In pursuing the first objective, the article will demonstrate the methodology of empirical black studies in the early modern period, and in prosecuting the second it will show the value of such studies in understanding further the vexatious topic of the black subject in Shakespeare and popular early theatre.

Review of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part One (directed by Bronagh Lagan) at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, 3 May 2011

Review of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part One (directed by Bronagh Lagan) at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, 3 May 2011

The Rose Theatre: Twenty Years of Continuous Monitoring, Lessons, and Legacy

The discovery of the Rose Theatre in 1989 led to the implementation of new planning guidance focused on the presumption that the preferred response to development impacting on archaeological sites would be mitigation and preservation in situ. There was little understanding of what the impact of mitigation would be on the quality of the buried evidence and the Rose Theatre site was the first to be scientifically monitored. As a direct result research was implemented and the PARIS series of conferences were initiated.

PARIS London: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Site Preservation

This paper outlines the history of preservation in situ as practised in London over the last hundred and fifty years. It touches upon the early development of the City of London and the destruction of significant remains, which gradually lead to a heightening of sensitivities and public concern for preservation, particularly of built fabric such as the Roman defences. The role of cases such as the Walbrook Mithraeum and Rose Theatre are discussed, both influential in changing the relationship between development and archaeology. The paper concludes by noting how much we have learnt from past mistakes, but notes that more can be done to make these sites more accessible.

Review of Marlowe's Edward II (directed by Peter Darney), the Rose Theatre, Bankside, 22 February 2011

The remains of the Rose Theatre provide at once the most romantic and the most improbable of settings for a theatrical performance. Since the actors cannot for obvious reasons use the historic play...