Author:
Callan Davies
Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture
University of Southampton
Dr Callan Davies is a literary, theatre, and cultural historian at the University of Roehampton.
Meet our team Guest PostsOn 21 July, we and MOLA, The Stage, and The Dolphin’s Back will explore the history and future possibilities for the Curtain playhouse with a public audience at Hackney House. Tickets are available on Eventbrite.
Further to Andy’s post on story, this post asks questions about the nature and necessity of coherent “story”—and of audiences following “plot”—in early modern commercial dramatic performance.
This post follows up some of the points raised by Andy in his discussion of “story” and early modern theatre as part of his Performing Words series.
It’s Friday, and we’re hurrying across London Bridge in the rain towards a part-carpeted Methodist Church in London’s Eastcheap: that Elizabethan-sounding nook somewhere loosely between Crutched Friars and Leadenhall (more Tudor echoes).
On the 18th February, Before Shakespeare and The Dolphin’s Back will return Elizabethan drama to the site of the First (and Second) Blackfriars Playhouse(s).
During rehearsals for James Wallace’s The Dolphin’s Back production of John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon (Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) back in August 2017, we had time to catch up with a few of the cast members and ask them how it felt to play gods, Nature, men, and women on the Sam Wanamaker stage in pre-1590s drama.