Drama & Literature

For this piece, I’ll be spending a year in the young Curtain playhouse as it makes its way into the brave new decade of 1580s.

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.

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.

We've been talking about authorship and the way we study it so much on this blog that I've taken a moment to think aloud about where we've got to as a discipline.

One of the best-known disputes in popular conversation around Shakespeare is the question of who wrote his work. After all, someone must have written it, so it stands to reason that we need to find out who that someone was, and buy them congratulatory cake.

We're very pleased to host this guest post from Alexander Thom exploring the trope of banishment in early commercial drama.