shakespeare

Looking to escape the 2020s for a brief period?  Wondering what alternatives you might find to a Christmas pantomime if you were in a different century?  Or simply looking to sharpen up your Trivial Pursuit knowledge (with extremely niche facts…)?

 

Lyly's Galatea (c.1584) enjoyed some more research and development with actors in August 2021, as it heads towards a production in collaboration with Wildworks, when director Emma Frankland gathered theatremakers at the 101 Outdoor Creation Space (thanks to their seed funding).

Bea Webster talks about the process of turning sixteenth-century English into British Sign Language and the creation of appropriate signs, the importance of a diverse rehearsal room, and what it's like playing a character about to be sacrificed... Part of the Galatea residency at 101 Outdoor Creation Space.

Nadia Nadarajah and Brian Duffy tell us about their experiences working on the play Galatea, including translations into British Sign Language, exploring the character of the goddess Diana, and using physical communication and visual vernacular. The work forms part of Emma Frankland's production and comes out of a residency at 101 Outdoor Creation Space in 2021.

Last week, the University of Kent’s Middling Culture Project released a fun Social Status Calculator for determining (as the name suggests) the social status of 16th and 17th century English people. Although The Taming of the Shrew is nominally set in Italy, it’s safe to say that when considering issues of class and marriage, Shakespeare is almost always really writing about England. So let’s quiz Petruchio on his social status.

The Curtain, in use from 1577 until 1625, has probably the longest of lifespan of all early modern playhouses, yet it had for some time been ‘the most ignored of the early modern London amphitheatres’ (Stern 2009, 77-78).