Andy Kesson

Before Shakespeare and Engendering the Stage are delighted to announce our next performance workshop, focusing on combat as entertainment—in both Shakespeare’s time and today.

One of the concerns of Before Shakespeare is the impact of the canon on contemporary performance, editorial practice and theatre history.

This week Sony have relaunched the original Playstation, a game console first released in 1994.

I got to see Michael Boyd’s production of Tamburlaine last night, a show that focuses as much on the plays’ verse as it does on their violence. The production has the most extraordinary and urgent verse speaking I think I’ve ever heard: fast, fluent and often underscored by the band’s rhythmical beat.

What do we see when we look at early modern plays in contemporary theatre?

I’m afraid this blog post will seem especially pedantic and churlish, because it is about the unexpected embedding of a strange word in conversations about early modern theatre history: the word ‘permanent’.