Events

Who visited the Elizabethan playhouses? What did it mean to have non-English characters being played on stage? What does dramatic engagement with issues of immigration, identity, and belonging tell us about sixteenth-century theatre?

On the 19th November 2017, the TIDE project and Before Shakespeare are hosting a workshop exploring the diverse audiences of Elizabethan playhouses and their surrounding neighbourhoods, based at the University of Liverpool’s London campus, 33 Finsbury Square.

We've just finished our four-day Before Shakespeare conference, and this blog post is an attempt to report back to the profession more generally about the things that worked or didn't work in the way we ran the event.

Theatre history is not so much about establishing fact as it is about embracing uncertainty, a dialogue between competing and sometimes complementary narratives.

The Before Shakespeare conference is over. But while the Before Shakespeare project continues, those of us who gathered together in sunny Roehampton at the end of August for four days of presentations and performances are left to contemplate life after Before Shakespeare.

The conference’s special panel on Christopher Marlowe offered a range of approaches to Marlowe’s plays, but all three highlighted themes of subjugation and violence, perhaps hinting at factors that made Marlowe’s plays so shocking and influential when first performed.