conference

We are delighted to present a guest post from Perry Mills, the director of Edward's Boys (a theatre group from King Edward VI school, Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is also Deputy Head).  Edward's Boys are soon to be performing The Woman in the Moon on several dates across the country.  Perry has also blogged on our site about this forthcoming production.

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 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.

Our fourth panel had a wonderful coherence to it, with all four papers complementing each other in fascinating and provocative ways.

Theatre history isn’t what it used to be.