Shakespeare's Globe Research Articles

Othello by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

Othello by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

Thinking about Collaboration

When Henry VIII, or All Is True was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London in May 2022, the production elicited a lukewarm review from Arifa Akbar in the Guardian. The theatre critic stated that "the play itself feels slightly disjointed, perhaps because it was not the Bard's work alone but a collaboration with John Fletcher. There is now the added authorial hand of Hannah Khalil, who edits the text to accentuate women's roles and adds some well-known lines from Shakespeare's other works. Where this should enrich the drama, it exposes its faultlines." Akbar's comment is revealing, and particularly so in the context of this issue's engagement with the varieties of early modern dramatic collaboration. It not only mentions several collaborative practices used in early modern theatre which are explored in the articles brought together for this special issue – co-authorship, adaptation and quotation, to name but three – but also reflects a profound unease towards collaboration in twenty-first-century culture. Henry VIII, Akbar infers, is an imbalanced play because Shakespeare wrote it with somebody else rather than by himself. Akbar also implies that the relationship between these two authors has to be hierarchical, with Shakespeare (aka the inevitably capitalised, solitary ‘Bard’) as the better and Fletcher as the lesser playwright, who is responsible for the play's alleged shortcomings. A similarly dismissive attitude towards Fletcher is reflected in the review's title, which refers to Henry VIII as ‘little-seen Shakespeare’ as a form of skewed advertisement (this is Shakespeare, but not as we know him),2 thus erasing Fletcher's co-authorship completely, only to eventually present his name by way of explaining the play's mediocrity. The review also suggests that the play's merit has been further reduced by Hannah Khalil's contemporary adaptation, which adds too much ‘wokeness’ (the accentuation of women's roles) as well as too much middle-class Shakespeare (the well-known lines recognisable for those who know their Shakespeare inside out). In short, the review relies on a hierarchy well established in (traditional) literary criticism: Shakespeare is the epitome of playwrighting, and his solo-authored plays are the gold standard of early modern English drama; his co-authored plays are diminished by the lesser dramatic ability of his collaborators (where Shakespeare is sprezzatura, Fletcher is learned rhetoric); adapters have even more limited authorial skills and, therefore, an adapted play is a ‘lesser’ play because of the adapter's ‘interference’. As Akbar's review showcases, the notion of dramatic co-authorship, especially Shakespeare's, is still routinely met with scepticism and disdain in public discourse. Rather than enriching a play, three cooks (Shakespeare, Fletcher, Khalil) have spoiled the broth.

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

The Tempest by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

The Tempest by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

Macbeth

Reviewed by: Macbeth Gemma Kate Allred MacbethPresented by Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank at Shakespeare's Globe, 2602– 1603 2020, and streamed via YouTube 1105– 2607 2020. Directed by Cressida Brown. Design by Georgia Lowe. Costumes by Laura Rushton. Music composed by Jon McLeod. Music Direction by Hilary Belsey. With Ekow Quartey (Macbeth), Elly Condron (Lady Macbeth), Jack Wilkinson (Macduff ), Samuel Oatley (Banquo), Aidan Cheng (Malcolm), Dickon Tyrrell (Duncan), Amanda Wright (Ross), Jessica Murrain (Lady Macduff/Witch 1), Molly Logan (Porter/Witch 2), Mara Allen (Fleance/ Witch 3), and others. Since 2007, Deutsche Bank has supported an annual Playing Shakespeare production at Shakespeare's Globe. Developed especially for schools, these productions run at around ninety minutes played without an interval, and are supported by workshops and online activities. The 2020 production— Macbeth, directed by Cressida Brown—did not finish its theatrical run due to COVID-19. However, a recording of the production was subsequently made publicly available via YouTube, offering wider access to a program that usually plays predominantly to organized visits by school audiences. To get a sense of numbers, 18,000 secondary school students were given tickets for free to see the 2020 production of Macbethin the theater; meanwhile the YouTubestream was, according to the Globe, viewed 471,500 times. The production was also in the rare position of being available both in the theater and online at different points during the COVID-19 crisis; it was also the last production I saw [End Page 164]in person before theaters closed worldwide. Revisiting Macbethonline, it's hard not to read the production in the context of ongoing concern over the wider political and societal response to the pandemic, raising as it does questions of effective and assumed leadership. Brown made a number of bold choices. She read Macbethas harboring a sense of inevitability: if Macbeth (Ekow Quartey) had not taken the actions he did, someone else would have. Brown sought to question the nature of tyranny, wanting to leave audiences with the sense of a societal fatal flaw: "the idea that tyranny is something that continues, it is not tied to a leader and you never know what regime you are going to be replacing with another" (Cuthbertson). Quartey's Macbeth was as much a victim of a flawed society as he was the agent of his own undoing. Lady Macbeth (Elly Condron), too, was portrayed sympathetically: heavily pregnant at the start of the play, the subsequent loss of her unborn child was as much a trigger for her madness as her involvement in regicide. Indeed, it was Lady Macbeth in the throes of miscarriage who warned Lady Macduff (Jessica Murrain) of her impending fate. There was a vulnerability within this production, with Fleance (Mara Allen) and Malcolm (Aidan Cheng) both portrayed as particularly childish. Parallels between Lady Macbeth's miscarriage and the murder of Lady Macduff's infant added a sense of a loss of innocence and a curtailment of any hope for the future. The sense of parallelism was present from the start of the play, with the witches offering prophecies for more than just Macbeth himself. As they disentangled themselves from a pile of dismembered bloody bodies, moving between the realms of the dead and the living, the witches foreshadowed the play's outcome. One (Allen) pulled a bloody dagger from her body as they introduced Macbeth; another (Murrain) held a damaged doll, a clear reference to Lady Macbeth's unborn child; whilst a noose around the third's (Molly Logan) neck hinted at the strangulation of Lady Macduff and the smothering of her child. There was a sense from the outset that this Macbethwas as much a commentary on society as it was on one man's "vaulting ambition" (1.7.27). Society was shown as damaged from the outset. Dirty, tattered Saltire flags bearing a "D" for Duncan motif were displayed around the theater, indicative of the poor state and strength of leadership. In contrast, Duncan (Dickon Tyrrell) appeared wearing a white suit and fur, the trappings of entitlement, a contrast to the bloodied fatigues of his soldiers who had been defending his...

George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland

Reviewed by: George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland Sarah Chambré Lucie Sutherland. George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii+297 pp., $84.99 (hardback). Examining theater history and cultural practice, Lucie Sutherland provides in this work of forensic scholarship a many-faceted portrayal of George Alexander, one of the last great figures to occupy the role of actor-manager, which dominated and shaped the English stage from Richard Burbage's tenure of Shakespeare's Globe (1599-1613) through David Garrick's creation of the Garrick Theatre (1747-76) and continued with an array of famous names until the early decades of the twentieth century. Like his predecessors and peers, Alexander combined the roles of principal actor, producer, and financial director as actor-manager of the fashionable St. James's Theatre from 1890 until his death in 1918. Sutherland's detailed analysis of the financial and practical aspects of this management arrangement underpins a nuanced portrayal of Alexander's championing of new English drama with a constant assessment of its appeal to his diverse audience, segregated by class and ticket price. This book describes how Alexander's commitment to contemporary texts, nurturing of a new audience, and manipulation of their tastes by the creation of a St. James's brand was tempered by conservatism. This was partly innate, partly due to censorship but mostly the result of a cautious guardianship of his brand, defined with a careful and highly attuned eye to the fashionable occupants of the stalls and dress circle. Sutherland delineates the elements that contributed to this management style and challenges the image of Alexander as a rigid autocrat with particular attention to his collaboration with actors and playwrights. His emerging style and openness to serious new drama was shifted significantly by the events of 1895, of which Henry James's short lived drama Guy Domville (1895) was only one. Sutherland details the financial imperatives and the portfolio approach to Alexander's risk management. Increasingly, the actor-manager interspersed new works with revivals, safe romances, and market-tested offerings such as acknowledged authors or works that had premiered elsewhere. The need for long runs and this conservatively managed collaboration, exemplified by but not exclusive to Alexander, led by the [End Page E-8] time of the opening years of the twentieth century to a bifurcated marketplace—as the critic Dennis Kennedy describes it: "avant-garde suspicion of popular success eventually split [the market place] into two parts: the larger part got the audience but little lasting attention. The smaller part the critical and historical acclaim" (146). In many respects, the representative history so well reconstructed here mirrors the shifts in literary book publishing over the same period. In this history, James arguably placed himself in the wrong market for his work, although the successes of pioneers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero in the early 1890s might have seemed to augur otherwise. Sutherland's book is not primarily about James's play, which was only a brief episode in Alexander's career. He is quoted as reminiscing in 1909 about Guy Domville that "I was, and always shall be, proud, in spite of that particular audience's adverse verdict. It had a fair run, which satisfied me, for it attracted to the St James's that whole of intellectual London's audiences available for any theatre" (45). The author accepts the standard critical viewpoint that the construed failure was due to "the limited dramatic possibilities of James's text." The detailed scholarship contained in this book is nevertheless very useful for Jamesians interested in a re-evaluation of the play and consideration of its limited run in the context of Alexander's practice. The creation of the St. James's brand relied on elaborately realistic and spectacular staging, which entailed high fixed costs for a production, and success was thus reliant on long runs to create profit. The stratified audience composition meant that a play must have broad appeal, something that Guy Domville failed to offer. Sutherland demonstrates that rehearsal time was limited and that Alexander focused on choreography and mise-en-scène rather than dialogue...

From the Editors of the Special Reviews Section: Shakespeare in Lockdown

Reviewed by: From the Editors of the Special Reviews Section: Shakespeare in Lockdown Peter Kirwan and Erin Sullivan Partway through preparing this issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, the world's theaters went dark. As countries around the world imposed social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19, theaters cancelled productions, tours, and rehearsals. At the time of writing (June 2020), it is still unclear when—indeed, if—anything approaching a "normal" theater industry might resume operations, and whether theater institutions (especially those without public subsidy) will be able to survive the disruption. The response of theaters was, understandably, to remind the world that they still existed. From March 2020, the explosion of online theater introduced audiences around the world to a startling variety of productions, with Shakespeare central in programming. For larger institutions—the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, the National Theatre, Stratford Festival, Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne, and many more—back catalogues of professionally recorded material were quickly made available for free in time-limited releases, with donations urgently requested. (Among the many questions raised by this model was that of how artists were being compensated for the re-use of their labour. In May 2020, the National Theatre confirmed that it would be offering artists payment for the broadcast of shows they had participated in [BBC].) The sudden global availability of archival content explodes conventional understandings of the temporally complex status of past productions, with live events coalescing around historical material, and surprising treasures (a 1957 Berliner Ensemble performance of Mother Courage starring Helene Weigel) sitting alongside recent productions. But at the same time, companies—often small, even newly formed ones—also began developing new, designed-for-online content. Gemma Allred and Benjamin Broadribb helpfully identify two different primary modes: the "Live Online Performance" in which a live performance is recorded through videoconferencing software, and then made available [End Page 489] online either in real-time, after the fact, or both, with donations solicited via Patreon or similar; and the "Virtual Theatre Performance" in which a one-off event happens via an online platform that allows performers and audiences to share presence, usually with paid entry (Allred and Broadribb 2020). Some of these projects, such as The Show Must Go Online, which mounted weekly stagings of Shakespeare, became regular fixtures in lockdown theater schedules; others, such as the Oxford-based Creation Theatre's Zoom Tempest, became the stuff of international news (Pellerin 2020). Across all of these different forms of theater event was an attempt to recapture some of the key values of live theater, both to serve what was clearly felt to be a need among isolated populations around the world, and also more pragmatically to shore up the future of theater by insisting on its unique selling point. As Alexis Soloski argued, "this explosion of online Shakespeare is less about Shakespeare and more about the feeling of virtual community that the shared knowledge of the works enables" (Soloski). But this was no utopian sharing. The extraordinary "Read for the Globe" project, put together as a fundraiser in a few days in response to Shakespeare's Globe publishing a stark warning about its future, saw brilliant performances from professional and amateur actors connected online, reading sixteen plays in forty-eight hours; but the celebratory air was underpinned by the specter of potential loss. And watching professional-quality productions without the physical co-presence of fellow audience members was, as some of the contributors to this special section argue, as much a reminder of what was missing as a celebration of what was present. The emotional impact for both theaters and audiences of trying to wrangle with what theater is in the age of COVID-19 is very real. Simon McBurney, artistic director of Complicité, recorded a new introduction to the previously released live capture of his solo show The Encounter, playing with technology to place a 2020 version of himself into the audience of a 2016 performance at London's Barbican, before standing up and tearing down a green screen in his living room and addressing himself to the camera. "In this period of confinement, we're not just asking when it will...

& Juliet

Reviewed by: & Juliet Gemma Kate Allred & JulietPresented by Max Martin and Tim Headington at Shaftesbury Theatre, London. From 11 2, 2019. Music and lyrics by Max Martin and Friends. Book by David West Read. Directed by Luke Shephard. Music supervision, orchestration and arrangement by Bill Sherman. Choreography by Jennifer Weber. Set by Soutra Gilmour. Lighting by Howard Hudson. Costumes by Paloma Young. With Miriam-Teak Lee (Juliet), Cassidy Janson (Anne Hathaway), Oliver Tompsett (Shakespeare), David Bedella (Lance), Arun Blair-Mangat (May), Jordan Luke Gage (Romeo), Melanie La Barrie (Nurse), Tim Mahendran (Francois), and others. In 2018, Emiliahit the stage of Shakespeare's Globe. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's protagonist became every woman, embodying their collective anger, and social media responded. Emiliawas established as essential viewing, working as a manifesto for a feminist revolution. The act of writing back across textual boundaries functioned as historical recuperation, placing the textual memories of the real Emilia Bassano into the [End Page 278]bodies of modern women. The West End show & Juliet—neon pink, glitter-accented, and set to a soundtrack of teen-pop classics—might seem to be an unlikely counterpart to Emilia. However, David West Read's jukebox musical, based on the chart-topping back catalogue of Max Martin, is just that. Asking "What if Juliet's famous ending was really just her beginning? What if she decided to choose her own fate?" & Julietraises questions about whose stories get told and by whom, and about who controls the narrative. Shakespeare's Juliet, with the assistance of a historically fictionalized Anne Hathaway, has the chance to rewrite her future without Romeo. Like Emilia, & Julietplaces early modern women in conversation with both a modern audience and Shakespeare himself. & Juliet's links to Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet(1996) cannot be ignored, with clear nods to 1990s pop culture throughout. Juliet's soundtrack was predominately Britney Spears-based. She entered, slumped against Romeo's tomb, singing a mournful version of Britney's 1998 debut "… Baby One More Time," arranged by Tony Award-winner Bill Sherman. Francois de Bois, her new love interest—a replacement Romeo, if you will—entered playing a Nintendo Game Boy and shared a duet with Juliet, Britney's "Overprotected." The musical's marketing also draws heavily on 1990s nostalgia: a special edition Smash Hitsmagazine handed out at London underground stations marked the production's premiere. The clear target audience is women now in their mid-thirties who grew up reading the magazine, listening to Britney's early hits, and watching Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, willing Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo to notice when Claire Danes's Juliet wakes and craving the fairy-tale ending Shakespeare denied us. & Julietoffers the target market a remix: a second chance at "happily ever after," this time centered not on the Hollywood heartthrob but, as West Read notes in the theater program, "the independent, empowered" Juliet. Inherently meta-theatrical, & Julietis as much a love letter to theater itself as it is to Romeo and Juliet. From the opening moments, I was aware that Juliet's story was a play within a play. Soutra Gilmour's set design was self-consciously based on Elizabethan theater (specifically, Shoreditch's Curtain). Gilmour took the idea of a disused theater space to frame her design. She created a clear timeline between Shakespeare's London and modern-day Shoreditch, taking inspiration from East London's street art tradition. Artist Vic Lee's text and maps provided backdrops that plotted the musical's journey from the theater in London (both Shakespeare's Curtain and today's Shaftsbury Theatre) to the play's settings of Verona and Paris. The musical's pre-set drew inspiration from the modern-day [End Page 279]Shakespeare's Globe. The Players entered gradually, interacting with the audience as they settled. Costume designer Paloma Young took her lead from actors warming up before a performance: the players wore dancewear with a hint of Elizabethan period costuming, and t-shirts and jackets referencing earlier Shakespearean performances. A spot-lit jukebox placed stage right provided warm-up music and kept & Juliet'sidentity as a jukebox musical at the fore. Shakespeare entered in rock...

Henry VI

Reviewed by: Henry VI Anna Hegland Henry VIPresented by the Globe Ensemble at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe, London. 11 5, 2019- 01 26, 2020. Directed by Sean Holmes and Ilinca Radulian. Designed by Grace Smart. Music composed by Ellie Wilson and directed by Thom Ashworth. Fight Direction by Philip d'Orléans. With Sarah Amankwah (Eleanor/Cade/Edward), Philip Arditti (Warwick), Nina Bowers (Suffolk/Young Clifford/Elizabeth), Jonathan Broadbent (King Henry VI), Leaphia Darko (Salisbury/Northumberland/Rutland), Steffan Donnelly (Queen Margaret), Matti Houghton (Somerset/Prince Edward), Colin Hurley (York/Hastings), John Lightbody (Gloucester/Old Clifford/George), and Sophie Russell (Richard). Continuing a history cycle that extended over multiple seasons in 2019, the Globe's Henry VIabridged Shakespeare's three early collaborative plays into one, cutting part one and adapting parts two and three into a three-hour production that saw the return of the 2019 Globe ensemble, last seen in the summer season's 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. This sustained engagement by the same group of actors (bar two replacements) meant that the cast appeared to have gelled as a unit, and, from my perspective having seen all five shows (including Richard III, performed in repertory with Henry VI) in the two-season cycle, felt extremely tight-knit. A sense of trust and subsequent willingness to just go with each other permeated the whole piece, and their individual and group performances were strong enough to compensate for a few flaws in the productions themselves. For Henry VI, the biggest of these flaws was consistency of pacing. While the majority of the production charged forward, giving an appropriately dizzying feel to the changing allegiances and brutality of war, some moments were overly rushed and lost their impact. Jack Cade (Sarah Amankwah), for instance, was treated as a scary figure, with hooded, anonymous characters wearing animal face masks appearing at the Playhouse's windows behind the audience, rallying around Cade's cry of "we [are] Jack Cade." But owing to the compression required to condense two plays into a single production, Cade's scenes were cut so that the rebellion never hit its stride or became a real danger to king and country, and the unseen crowd of commoners protesting Humphrey's death felt far more threatening. Some of the blocking in the first act also felt disconnected, despite using one major set piece to tie things together. Grace Smart's design [End Page 302]changed the indoor theater into a Georgian palace, with the black and gold backdrop of the Wanamaker painted a pale blue, and a large marble rose motif covering the floor. Dominating the center of the space was a bright red chaise longue, around which the first act based a series of tableaux featuring the nobles dressed in modern suits of red or white. The chaise became a throne big enough for not only King Henry (Jonathan Broadbent) but also, at the beginning of the play, both Humphrey (John Lightbody) and his wife, Eleanor (Amankwah). Eleanor was quickly replaced by Queen Margaret (Steffan Donnelly), while York (Colin Hurley) and Suffolk (Nina Bowers) also sat next to the monarch in turn. The chaise became a touchstone during the first act, as the ensemble came back to this image regularly. The throne provided a large obstacle onstage, which anchored and hindered the action in equal parts. Some of the actors became blocked behind it, unable to move, while others were able to break away and move around it for soliloquies and pointed commentary on the rest of the court. The tableaux were often helpful, especially in terms of illustrating the shifting power dynamics that set up the civil war of acts two and three. Other moments were effective even without much movement, such as when Suffolk and Margaret plotted the removal of their enemies literally behind Henry as he sat on the throne, and even started making out over his head. However, such stationary blocking also flattened the action, and meant that much of the first hour was static. Many of these issues were fixed after the first act, however, and the second and third acts felt clearer. While the...

Doctor Faustus by Shakespeare's Globe

Doctor Faustus by Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare and the Naming of Bears

Further to his enquiries into ‘Shakespeare and the Three Bears’ (NTQ 106), Nick de Somogyi here turns his attention from Harry, Hunks, and Sackerson to another celebrity triumvirate of fighting bears at Paris Garden, likewise stabled some few hundred yards away from the playhouses Shakespeare knew. Jeremy, Sampson, and Daniel may have bequeathed a lower profile to posterity, but the endurance implicit in their Old Testament naming lends perspective to the enigma of Bankside's parallel entertainments – between blood sport and high art. In particular, it is argued here that the briefly documented life of Sampson-the-Bear enduringly informs the ‘ancient grudge’ with which Romeo and Juliet begins. A Contributing Editor to NTQ since 2003, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and works as an independent scholar, textual consultant, freelance editor, and illustrator. The founder editor of both the Globe Quartos and Shakespeare Folios series for Nick Hern Books (1997–2015), he has lectured at Cambridge University, the Museum of London, and for the Rose Trust, and has curated four exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–16). His publications include Shakespeare's Theatre of War (Ashgate, 1998), Shakespeare on Theatre (Nick Hern Books, 2011), and (as Consultant Editor) Shakespeare in 100 Objects (V&A, 2014).

Performing the Public at Shakespeare's Globe

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking features of performances at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe has been the active role played by spectators there. This essay analyses the way in which the theatre and its audiences have constructed a sense of “the public” in the playhouse, paying particular attention to productions of Julius Caesar (1999 and 2014), Coriolanus (2006) and Titus Andronicus (2006 and 2014) in which the audience was addressed as both a fictional public and a real one. Drawing on video recordings and other archival material for all five productions, the essay examines the extent to which these roles were imposed by the production, or actively negotiated by spectators. It suggests that these productions marked key moments in the Globe’s changing uses of its audience.

Hamlet by Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by: Hamletby Shakespeare's Globe Michael J. Collins HamletPresented at Shakespeare's Globe, London. 04 25- 08 26, 2018. Directed by Federay Holmes and Elle While. Designed by Ellan Parry. Music composed by James Maloney and directed by Adrian Woodward. Choreography by Sian Williams. Fights directed by Yarit Dor. With Catrin Aaron (Horatio), James Garnon (Claudius), Colin Hurley (Ghost/Grave-digger/Player), Bettrys Jones (Laertes/Player), Richard Katz (Polonius/Priest), Jack Laskey (Francisco/Player/Fortinbras), Nadia Nadarajah (Guildenstern), Pearce Quigley (Rosencrantz), Shubham Saraf (Ophelia/Osric), Helen Schlesinger (Gertrude), Michelle Terry (Hamlet), and Tanika Yearwood (Marcellus/Reynaldo/Player). Michelle Terry's Hamlet, her first production as Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe, seemed designed not simply to reflect the recent [End Page 691]change in leadership, but to reverse certain practices of her predecessor. Emma Rice, who served for two years as Artistic Director, resigned at the end of the 2017 season because the Globe's board found her productions, marked by strong directorial concepts and employing contemporary sound and lighting techniques, at odds with the organization's central tenets. At the start of her Twelfth Nightin 2017, for example, the cast on the SS Unity, prior to the shipwreck, sang along with a recording of Sister Sledge's We are Familyas they danced up and down a gangplank that extended diagonally from the balcony to the stage. Hamlet, on the other hand, was played throughout on an entirely bare stage. The balcony was used primarily for a brass ensemble that appeared intermittently during the production to provide sound effects (flourishes at the King's entrance, for example). No stairs led from the stage to the yard, as is often the case at the Globe, and thus no exits and entrances were made through it and no action took place in it. Although two directors were credited in the program, the production was shaped by the actors and the creative team working openly (members of the Globe staff and visiting students attended the rehearsals) and collaboratively over ten weeks on both Hamletand As You Like It, in an attempt to replicate, in contemporary terms, the rehearsal process of Shakespeare's company. As Elle While described it in the program, "the worlds of the plays have evolved out of our interaction with each other and the texts. The task has then been to develop the threads that tie our ideas together." With only twelve actors, equally divided between male and female, some cross-gender casting was not just inevitable, but a deliberate choice. Hamlet, Horatio, and Laertes were played by women. Guildenstern was also played by a woman who is Deaf: she signed her lines with Rosen-crantz acting as her interpreter. Gertrude and Hamlet also communicated with Guildenstern through British Sign Language. Ophelia was played by a young man and Rosencrantz by a man who looked old enough to be Hamlet's father. While imagination, as Theseus reminds us ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.209), must always to some degree amend what it encounters on the stage, the production, in an admirable attempt to embrace diversity in its casting across age, gender, and disability, went further than most in challenging literal renditions of characters and lines. The discrepancy in height between the diminutive female actor who played Laertes and the tall, thin male actor who played Ophelia led to some unintentional comedy (and laughter from the audience), as did Laertes's reference to Ophelia's "chaste treasure" (1.3.30). The King, following the script in [End Page 692]3.4.250, called "Ho, Guildenstern" through the door on the right to bring Guildenstern on to the stage, although Guildenstern would have been unable to hear him. The gray-bearded Rosencrantz did not in any way suggest that he was, as Claudius puts it, "neighbored" to Hamlet's youth (2.2.12). Perhaps the point of the casting was not simply to provide a new way for the actors to replicate the conditions of Shakespeare's theater, but also to extend this replication to an audience watching an ensemble of actors performing a play. The production, for the most part, let much of...

Othello by Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by: Othelloby Shakespeare's Globe Gemma Miller OthelloPresented at Shakespeare's Globe, London. 07 20– 10 13, 2018. Directed by Claire van Kampen. Production Design by Jonathan Fensom. Costumes by Lorraine Ebdon-Price. Music by Bill Barclay. Choreography by Antonia Franceschi. With Sheila Atim (Emilia), Catherine Bailey (Bianca/Doge of Venice), William Chubb (Brabantio/Montano), Steffan Donnelly (Roderigo), André Holland (Othello), Micah Loubon (Chorus), Ira Mandela Siobhan (Chorus), Aaron Pierre (Cassio), Mark Rylance (Iago), Clemmie Sveaas (Chorus), Badria Timimi (Lodovica), Jessica Warbeck (Desdemona), and others. The Globe's 2018 revival of Othello, the fourth since it opened in 1997, saw the welcome return of former Globe Musical Director Clare van Kampen as director, and former Globe Artistic Director Mark Rylance in the role of Iago. Iago was to be Rylance's first Shakespearean performance at the Globe since his critically acclaimed performances in the "original practice" productions of Twelfth Nightand Richard IIIin 2012. Olivia, in particular, was a role he seemed born to play and I was intrigued to see how he would handle the part of Iago and, perhaps more pertinently, whether André Holland's Othello would be able to hold his own against such an experienced Globe performer. [End Page 695] Van Kampen declared in the program that she was "going for a heavy cut" with the text, a decision which I felt added to rather than detracted from the drama. The bawdy exchange between Iago and Desdemona at the quayside (2.1) was significantly reduced, and the two exchanges with the Clown in 3.1 and 3.4 were excised in their entirety. This meant that the second half opened with Desdemona asking Emilia, "[w]here should I lose that handkerchief?," thus drawing our attention to the significance of this central plot device. There were some small cuts to Iago's monologues. For instance, he ended his soliloquy in 2.3 with "Divinity of hell" (345), at which point he shook hands with one of the groundlings. This meant that we lost two of Iago's greatest pronouncements: "When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows" (2.3.346–47), and "So will I turn her virtue into pitch" (2.3.355). However, his simple gesture created a sense of complicity with the audience that more than compensated for the lost lines. The overall result of the excisions was a clear production that sacrificed none of the music of Othellowhile achieving a slick, dramatic pace that drove relentlessly through to its inevitable and tragic conclusion. The play opened with Roderigo struggling to keep up with Iago as he raced towards Brabantio's house, weaving around the two columns in frantic figure-of-eights. From this opening scene, Iago was established as a master-manipulator, leading not just the credulous gull Roderigo, but all of the other characters, "by th' nose" (1.3.400) with his scheming. The sense of Iago as a Prospero-like puppet master continued throughout the play. For instance, he stood on the balcony upstage left during the encounter between Othello, Brabantio, and the Duke in 1.3, watching and calculating with a silent sense of menace. He arrived triumphantly in Cyprus on a cart drawn through the groundlings in 2.1, only releasing a cramped and contorted Roderigo from an oversized suitcase some one hundred lines later. He led the dancing and drinking in 2.3 with the gusto of an "honest" and affable officer, his "stoup of wine" (2.3.27) a large crate with several rattling bottles. I have long been baffled by those who claim that Iago is without motive. It has always been clear to me that it is Iago's sexual jealousy that drives him, rather than a sense of motiveless evil, a reading that Rylance's performance reinforced with a clarity that I have never experienced before. This was most notable during the rambunctious drinking scene in Cyprus, during which he watched jealously over Emilia and led her away from Cassio on more than one occasion. He was also evidently discomfited by the overt manifestations of physical intimacy between Othello and Desdemona. [End...

Emilia by Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by: Emiliaby Shakespeare's Globe Eleanor Rycroft EmiliaPresented at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 08 10– 09 1, 2018. Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. Directed by Nicole Charles. Designed by Joanna Scotcher. Costumes supervised by Lydia Crimp. Music composed by Bill Barclay. With Leah Harvey (Emilia One), Vinette Robinson (Emilia Two), Clare Perkins (Emilia Three), Jenni Maitland (Countess of Kent and others), Carolyn Pickles (Henry Carey and others), Charity Wakefield (William Shakespeare and others), Sophie Stone (Margaret Clifford and others), Shiloh Coke (Anne Clifford and others), Anna Andresen (Mary Sidney and others), and others. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum(1611), Emilia Lanier reshaped a number of poetic genres to place women at their heart, dedicating the work to Queen Anne and the great women patrons of her day and then envisioning religious and country house poetry through a feminist lens. Barbara K. Lewalski asserts that Lanier's work rewrote "patronage in female terms, imagining for the poet Lanyer a family of maternal and sisterly patronesses who will honor and reward her celebrations of them and of the female sex" (106). In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's new play a similar celebration of this remarkable woman took place, Lanier finally, and deservedly, taking center stage. The performance elements were deceptively simple. To distinguish between genders in an all-female cast, female characters were dressed in blue and male in red. The scheme was mirrored in the mammoth bookcases that made up the set, although here the red far outweighed blue. In a nice touch, Emilia was at one point given a blue-boxed gift by a suitor, placing it immediately on the shelf where it was subsumed by the books. There were also two library ladders onstage, but these were barely used and came to stand for the lack of mobility in the society into which Emilia was born. On the balcony was a huge circular wooden bookcase of red spines in which Emilia's Muses sat in the first scene; her own "Wooden O." The idea, too, was simple—a dramatization of the life of Emilia Bassano, later Lanier. English Literature undergraduates may become aware of her poetry on their early modern literature modules, perhaps reading some of the more startling stanzas of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That she was the first woman to declare herself a poet tends to be assimilated among all of the extraordinary facts of the period. But to dislocate her life from her peers and to treat it as a subject in its own right is to accord [End Page 703]her astonishing achievements the respect that they merit; to ensure that she does not, like the gift, get lost among the books of men; to give Lanier her proper place. Malcolm's play is so much about place, and finding one. Young Emilia is repeatedly told by her superiors to remember her place as she emerges into womanhood: "As I grow, I must shrink," she says. At the beginning of the second half, disoriented and wandering Bankside after the tragic death of her only daughter, she finds a seedpod on the shore. It is foreign, too large and lovely for this country, and Emilia wades into the Thames to hold it. Seeds are a motif of the play, the seeds of children, of ideas, of desires for more. Sometimes Emilia is seeded by others: a sense of being colonized is her reaction to finding out she is pregnant by her lover, Henry Carey, for instance, but it also happens when William Shakespeare— Emiliadramatizes the theory that Lanier is the Sonnets' "dark lady"—hijacks her words and plants them directly into the mouth of his fictional Emilia in one of Othello's most famous speeches. Where can Emilia lay roots? How can she grow? What is the least hostile environment for a literary woman of color—in this play her heritage is African, not European—at this time? Malcolm's Emilia struggles to find her place, either in her childhood home with the Countess of Kent, at court, as Carey's mistress, or as wife to Alphonso Lanier. She is told she lacks a place because she has not understood how the system...

Antipodal Shakespeare by Gordon McMullan et al.

Reviewed by: Antipodal Shakespeare by Gordon McMullan et al. Angela Eward-Mangione Antipodal Shakespeare. By Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty, and Mark Houlahan. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xiii + 309. $102 (hardback), $91.80 (Ebook). In Antipodal Shakespeare, lead authors Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead analyze the Shakespeare Tercentenary and simultaneously reconsider the origins of "Global Shakespeare." Although "Global Shakespeare" has been viewed typically as a niche area of Shakespearean studies that developed alongside not only postcolonial criticism but also an increasing focus on globalization, the authors assert that the 1916 Tercentenary Celebrations refine scholars' understanding of the phenomenon of "Global Shakespeare." To support their claim, the authors propose "Antipodal Reading" as a methodology. In their view, Antipodal Reading analyzes activities, events, or performances that take place at the same time yet in locations that differ culturally and politically (11). According to McMullan and Mead, the term "antipodal" does not resolve tensions inherent in the local-global binary, but the method highlights the effects of numerous binaries that have been affected by history, particularly imperial history. The authors apply this methodology to their analysis of Shakespearean Tercentenary celebrations in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. McMullan's chapter, "Forgetting Israel Gollancz: The Shakespeare Tercentenary, the National Theatre and the effects of commemoration," applies antipodal reading to analyze Israel Gollancz's leading role in the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations in Britain, demonstrating how Gollancz's unique approach to commemoration led to not only the origins of the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare's Globe but also to the emergence of a Global Shakespeare. For example, as planning for the Tercentenary began in 1903, Gollancz proposed an international design competition to make the commemoration a distinctively international movement (36). The proposal for this international competition engaged locations affected by the imperial history of which Shakespeare is a substantial part, thereby manifesting a Global Shakespeare that was integral to Tercentenary celebrations. [End Page 371] However, this Global Shakespeare was opposed by advocates of a living monument to Shakespeare, such as a national theatre, resulting in the merger of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee and the movement for a National Theatre (37). The Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) committee nonetheless remained involved in many Tercentenary events, including one for which Gollancz gave King George V and Queen Mary the Book of Homage to Shakespeare. This book celebrated Shakespeare in numerous countries, including Australia and New Zealand, and served as a performative memorial that reflects the global nature of Gollancz's outlook (48). This chapter also examines Gollancz's second contribution to the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, which further enabled Shakespearean memorialization to occur during the War. Finally, the chapter analyzes how rent money from the Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) for the Shakespeare Hut funded the New (Royal) Shakespeare Company (55), and how Gollancz's involvement in the SMNT influenced Shakespeare's Globe. Most importantly, the chapter observes that the antipodal nature of the National Theatre project has been forgotten. However, the chapter's discussion of Gollancz's vision of an international statue design contest as well as his creation of the Book of Homage offers the most effective examples of the author's view of a global Shakespeare that emerged during Tercentenary celebrations in Britain. Chapter two, "Shakespeare, memory, and the city: The Tercentenary in Sydney and its afterlife," by Philip Mead, explores how ramifications of cultural exchange between Britain and Australia affected the Tercentenary in Australia. Applying antipodal reading, the chapter points out that while the consensus in London was primarily for a national theatre, Sydney's commemorative impulse was to keep Shakespeare's memory alive (69). Plans to commemorate the Tercentenary in Australia began in the early years of the twentieth century, particularly with the establishment of the New South Wales (NSW) Shakespearean Society, over which Henry Gullett presided in 1909 (65). The chapter's analysis of Gullett's vision to memorialize Shakespeare, the man, as the King of Englishness (72) proves to be particularly successful in developing the book's focus on these nascent forms of a Global Shakespeare. As the chapter notes, Gullett contacted expatriate Australian sculptor Sir Bertram Mackennal with a...

The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare's Globe

The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare's Globe

Are Shakespeare's plays always metatheatrical?

The ambiguity of the term derives in part from its text of origin, Lionel Abel's 1963 book of the same name. By his own admission, Abel's use of the term was loose and sometimes erratic (v). If we use the term in its broadest sense—to describe any theater that in some way draws attention to its own artifice—it becomes evident that early modern drama is always metatheatrical to some extent: these plays are designed never entirely to lose sight of the material realities of their performance, or of the physical co-presence of their audiences. If this is the case, how useful is the term metatheatre? Indeed, are Shakespeare's plays always metatheatrical? This article unpicks some of the conflicting notions of metatheatre suggested in Abel's book, and suggests a modified conceptual model based the work of Arthur Koestler. Arguing against the tendency to see early modern theatrical self-consciousness as a form of proto-Brechtian alienation, it uses Koestler's concept of bisociation to think about the delight produced by universes of discourse colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused (40). It considers several examples from performance, especially moments from productions at the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe, to argue that metatheatre functions as a kind of imaginative game. This game may be prompted by cues in the written text, but it is one that can be played only in performance. While Harry Newman's essay for this special issue argues that metatheatricality was available to early modern readers on the paper stage of printed playbooks (104), my essay posits a decidedly more theatrical definition of the term, contending that the agency of the actors plays a central role in determining the metatheatricality of particular moments stage.

“The Ghosts Are Watching”: The Globe's Battlefield Performances ofHenry VI

In the summer of 2013, Shakespeare's Globe, the company based at the Globe reconstruction in London, mounted productions of the three parts of Shakespeare'sHenry VIat Wars of the Roses battlefield sites. The battlefield as performance space, with its rolling hills and buried corpses, mediated the temporal overlap of past and present, as contemporary bodies engaged with the construction of a historical narrative in the fictional play and the actual historical moments of the Wars of the Roses. The associations entrenched in the soil of these sites, the physical remains and histories of the past, encode a connective experience for the contemporary participants interacting with it. The battlefield site, then, is not just a site of historical significance—it is also a site of historical reenactment, where present bodies meet absent ones in the Globe's attempt to converge separated temporalities. The Globe framed the battlefield performances as a way of enlivening history by grounding well-worn Shakespearean texts in the places they represent. But the Globe, in collaboration with The Space, an online arts collective, also filmed the ten-hour marathon event at the Barnet battlefield, live-streamed, and then saved the performance to a digital archive. So the Globe displaced the site of their site-specific experience. Virtual spectatorship, a result of the Globe's efforts to increase access to their battlefield performances by making them available online, adds another layer of absence to the battlefield. The virtual spectator as absent spectator challenges the privileging of a physical viewing experience that the Globe's “open-air” project promotes. The displacement of site disrupts the relationships grounded in the material performance space and its geographical connections, and expands the understanding ofsite-specificby demonstrating how a specific relationship to place might be produced and maintained without physical access to a geographical location. Together with their placement at the historical sites and transmission into virtual spaces, the battlefieldHenry VIs generate a multiplicity of shared viewing experiences. These shared experiences mediate the continuation of a (re)constructed historical and collective memory and highlight the role of spectatorship, both physical and virtual, in the formation of communal and national identity.

As You Like It by Shakespeare's Globe

As You Like It by Shakespeare's Globe