Shakespeare's Globe Research Articles

Review of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (directed by Matthew Dunster) at Shakespeare's Globe, 26 June 2011

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Except as noted, all quotations in this review are from the A-text.

London, Globe Theatre: ‘The Play's the Thing’

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Season 2012, entitled ‘The Play's The Thing’, centred on Henry V and Richard III, with new music scores by Claire van Kampen, and The Taming of the Shrew, with a new score by Richard Hammarton. In addition – and well timed in the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and also the London Olympics – the Globe Theatre celebrated by sending out a worldwide invitation asking who would like to participate in their ‘Globe to Globe Festival’. As a result, 37 countries performed Shakespeare in 37 different languages here during the Season, within the architecture for which Shakespeare wrote, bringing with them a vast array of cultural diversity in music and dance dovetailed into the drama.

Shakespeare, Rehearsal and the Site-Specific

This essay considers the rehearsal processes and productions that might be created by working with Shakespeare in non-theatrical space, and the meanings that might be produced by privileging space alongside (or even over) text and character in Shakespeare production. It argues that early modern drama lends itself particularly to such practices due to its material origins, in which acting companies such as Shakespeare's toured and performed at court as well as in the London theatres, meaning that their work, though generated with particular theatre buildings in mind, also had to be adaptable to a range of non-theatrical spaces. The essay suggests that the radically different rehearsal practices of the early modern period - in which anything approaching the modern sense of ensemble practice only took place in the theatre, in front of an audience - produced plays with a particular openness to space, architecture and audience: qualities that are, today, emphatically on display at Shakespeare's Globe in London. While acknowledging that the practical and economic considerations of today's rehearsal practices mean that most Shakespearean work is produced and rehearsed away from the site where it is eventually performed, encouraging particular kinds of discursive and hermeneutic practices in which text is privileged of text over space in the production of meaning, the essay argues not for "original practices" in Shakespeare rehearsal but rehearsal processes in which the material presence and the historically accrued meanings of the performance space make meaning of and intrude upon the text, as Shakespeare's work was bound to do.

Review of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing (directed by Jeremy Herrin) at Shakespeare's Globe, London 26 May 2011

The Globe's production of Much Ado about Nothing is a real crowd-pleaser. With two star performances by Charles Edwards and Eve Best, both highly skilled at milking the audience for laughs, the pro...

As You Like It (review)

Reviewed by: As You Like It Tom Ue As You Like It Shakespeare's Globe, 2009 Thea Sharrock offered a thoughtful, intelligent, and energized production that made productive use of Shakespeare's Globe and Dick Bird's designs (Duke Frederick's grim court was transformed into the Forest of Arden in a magical moment), that incorporated an excellent score by Academy Award-winning composer (of Shakespeare in Love no less) Stephen Warbeck, and that brought together the terrific performances of Naomi Frederick (Rosalind), Laura Rogers (Celia), Jack Laskey (Orlando), Tim McMullan (Jacques), and Dominic Rowan (Touchstone). Frederick effectively brought out Rosalind's humor, cleverness, and assertiveness—particularly in her remonstrance against Duke Frederick's banishment—and her chemistry with Rogers's Celia gave plausibility to their joint escape from the court. Sharrock made a number of interesting and thought-provoking decisions, notable among them the inclusion of Oliver as an audience member in the hilariously-rendered wrestling match. What was particularly striking about Sharrock's production, for this viewer, was Laskey's performance of Orlando, one which showed the character in its true complexity. With his hair endearingly tousled, Laskey seemed wonderfully naïve and unable to represent himself, as could be gathered from his bad poetry. Indeed, after the wrestling match, despite lots of mouthing, he failed to thank Rosalind for her chain, lending weight to his aside: "My better parts / Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up / Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block." Yet, this same Orlando betrayed a mischievous streak as early as 1.1 when he engaged with Oliver in a dirty fight. This Orlando recognized Rosalind as early as the marriage scene of 4.1, so that both his question "But will my Rosalind do so?" and his subsequent meeting with her in 5.2 served as proposals, however indirectly. Early in the play, Charles the wrestler asked Oliver to dissuade Orlando from fighting in the wrestling match: "Tomorrow, sir, I wrestle for my credit, and he that escapes me without some broken limb, shall acquit him well." Charles punned on the term credit's meanings of "the attribute of being generally believed or credited" and "the estimate in which the character of a person (or thing) is held." If the match is a means through which a competitor can damage, establish, maintain, or further his name [End Page 63] and reputation, we were constantly reminded of it by a chalk circle drawn on the stage near the start of the play. This circle, like Sharrock's production as a whole, foregrounded the centrality of character formation to our understanding of Shakespeare's deceptively-simple comedy, and of its seemingly-endless possibilities in performance. Tom Ue University College London Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Shakespeare on your feet

We all know that Shakespeare should be taught on your feet. Now a three-year study has yielded teaching approaches learnt from actors that improve achievement and behaviour as well. Fiona Banks from Shakespeare's Globe explains more.

NEO Bankside

AbstractBeyond the City's walls, Southwark was for hundreds of years one of the capital's liveliest boroughs: London's industrial backyard and entertainment district. It was the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens as well as several prisons, such as the Marshalsea. However, it fell into decline in the late 20th century as print works and the London docks closed. Matthew Gandy describes a new development in Southwark, adjacent to Tate Modern, which marks its reinvention as a luxurious enclave for the internationally rich. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Review of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (directed by Mark Rosenblatt) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 2 August 2010

Review of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (directed by Mark Rosenblatt) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 2 August 2010

Review of Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage (co-ordinated by James Chalmers for the Read Not Dead Series, Globe Education), Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, 15 August 2010

Review of Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage (co-ordinated by James Chalmers for the Read Not Dead Series, Globe Education), Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, 15 August 2010

Review of Fletcher's The Chances (co-ordinated by Vivien Heilbron for the Read Not Dead Series, Globe Education), Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, 19 September 2010

Review of Fletcher's The Chances (co-ordinated by Vivien Heilbron for the Read Not Dead Series, Globe Education), Nancy W. Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, 19 September 2010

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Lucy Bailey) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 6 April 2010

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Lucy Bailey) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 6 April 2010

Shakespeare and the Three Bears

Recent researchers into the documentary evidence of Shakespeare's professional life as a writer–performer have understandably restricted themselves to his human fellows and rivals. But on Bankside in the 1590s bear-baiting vied for popularity with theatre, and in this article, Nick de Somogyi seeks to correct a long-standing error of naming among the celebrity fighting bears of Paris Garden – stabled some hundred yards west of the Globe. Scholars are agreed that the careers of George Stone, Harry Hunks, and the great Sackerson competed for attention with the dramatist's own. But while Sackerson's is the only contemporary name Shakespeare ever dropped in his plays, and while George Stone probably expired in the same season as witnessed the premiere of Macbeth, it is argued here that the only scholarly basis for the existence of ‘the famous Harry Hunks’ lies in the erratic contemporary punctuation of a single poem. A Contributing Editor to NTQ, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and is now an independent scholar and textual consultant. He was the founder editor of the Globe Quartos series for Nick Hern Books, and The Winter's Tale, the eighteenth play in his Shakespeare Folios series (with Simon Trussler) appeared in early 2011. He curated three successive exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–5), contributed to the National Portrait Gallery's Searching for Shakespeare exhibition (2006), and is the author of Shakespeare's Theatre of War (1998) and Shakespeare on Theatre (2011). This is the first in a series of pieces on the relationship between playhouse and beargarden he is currently researching.

Performance, ætherial space and the practice of landscape/architecture: the case of the missing mask

How is architecture, as an evolving practice, encompassing both the landscape and the buildings within it, comprehensible in the light of contemporary theorization concerning performance, spectacle, embodiment, the everyday and materiality? The answer is sought here by examining the relationship between architecture and performance in the context of the theater contrasting the pre-Renaissance theater tradition stretching from ancient Greece to Shakespeare's Globe and the post-Renaissance tradition stretching from the architecture of Inigo Jones to that of Las Vegas. The study is grounded in the geographical literature on pictorial perspective and the conception of landscape as scenic space. Rather than focusing on the pictorial arts, however, the point of departure here is in the production of theater scenery.

Review of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (directed by Mark Rosenblatt) at Shakespeare's Globe, 24 May 2010

Review of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (directed by Mark Rosenblatt) at Shakespeare's Globe, 24 May 2010

Henry VIII , and: Anne Boleyn (review)

Reviewed by: Henry VIII, and: Anne Boleyn Carolyn Sale Henry VIII Presented by the Globe Theatre Company at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. May 24–August 21, 2010. Directed by Mark Rosenblatt; designed by Angela Davies; composer, Nigel Hess; choreographer, Sian Williams; stage manager, Vicky Berry; production manager, Paul Russell. With Kate Duchêne (Queen Katherine), Dominic Rowan (Henry VIII), Miranda Raison (Anne Boleyn), Antony Howell (Duke of Buckingham, Lord Chancellor), Amanda Lawrence (Fool, Lady-in-Waiting), Ian McNeice (Wolsey), Michael Bertenshaw (Sir Thomas Lovell, Cardinal Campeius, Porter), John Dougall (Lord Sandys, Gardiner), Colin Hurley (Thomas Cranmer), and Dickon Tyrrell (Duke of Suffolk). Anne Boleyn Presented by the Globe Theatre Company at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. July 24–August 21, 2010. Written by Howard Brenton; directed by John Dove; designed by Michael Taylor; composer, Willian Lyons; choreographer, Sian Williams; stage manager, Vicky Berry; production manager, Paul Russell. With Miranda Raison (Anne Boleyn), James Garnon (James I), Anthony Howell (Henry VIII), Amanda Lawrence (Lady Rochford), Peter [End Page 111] Hamilton Dyer (William Tyndale), John Dougall (Thomas Cromwell), Colin Hurley (Wolsey, Henry Barrow), Sam Cox (Dean Lancelot Andrewes), Michael Bertenshaw (Robert Cecil), Ben Deery (George Villiers), and Dickon Tyrrell (Dr. John Reynolds). In the summer of 2010, the Globe Theatre had some real fun with its "Kings & Rogues" season, which gave audiences an opportunity to see a lot more of a character who is, in one of the season's plays, Henry VIII, little more than a flitting, fleeting tease: Anne Boleyn. Anyone who bought a ticket for the new play by that title which Howard Brenton wrote for the season might fairly have concluded that Shakespeare is all right, but we should all really be buying more tickets for plays by Brenton. The pair of plays benefited from a crucial casting choice, which was to have the same actress, Miranda Raison, play Anne Boleyn in both productions. I saw Henry VIII first, and was glad to know that when I returned I was going to get to see Raison in the same role. In Henry VIII, Boleyn is a teasing, tantalizing figure, who flirts with Henry, denies that she wants the "glistering grief" of being queen, and haunts the principal action from the periphery—indeed, in this production, from the recesses of the stage where she was in one scene nothing more than a nightgown clad figure departing from Henry. The delight of Brenton's play is that it frees this peripheral figure from the cribs and confines of her limited role in Henry VIII to let the actress playing her win us over to an idea of Anne that flouts all popular conceptions. But those Globe-goers who showed up for Anne Boleyn as well as Henry VIII were also treated to things they could not have possibly have expected from Brenton's title. Not only does Brenton's play reclaim Anne from her ignominy so that she can matter to English history—or at least to Brenton's reinvention of the English history play—it also gives us a screamingly funny satiric portrait of that misogynist and demoniac known as James VI of Scotland and James I of England and Ireland. Making use of the very aspects of Anne's story that Shakespeare and Fletcher choose to leave out, Brenton has the English Reformation find its fulfillment in a bizarre alliance across time between two of the period's more notorious figures, a siren and a tyrant. His play serves up a comic fantasia that is an answer to so many of the problems of Henry VIII, which is not only—let's be frank!—too episodic for most theatre-goers' taste, but also—let's be franker!—hard work to listen to. I watched an audience take it in across a sweltering summer afternoon from paper visors that guarded their eyes from the [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution Dominic Rowan as King Henry VIII in Shakespeare's Globe's 2010 production of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt. Photo courtesy of John Tramper. [End Page 113] sun and with the assistance of programs as fans, and I was impressed by their stoicism...

This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now. By David Bevington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; xi + 242 pp. $25.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; xxii + 268 pp. $81.00 cloth, $25.99 paper. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics. By Hugh Grady.

<i>This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now.</i> By David Bevington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; xi + 242 pp. $25.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. <i>Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment.</i> Edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; xxii + 268 pp. $81.00 cloth, $25.99 paper. <i>Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics.</i> By Hugh Grady.

Shakespeare in stages: new theatre histories

Introduction Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson Part I. Notions of Authenticity: 1. The move indoors Andrew Gurr 2. Whig heroics: Shakespeare, Cibber, and the troublesome King John Elaine M. McGirr 3. Coriolanus and the (in)authenticities of William Poel's platform stage Lucy Munro 4. 'A fresh advance in Shakespearean production': Tyrone Guthrie in Canada Neil Carson 5. Authenticity in the 21st century: Propeller and Shakespeare's Globe Abigail Rokison Part II. Attitudes Towards Sex and Gender: 6. Performing beauty on the Renaissance stage Farah Karim-Cooper 7. The artistic, cultural, and economic power of the actress in the age of Garrick Fiona Ritchie 8. Women writing Shakespeare's women in the nineteenth century: The Winter's Tale Jan McDonald 9. 'Not our Olivia': Lydia Lopokova and Twelfth Night Elizabeth Schafer 10. Measure for Measure: Shakespeare's twentieth-century play Christine Dymkowski Part III. Questions of Identity: 11. Shakespeare and the rhetoric of scenography 1770-1825 Christopher Baugh 12. The presence of Shakespeare Susan Bennett 13. Finding local habitation: Shakespeare's Dream at play on the stage of contemporary Australia Kate Flaherty and Penny Gay 14. 'Haply for I am black': shifting race and gender dynamics in Talawa's Othello Lynette Goddard 15. British directors in post-colonial South Africa Brian Pearce Epilogue: Shakespeare's audiences as imaginative communities Christie Carson.

Reconstructing Theatre: the Globe under Dominic Dromgoole

In this article Tom Cornford examines the policy of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare's Globe for each new production, as pursued by Dominic Dromgoole since the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director in 2006. The article responds initially to John Russell Brown's equation in NTQ 102 of a particular kind of ‘intimate’ acting with ‘small theatres’. Cornford resists this conflation of acting and building, seeing in it a tendency to obscure both the role of reconstructed theatres to challenge contemporary notions of the ‘rightness’ of theatre spaces and the role of directors and actors to convert their apparent problems into opportunities. He explores the transformation of the Globe since 2006, using interviews given by Dromgoole and the directors working with the Globe's research team to critique the theory underpinning the ‘permanently temporary’ alterations to the theatre, and takes the evidence of performances to examine their use of the space in practice. Cornford offers a selection of staging solutions to the apparent ‘problems’ identified by Dromgoole and his team, and proposes an alternative model of reconstruction: not the rebuilding of the theatre, but the constant reviewing of theatre practice, including training. Tom Cornford is a freelance director and teacher of acting for the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota BFA Program, the Actors' Centre in London, and Globe Education at Shakespeare's Globe. He was, until recently, Artist in Residence at the CAPITAL Centre in the University of Warwick, where he is undertaking PhD research.

The director's perspective: Interview with Thea Sharrock (director of As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe)

This is an edited extract of a longer interview between Farah Karim-Cooper (Head of Courses and Research, Shakespeare's Globe) and Thea Sharrock (director of the Globe's 2009 production of As You Like It) in which they discuss directing the Globe's space, theatre reviewing and audience response.

Acting performance and flow state enhanced with sensory-motor rhythm neurofeedback comparing ecologically valid immersive VR and training screen scenarios

Actors were trained in sensory-motor rhythm (SMR) neurofeedback interfaced with a computer rendition of a theatre auditorium. Enhancement of SMR led to changes in the lighting while inhibition of theta and high beta led to a reduction in intrusive audience noise. Participants were randomised to a virtual reality (VR) representation in a ReaCTor, with surrounding image projection seen through glasses, or to a 2D computer screen, which is the conventional neurofeedback medium. In addition there was a no-training comparison group. Acting performance was evaluated by three experts from both filmed, studio monologues and Hamlet excerpts on the stage of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Neurofeedback learning reached an asymptote earlier as did identification of the required mental state following training in the ReaCTor training compared with the computer screen, though groups reached the same asymptote. These advantages were paralleled by higher ratings of acting performance overall, well-rounded performance, and especially the creativity subscale including imaginative expression, conviction and characterisation. On the Flow State scales both neurofeedback groups scored higher than the no-training controls on self-ratings of sense of control, confidence and feeling at-one. This is the first demonstration of enhancement of artistic performance with eyes-open neurofeedback training, previously demonstrated only with eyes-closed slow-wave training. Efficacy is attributed to psychological engagement through the ecologically relevant learning context of the acting-space, putatively allowing transfer to the real world otherwise achieved with slow-wave training through imaginative visualisation. The immersive VR technology was more successful than a 2D rendition.