Shakespeare's Globe Blog

Rehearsing for Bartholomew Fair.

Ahead of the riotous play by Ben Jonson opening in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse next week, assistant director Diane Page reflects on the road that led her here and what the 400 year old play means today.

Before becoming part of the Bartholomew Fair company at the Globe, it’s fair to say that my experience and knowledge of Ben Jonson and his work was substantially less than my experience of working with Shakespeare’s texts. When I was studying for my degree, eager to absorb as much knowledge as possible (the dreams of a first year Theatre and Drama Studies student!), I had read about Jonson in a chapter on Jacobean theatre in a book I had picked up in my university library. It mentioned a play called Bartholomew Fair. I found the play, skimmed through it and left it at that.

A few years later I was invited to the Globe with the possibility of assisting on a Jonson play called Bartholomew Fair, directed by Blanche McIntyre. I quickly re-read the play and as soon as I had finished reading I couldn’t believe what I had missed the first time around. It was striking how much this play seemed to mirror much of the London I knew and had grown up in. I laughed because I recognised and knew many of these characters… and this was from a play written over 400 years ago! The lines that the characters had in the play didn’t seem a million miles from how people speak today. Being London born and bred, I was immediately excited by what Jonson’s play could mean to audiences now.

Ben Jonson was born 1572 in Westminster. In his time he was a student at Westminster School, a soldier, a criminal - in 1598 he was imprisoned for a time for killing an actor, Gabriel Spencer. He was a Roman Catholic convert, a poet and a playwright. In 1614 Jonson wrote Bartholomew Fair and it was first performed in the Hope Theatre. Jonson appears to have captured a lot of the essence London, and there’s no doubt he drew inspiration from his own experience of London and the people he knew.

In the play, Jonson throws these characters into a fair where suddenly we, as the audience, get to observe how people of different classes and social statuses move amongst each other and interact. Most interestingly, we get to see how those class and social statuses are largely what these characters are judged on and we get to see how they affect how others engage with them – a lot like now.

When I think of growing up in Bermondsey and the changing landscape of some of the areas in South East London and other areas of London, there are some moments in Jonson’s play that aren’t so different from what I have seen. People from different walks of life still live and experience things side by side. Power and authority and who it belongs to is still as much of a talking point now as it is in Jonson’s play, and we can’t ignore the fact that money always plays a huge part.

Through all of this, comedy does shine through in Bartholomew Fair, but there are moments of darkness in Jonson’s play. And just like Jonson’s London, as much as we all might love London, we can probably agree that it isn’t always fun and games.  

One of the first things Blanche and I spoke about when we first met were the amount of different accents and languages in London, and what an amazing thing that was. In rehearsals the actors have been making choices that are representative of London today, one of these has been in regards to accent.  

Similarly, it has been very enriching for us all to hear the company’s stories about similar events to Bartholomew Fair they’ve experienced in modern London, or what they’ve experience by just living in London and how much we collectively share just by being here. It’s probably even richer as not everyone is originally from London.

As much as now, Jonson’s London was one that wasn’t without its problems. Thinking of the divisions in society in Jonson’s time, it isn’t hard to think of the divisions we face as a society now - and so it makes sense that this production of Bartholomew Fair is set in a contemporary way. The characters that Jonson came across and wrote about are the people we walk past every day and who we interact (or don’t interact) with. In a way nothing has changed. No one is out of place in this city until someone tells them that they are. Although this is a play about London, it’s also a play about people living out and being judged by their social identities.

So, here it is! A snapshot of London, then and now, in all its glory and grittiness.  

Bartholomew Fair opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 23 August 2019.

Photography by Marc Brenner

Poland is Hamlet. 

Why has Hamlet in particular and Shakespeare in general gained such prominence in the Polish imagination? In this blog Professor Tony Howard ( (University of Warwick) reflects on this question. Hear more from Tony on 4 July where he will speak as part of  Wyspiański: Hamlet Study and The Death of Ophelia.

Brendan O’Hea is directing our touring productions: Twelfth Night, Pericles, and The Comedy of Errors. A company of eight actors, two stage managers and one wardrobe manager are taking these tales of home and belonging across the world, performing to audiences familiar and brand new.

In this blog Brendan talks about the importance of these plays, performed by this cast at this moment in time and in particular in Refugee Week. 

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As part of Refugee Week 2019 (17-23 June) Voices in the Dark: From Around the Globe will showcase the work of young people - users of the British Red Cross Young Refugee Service, who have taken part in workshops led by theatre company, Compass Collective.

Here we take a look at day one of rehearsals. You can catch the results of this collaboration on 22 June in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. 

Compass Collective are gathered in the Globe’s brand new rehearsal space to begin devising a play, and they don’t know yet who might turn up to be in it. So there’s a little nervousness about numbers. The four day rehearsal is planned during half term in order to have the best turn out, but it’s Ramadan. Having run evening workshops across five London boroughs at the British Red Cross Refugees and Befriending sessions for the past two months, they know the amount of energy involved to take part and fear it may put off some of those who are fasting.

Nevertheless 11 o’clock comes by and participants start filtering in. Some have met before through previous befriending sessions there is a sense of familiarity in the room, making the name games easier when they begin.

Half an hour later, Matilda, a producer from the Globe arrives to give the group a tour of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Even without the candles which light it for performances, the theatre is magical. Each of the boys has their opportunity to speak on the stage, taking it in turns to say their name and their favourite thing (‘music’, ‘football’, ‘education’, ‘this whole building’) before swapping and experiencing the space as an audience member. To illustrate the acoustics of the space Leila from the Red Cross leads a song. There are laughs as the group tries to fit Solomon’s name into a structure that only seems to have space for two-syllables.

Back in the rehearsal room there is a buzz as the young actors mark out the stage on the floor with tape, while others play on the keyboard and cajón brought along by Tom, Compass Collective’s musical director. As lunch time calls, half the group peel off to the Prayer Room, while others juggle plates of pasta (donated by a local Carluccio’s) while dribbling footballs across the space.

In the afternoon, the group has been offered a ‘Heaven and Hell’ tour, which explores from the Globe Attic down to the underbelly of the Stage. These aren’t available to the public, so it’s a really special moment. Entering through Stage Door, Patrick from Compass Collective points at one of the archive photographs of raucous Jacobean comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle and starts attributing each of the actors in the picture to one of the boys.There’s lots of laughter and it’s beginning to feel like a company.  

On stage, the sense of excitement builds: one of the boys begins climbing a ladder to the Musician’s Gallery, and others mill around on the stage taking selfies and commenting on the flags that are hung around the auditorium for the performance of Henry IV Part One that will take place later that day.

The stage meanwhile is set up for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Downstairs in ‘Hell’ the stage above only leaves around 5 feet of headroom in which the boys,  full of teenage growth, awkwardly try to avoid bumping their heads.

Backstage, a thunder sheet becomes a source of great interest, before props take precedence – the live plants and flowers that populate the The Merry Wives of Windsor set  are particularly pleasing – and someone becomes transfixed by the tannoy which calls actors to stage. ‘Is this for the sound?’ he asks. ‘Yes’, Patrick says, whisking him away before curious hands can interfere with the cues for tonight’s performance…

As the day draws to a close, the boys are shown to the nearest tube stations and Compass Collective sit down to debrief and plan the activities for the following day, the rehearsal space already looking significantly more lived in. Only a few days to go…

Join us for Voices in the Dark: From Around the Globe on Saturday 22 June, 6pm, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

The Windsor Locals. 

The first people you’ll meet as you arrive at the Globe for this summer’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor might not be those you’d expect in the wealthy, glamorous world of Mistresses Ford and Page  – there are socialist agitators, street hawkers and someone who needs help with a washing line… In this blog by Director Elle While and Associate Director Martin Leonard, we find out a little more about the Windsor Locals.

Merry Wives is not a play about monarchs or magic, but rather ordinary people who happen to have extraordinary stories to tell. You can well imagine that Shakespeare based many of the characters on people he met down the pub, people who’d happily tell you their life story over a pint of ale.

We have collaborated with local arts organisations London Bubble, Clean Break and the Soldiers’ Arts Academy for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Collaborating with these groups  has introduced us anew to creative local people with a wealth of similarly imaginative stories to tell. They have created characters informed by lived experiences and offering perspectives shaped by unique circumstances. This is an opportunity to break open assumptions around who Shakespeare is for, and how he is performed, by sharing his words with people who have something to say, but don’t always get given the chance.

This is a play about community – it ends with an exuberant event to which all of Windsor is invited. It seems fitting to welcome as many people as possible to perform in it.

Find out more about our collaborators

The Soldiers’ Arts Academy CIC is creating permanent arts hubs nationwide for current and former military personnel and their families. Founded by Amanda Faber, it runs free masterclasses and creates professional productions and exhibitions in performance, singing, creative writing, dance, poetry, film, photography and art. It provides forums where members can recover from physical and mental injury, link with professional mentors, and train for new careers. Shakespeare’s Globe partnered with the Academy for ‘Shakespeare and Remembrance’ on 11 November 2018 commemorating the World War One centenary. The Academy is delighted to work in association with Shakespeare’s Globe again.

Established in 1972, London Bubble Theatre is a community arts company working to bolster individual and community wellbeing through participatory theatre practice. Delivering workshops and performances in locations across London, building children’s communication skills through primary school drama intervention, training the youth community to make interactive issue-based plays and inviting people to join regular drama groups at our base in Rotherhithe, London Bubble is open to everyone. All sessions, from the intergenerational to the age-specific, are designed to cultivate togetherness through play and the sharing of stories and are assisted by experienced practitioners who share the vision that people make theatre.

Clean Break changes lives and changes minds through theatre – on stage, in prison and in the community. It produces ground-breaking plays with women’s voices at the heart of its work. Founded in 1979 by two women prisoners who believed that theatre could bring the hidden stories of imprisoned women to a wider audience, it is still the only theatre company of its kind remaining true to these roots, inspiring playwrights and captivating audiences with the company’s award-winning plays on the complex theme of women and crime.

The Merry Wives of Windsor opens at Shakespeare’s Globe on 17 May. 

Photography by Helen Murray 

The music of the History plays. 

Tayo Akinbode composed the music for our three History plays, Henry Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. We asked him to give us some insight into his process -the challenges and joys of working across three plays in a collective of actors and creatives.

My name is Tayo (Akintayo) Akinbode, I’m a freelance composer, musical director, sound designer and musician. It was Stephen Warbeck who first introduced me to the music department at the Globe. The first thing I did here was ‘Sonnet Sunday’ in 2012. All 154 sonnets were performed by actors from around the world in about 25 different languages. I accompanied some of them with music. I did Sonnet Sunday again last year with Federay Holmes (directing the History plays with Sarah Bedi), that’s partly how I ended up on these shows.

It’s not uncommon for a composer to be working on three or more plays at once, but I’ve never done three by the same writer, with the same group of actors at the same time. Early on one of the biggest challenges was simply getting the three plays separately into my head. Several of the characters are in more than one of the plays and I found the scenes would merge in my mind. I was in and out of the first half of rehearsals. I got to know Falstaff (Henry IV Part 2) best first, and then eventually Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1). I only felt I knew Harry England (Henry V) towards the end of the rehearsal process. It was important to understand the differences and similarities between the three plays in order to compose music for them.

Everything in the creation of these plays was done working as a collective, so naturally that includes the music. That doesn’t mean I wrote the music with the company… I would have loved to have, but there simply wasn’t the time to do that. I had sessions with the company, singing, drumming and chatting about musical ideas. The music sounds the way it does because I worked with the actors to generate the musical ideas. For example, in one play there is a line in the script that simply says ’she sings in Welsh’. I had a chat with the actor who plays that part and we worked out how the song should feel… Celtic, free and definitely with a drone. Separately, another actor who is Welsh found an old Welsh folk song. We ended up fusing those two elements and that’s how we finish the first half of Henry IV Part 1.

We, the wider ensemble making these plays, are a diverse and real snapshot of contemporary Britain. When starting work on these plays there was no ‘angle’. By that I mean we were not setting them in the present day, or in the 1930s, in 10th century Japan or anything like that. So the only thing I had to go on to create the world of the music was us, the company. I hope I’ve managed to create a sound that reflects us where we are now, where we’ve come from and our history.

I don’t have a favourite play, but then you’d probably expect me to say that! Musically, for me the 3 plays are quite different. The first has very little music until the end of the play when it suddenly gets very busy because of all the fighting. The second has probably the most range in that there’s a sort of tango, an Arabic influenced tune with a Baladi rhythm, some fanfares even a funky jig. The third has by far the most music. I like them all in different ways.

The Globe is a unique theatre space, it’s sort of indoors but outdoors. The music played there is entirely acoustic. One of the biggest challenges is having a range of different instruments and keeping them well balanced. It’s easy getting a trumpet to carry a long way but not so easy to do the same with an acoustic guitar. Also instruments sound different close up and at a distance. We have 2 snare drums, a high quality expensive one and a tiny one from a child’s drum kit. Up close the expensive sounds great, whereas from a distance, when all the other instruments are playing it doesn’t sound so good, but the kid’s one sounds amazing!

If I had to choose just instrument to sum up each of the plays I would say Henry IV Part 1, ‘Hotspur’ is like a trombone. Sometimes it’s very funny but at other times it’s all about loud battles and confrontation.

Henry IV Part 2 ‘Falstaff’ is like a saxophone. It’s a puzzle of a play, at times sensual, mysterious;  it can be very different at different times.

I can’t decide which instrument Henry V ‘Harry England would be... It’s politics and wars and trying to work things out, maybe it’s a drum kit - four limbs working separately but together, trying to create a big wild cohesive sound.

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V are playing at Shakespeare’s Globe until 11 October 2019.

Photography by Tristram Kenton 

Singing History. 

Research Assistant Hailey Bachrach looks at then importance of songs in the Henriad. 

If you’ve seen our production of Hotspur (aka Henry IV Part One), you’ll have noticed—or soon will notice, if you haven’t made it yet—that it begins with a song. This song was arranged by our fantastic ensemble composer Tayo Akinbode, and adapted by director Federay Holmes from several famous ballads of Shakespeare’s time. Two in particular had an influence on the opening song: a Scottish ballad called “The Battle of Otterburn,” and an English ballad known by various titles, including “The Ballad of Chevy Chase” or “The Hunt of the Cheviot.”

This second ballad was one of the most popular songs of Shakespeare’s day. Supposedly, playwright Ben Jonson said that he would rather have written it than the entirety of his works. It tells the story of a fictional encounter between the Scottish Earl of Douglas and the English Percy, Earl of Northumberland that ends in both of their deaths.

Word is come to Edinburgh, To Jamie the Scottish King, Earl Douglas, lieutenant of the Marches,  Lay slain Cheviot within.                

His hands the King did weal and wring, Said, ‘Alas! and woe is me! Such another captain Scotland within I’ faith shall never be!’                    

Word is come to lovely London  To the fourth Harry, our King, Lord Percy, lieutenant of the Marches, Lay slain Cheviot within.                

‘God have mercy on his soul,’ said King Harry, ‘Good Lord, if thy will it be!  I’ve a hundred captains in England,’ he said, ‘As good as ever was he:  But Percy, an I brook my life, Thy death well quit shall be.’                      

And as our King made his avow  Like a noble prince of renown, For Percy he did it well perform After, on Homble-down;                

Where six-and-thirty Scottish knights  On a day were beaten down;  Glendale glitter’d on their armour bright  Over castle, tower and town.                      

“Otterburn” is the Scottish version of roughly the same story, though it’s much more rooted in actual facts—probably because, historically, the Scots won and Percy was captured, much to the family’s disgrace.

It fell about the Lammastide, When moor-men win their hay, The doughty Douglas bound him to ride Into England, to drive a prey.

And he has burned the dales of Tyne, And part of Bamburghshire, And three good towers on Reidswire Fells, He left them all on fire.

Then he's marched on down to Newcastle, “Whose house is this so fine?” It's up spoke proud Lord Percy,  “I tell you this castle is mine!”

“If you're the lord of this fine castle, Well it pleases me. For, ere I crossed the Border fells, The one of us shall die.”

It’s hard to think of an exact modern equivalent to Renaissance ballads. The obvious comparison is hit pop songs, the ones that play constantly on the radio in every shop and that everyone seems to know, but even that doesn’t quite capture the communal, oral culture that ballads were part of. They were designed not just to be listened to, but to for everyone to sing. New lyrics were produced to recycled tunes to make it easy for anyone to learn them, and the lyrics conveyed not only historical or legendary or fictional material, but current events and recent news. We see this in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, when the thief Autolycus disguises himself as a peddler and sells the Bohemian shepherdesses ballads. ‘I love a ballad in print,’ the shepherdess Mopsa gushes, ‘for then we are sure they are true’ (4.4.296).

The Percys and the Douglas are prominent families in Hotspur, and the play begins with the very battle that “Chevy Chase” references in its final stanzas: the Battle of Homble-down, or Holmedon, where Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy decimated a Scottish force led by Douglas. Neither song should be seen as a direct prequel to Henry IV Part One—especially “Chevy Chase,” where Percy and Douglas wind up dead. But Shakespeare’s evocation of these familiar names and battles right in the first scene could help audience members who may not know much about history understand the relationships between the two border families, and the political stakes and legacies of the battles being discussed. Ballads were an important way for people who couldn’t access formal histories to learn about their nation’s past, and playwrights knew it.

We wanted to try and let our audiences experience the same kind of familiarity that Renaissance audiences would have had with some of the leading figures of the play they’re about to watch. Watching Hotspur with the military adventures of the daring Percy and the bold Douglas fresh in your mind is a very different experience than just reading a summary of the reign of Henry IV, or even having watched Richard II. It redirects your focus and sets up a series of expectations about plot and character, some of which the play meets, and some of which it intentionally subverts. While it’s not quite the kind of pre-show background information that we’re used to getting for one of Shakespeare’s history plays, it’s the experience that many of his original audience members would have had.

Further Reading: “The Heyday of the English Broadside Ballad,” by Erik Nebecker for the Early English Broadside Ballad Archive.

Broadside Ballads Online from the Bodelian Libraries.  

Find out more about Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. 

Photography by Tristram Kenton 

Women & Power:  Why here? Why now? 

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Research & Higher Education at the Globe introduces our forthcoming Women & Power Festival that takes place 13-18 May. 

The Women and Power Festival is designed to ask questions about women and leadership in all sorts of areas, so we’re interested in the arts and culture, we’re interested in politics and society, we’re interested in education and academic studies.

Obviously, in the last couple of years conversations have exploded about the role of women in society and whether or not women have access to power and how much access to power we have. So it’s this relationship between women and power specifically that this festival is really interested in.

We’re having this conversation now because of the precarious relationship between structures of power and women. So we see in some parts of the world women not having gained power at all. We see in some parts of the world women’s power being taken away from them as we speak. I think there’s a lot of fear out there about women having power but actually what women want is equal access to power and I think it’s these kind of conversations that we need to have here.

It’s important at Shakespeare’s Globe because we are interested in particular in what theatre and art-making can do in particular to those conversations. So we’re going to have some platform events where we invite female directors to come in and talk to people about what it means to direct theatre in the twenty first century as women, as women of colour.

We also want to have a panel event which discusses politics and activism and who these women are who are sort of on the front lines of society at the moment. Then we’re going to have the one day symposium which just examines women and leadership really quite intensively. So we’re going to be looking at the relationship between women and leadership and culture and art and politics and education specifically as well. What the imbalances are between the different genders.

The kind of impact that we are hoping this women and power festival will have is getting people to talk, getting people to think about these questions about the role of women in society very critically instead of just skimming the surface of social media and picking a side. It’s really looking at the grey areas what it means to be a woman today when we are faced with all of these struggles and imbalances. It’s really about getting people to talk and ask more questions, maybe even put on more events, but we just need to keep talking about it.

Art and theatre is about creativity and I suppose they’ve been domains that have been male dominated. I suppose that women have had to elbow their way in to important positions, taking over theatres, deciding content, curating museums. It’s all those kinds of things. Those have been in the domains of men and I feel like the potential particularly for theatre is basically exploding a conversation that women are determining. What kinds of performances are we going to see, whose story are we going to tell, are we always going to tell the same old stories that have been dominating society for hundreds of years. I think when women come into the scene, they start to provide alternative narratives and ideas that actually propel more creativity, and that’s really exciting.

You can hear Farah alongside playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, actor Clare Perkins, fight director Yarit Dor and Globe artistic director Michelle Terry talking about women and equality in theatre in our podcast, Such Stuff. Tune into Episode 2, Season 4: International Women’s Day. Full transcript available. 

Taking up space: The Lady Members’ Room.

Rachel Reeves MP for Leeds West is one an incredible line up of people participating in our Women and Leadership: A Symposium on 17 May that also includes Dr Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe), Claire Van Kampen, Morgan Lloyd Malcom, Professor Liz Shafer (Royal Holloway), Dr Sumi Madhok (LSE), Winsome Pinnock, Dr Will Tosh (Shakespeare’s Globe), Baroness Kingsmill CBE, Rachel Reeves, Stella Kanu and Gillian Woods (Birkbeck). They will discuss women in history, their own experiences in leadership roles, the pay gap, ‘likeability’ and what kind of leadership do women or ‘should’ women cultivate?

This blog is an extract from Rachel Reeves’ book Women of Westminster in which she gives insight into the Lady Members’ Room in the 1920s.

Winston Churchill famously quipped to Lady Astor. She rebuffed him with a wry smile: ‘You are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind.’ Yet Churchill’s attitude was typical of male views towards women in Parliament.

Westminster was, and remains today, a male-dominated institution. Charles Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament, had designed a number of male-only private members clubs; in many ways Parliament was just another club with a debating chamber appended to it. The physical barriers to women’s acceptance within Parliament were particularly pronounced in those early years of women’s representation. The scarcity of the new women MPs, combined with institutional sexism, meant that they were often made to feel unwelcome in the Commons. There were numerous cases of women MPs being mistaken for secretaries, as well as generally being treated with distrust and a continued sense of disbelief at their very existence.56

‘The dungeon’ 

The Lady Members’ Room, a designated room where women MPs could respond to correspondence and dress themselves, served as an office for all women MPs. Known as ‘the dungeon’, it was a small, stuffy room in the basement of the Palace of Westminster. Mark Collins, Parliament’s estates archivist and historian, described it as ‘a dark place with wooden panelling.’57 When Wilkinson first entered the House in 1924, the nearest ladies’ toilet to the debating chamber was a quarter of a mile walk, along three long corridors and two flights of stairs.58 In 1929, the Lady Members’ Room was moved down the corridor to accommodate the larger pool of women, but it was still small and lacked a changing room or an annunciator to alert MPs as to what was happening in the debating chamber. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the facilities were improved.

 Meanwhile, male MPs had a much greater purchase on the space of Westminster. Unlike women, male members had access to baths (particularly useful during all-night sittings) and dining rooms. Ministers (almost exclusively male) had their own offices, and not even Nancy Astor dared to enter the smoking room, ‘where a whispered word may sometimes have more effect than an hour’s speech thundered in the debating chamber’, as Ellen Wilkinson described it.59 The physical infrastructure both facilitated, and was facilitated by, elite social networks. In almost a physical extension of the parliamentary estate, male members would go to their private male-only clubs (including the Athenaeum, the National Liberal Club, the Garrick and the Carlton) to discuss politics.

Ellen Wilkinson was the first woman MP to enter the smoking room. As she bounded up to the door, she was stopped by a policeman who informed her that ladies did not usually enter. ‘I am not a lady – I am a Member of Parliament,’ she responded peremptorily as she opened the door. Wilkinson continued to push the boundaries of Westminster convention. In 1928 she used her position on the Kitchen Committee (a select committee dedicated to the domestic arrangements of the House of Commons) to initiate a campaign for women to be admitted to the Strangers’ Dining Room. As it stood, while male parliamentary secretaries of ministers and opposition leaders could eat in this cheaper dining room, women had to eat in the more expensive Harcourt Room. Despite opposition to Wilkinson’s campaign from others on the committee, including her only other female colleague (Mabel Philipson), the motion passed. The speaker decided that a lady guest could be admitted for dinner, but not for lunch, on the dubious grounds that there was a shortage of accommodation. Astor intervened, saying: ‘Do not women need luncheon, too?’ Nevertheless, this was primarily a moment of celebration and Wilkinson entertained a party of female guests in the Strangers’ Dining Room (a meal which was, interestingly and unusually for the time, a vegetarian and non-alcoholic affair). But she continued to push forwards, and when appointed to the committee once more in 1930, she was active in the campaign to admit women for lunch as well. In October 1931, Labour MP Edith Picton-Turbervill made a request for a women’s dressing-room, which was granted in the next Parliament. Women were beginning to ‘take up space’.

Women and Leadership: A Symposium takes place at Shakespeare’s Globe on 17 May.

Image:  Ellen Wilkinson MP in 1926. Source: Library of Congress. 

On the positive impact of creativity on woman’s mental health: a reflection.

This year sees the 40th anniversary of Clean Break and Southall Black Sisters, organisations that seek to empower women who have experienced disadvantages, through creativity and self–care.

On 15 May speakers from both organisations will join us in a panel, Clean Break & Southall Black Sisters @ 40: Activism, Women & Power. Chaired by our Dr Farah Karim-Cooper we will explore the themes of justice facing women, the current context and the strategies both organisations have adopted to affect change and reclaim power.

In this blog, one of Clean Break’s current Members[i], Beverly, reflects on her experiences, and the ways in which Clean Break’s Members Programme has contributed to her wellbeing, healing and self-care.

About Clean Break

Clean Break changes lives and minds through theatre – on stage, in prison and in the community. It produces ground-breaking plays with women writers and actors at the heart of its work. Founded in 1979 by two women prisoners who believed that theatre could bring the hidden stories of imprisoned women to a wider audience, it is still the only theatre company of its kind remaining true to these roots; inspiring playwrights and captivating audiences with the company’s award winning plays on the complex theme of women and crime.

Clean Break uses theatre to keep the subject of women’s criminalisation on the cultural radar, helping to reveal the damage caused by the failures of the system. Through its unique repertory of new plays and its’ participatory model, it raises difficult questions, inspires debate, and helps to effect profound and positive change in the lives of women with experience of the criminal justice system.

How has Clean Break had an impact on your life?

I still feel and carry numerous treasures in my heart, accumulated over the three (almost four) years l have been taking part in classes and workshops at Clean Break. In sickness and in health, as a student initially and now as a Member. Yes, in sickness and in health, we are committed to one another's betterment, through creatively supportive means.

My first year at Clean Break was purely about learning and re-learning self-care, and putting what l learnt into action. l am now, as l was then, encouraged, praised and thanked, not only by members of staff, but also by Women taking part in classes. And their words feel genuine.

It took some time, but l did begin again to believe 'This is what l deserve.' I had come to Clean Break because l was broken, internally and externally. I came across that years’ booklet[ii] advertising all the creative and healing wonders that were available back then, and knew l needed and deserved the self-care options. I didn't know if l could locate any inner resolve, or the courage to face the possibility of another rejection. I did say l was broken. Thankfully courage and need led me to self-refer, and after an interview l was accepted, as a human being as well as a student. This experience of not being judged negatively alone has been the foundation for my present and my future.

How has Clean Break has had an impact on your wellbeing?

No matter what one’s state of health, (that’s emotional psychological spiritual physical financial – I am still so grateful for fares and lunch[iii]), being with Women who want to create art as part of their healing and sharing lives, definitely has the most positive impact on all the Women's lives. I did move on from - and took with me, what l needed -  the Self-care and Self-Development courses -  rejuvenated, and even more curious to know for myself what went on in 'Introduction to Drama,' 'Performance Level 1' and 'Performance Level 2.' I found out! - Lots of hard work made easier with laughter, and a level of inclusion (daily) that l still truly appreciate, and try to live by.  

My very first ‘Writers Circle’ participation led to professional actors bringing to life my words and my scene, set in the Perthshire woods!! I was there, we were all there.  I could not remember having a feeling like it before or since. I did/we did that.  One of the actresses further encouraged me afterwards by telling me she had felt what l had felt. It was pure magic.

Because of these shared successes, which l can see now are validations of my burgeoning growth in becoming more of a human being and as an artist, l have auditioned for roles and not been accepted, and l have experienced the opposite. Actively taking part in Clean Break's 'Making Choices' with each rejection and acceptance l eventually saw the opportunity to really choose my response to each outcome, and to own my feelings.

What are your hopes for the future?

This is Clean Break’s 40th year of being. I know our futures are entwined for eternity. I hope to see Members who are ready willing and able fully integrated in the company's artistic presence in the UK and abroad. We have a unique and valuable approach to fully living life and we need to be out sharing it. The wider world is waiting for us.

Can you leave us with a positive message you would like to share?

Never forget that at your core there are treasures that are meant to be mined, brought up to the light, and shared, so that you and everyone you share your environment with, can experience the true treasures of life. I aim to do this daily.

Clean Break continues its 40th anniversary year following the success of its Spring season, which opened with the sold-out run of Inside Bitch at the Royal Court Theatre. Its second season of work includes:

[i] Member: A woman attending Clean Break’s onsite Members Programme for women with experience of the criminal justice system and women at risk of entering it because of drug/alcohol use and/or mental health needs.

[ii] Years booklet: This refers to Clean Break’s annual prospectus detailing the full year of courses and qualifications that women could enrol onto.

[iii] Fares and lunch: Clean Break pays towards Members travel expenses and provides a free hot meal on a daily basis, as well as contributing to child care costs.

Shakespeare’s Sequels: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V.

Research Assistant Hailey Bachrach looks at why you don’t need to know English monarchical history to have a good time at one of Shakespeare’s History plays. In this blog she looks at Henry IV Part 1. 

Richard II ends with a promise: the newly crowned King Henry IV vows to take a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to atone for his role in the murder of King Richard. A couple years later, Shakespeare decided to follow up on King Henry IV’s reign, opening Henry IV Part 1 with a reiteration of this promise. He brings back a cast of characters that those who have seen Richard II will recognise: Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV; the Earl of Northumberland; and Northumberland’s son, whose fervour in battle has now earned him the nickname Hotspur—which is also the alternate title we’ve given the play.

So the two plays are definitely linked… but they’re also very capable of standing alone. In fact, in early attempts to cut down the play, co-directors Federay Holmes and Sarah Bedi tried to remove as much of the backstory relating to Richard II from the script as they could, for the sake of clarity, and recognizing that not everyone in our audiences will have seen Richard II. As rehearsals went on, however, we found that it was almost impossible not to add those lines and references back in. One of the fundamental questions of Hotspur is whether the present can ever really make a clean break from the past… so it makes sense that the characters can’t stop reminiscing about it.

However, this definitely doesn’t mean that you need to have seen Richard II in order to understand Hotspur (or Henry IV Part One to understand Part Two, for that matter). Hotspur develops its own characters and its own versions of past events. One conspicuous example is Northumberland’s brother, the Earl of Worcester, who is frequently referenced in Richard II, but never seen in that play. In Hotspur, he is treated as a central conspirator, and characters describe him as if he was present for events that Richard II does not depict him as a participant in.

This slight disconnect can help us understand how early modern writers and audiences may have approached the idea of sequels. Multi-part plays, especially those based on history or mythology, were very popular during the 1590s. However, this wasn’t the only way audiences experienced sequential historical narratives. As I discussed in my previous post, audiences could also watch multiple versions of the same historical figure’s life in different plays by different companies, or even by different writers for the same company. When we remember this, the not-quite-seamless nature of Shakespeare’s sequels begins to make a lot of sense. People were accustomed to seeing multiple ‘takes’ on a single set of historical figures and events. Serial history plays feel less like a box set or a TV drama and more like big superhero movies, where different writers offer slightly different takes on characters and events that all coalesce into a collective mythology rather than a single linear storyline.

Hotspur is therefore a continuation of Shakespeare’s own play, but also a continuation of the broader mythology of Henry IV, the king who usurped his crown. The play introduces another well-known figure, the future Henry V, who was famous for his reckless, irresponsible youth and surprise transformation into an adept military commander and widely-admired king. Both of these cultural legacies are as important to the play’s background as any of the specific events of Shakespeare’s Richard II.

This naturally raises the question of whether the same principle applies to Shakespeare’s other history plays. Do you need to see the histories we’ll be performing this summer—Henry IV Part One and Two and Henry V—in that order? We think that you don’t. That’s one reason why we’ve given them new individual names: Hotspur, Falstaff, and Harry England. As with Richard II, all three plays both do and do not follow directly on from one another. Time moves forward across the plays, and they reference past events. But they also slightly reset themselves, giving the characters the chance to re-enact the story arc they’re best known for. In all three, Prince Hal must labour to convince the world that he’s better than his reputation; in both Hotspur and Falstaff, King Henry must grapple anew with his guilt over the crown and his mistrust of the son who will inherit it. In Falstaff, Falstaff remembers an event that actually took place in a completely different play about the youth of Henry V, while King Henry IV and one of his lords reminisce about a scene from Richard II for which neither were present. This is a perfect example of the complex ways in which early modern ‘sequels’ relate to one another and to other plays about the same characters, the way they exist in sequence and in parallel at the same time. The order that you see our productions in will change your understanding of each play, but the plays are designed to withstand being seen in any order, with any level of prior knowledge of the characters and events they depict.

In short, if you loved Richard II, come join us to see the next chapter in the story of Bolingbroke, Northumberland, and Harry Percy. And if you missed it, choose any play you like and embark on an entirely new adventure this summer.

Henry IV Part 1 opens on 23 April. Henry IV Part 2 opens on 25 April and Henry V opens on 30 April. 

Photography by Pete Le May 

Shakespeare’s Globe produces new plays?

Jessica Lusk is our Literary Manager. She is responsible for the research and development of all our new writing. Lucky her! If you came to see Emilia in 2018 you can thank Jessica in part for that.

In this blog she explains why and how we commission new plays at Shakespeare's Globe. If you're a budding playwright this is essential reading. 

The Globe has always been a new writing venue. It’s hard to believe now but Shakespeare was a new writer once, and The Globe I write from now, (the third Globe) is still a new writing venue today.

Our first brand new play was seen by enthusiastic audiences back in 2002, it was called The Golden Ass by Peter Oswald – an adaptation of a Roman Classic – with a cast of 30 actors playing almost 200 different characters, with puppetry, opera and mini-scooters… it was certainly not a case of starting small!

Since then we have produced almost 40 new plays, for both the Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, including Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn, Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, Che Walker’s The Frontline, Claire van Kampen’s Farinelli and the King, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia and most recently Tom Stuart’s After Edward. They’ve played here, in the West End and on Broadway, as well as on tour around the UK.

Now, as we enter our 22nd year, the process of commissioning and developing new work is getting a shake-up. Shakespeare wrote his plays specifically for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and for the playhouses they performed in, and once they had passed the censor then it was left to the audience to decide their worth.

We want to take this as our guide: to work with writers and produce exciting new plays written bespoke to the architecture they will be performed in. We will give writers the space and time to work with our academics and research team, spend time with our actors, see plays in our theatres, experiment with and learn from the architectural playing conditions of our two theatres, the practitioners who work in them, and ultimately write a play bespoke to those theatres.

We’re calling this idea ‘The Scriptorium’, hearkening back to the medieval idea of a space devoted to writing, but more on that another time…!

Our cause is to celebrate and interrogate Shakespeare’s transformative impact on the world - and where can that impact be more felt than in the writers of today…. Artistic descendants of this extraordinary shaman.

Our aim is to programme and produce new work within a season of Shakespeare’s plays that support and complement each other. For example, we programmed Emilia in a season of Shakespeare’s plays in which the character of Emilia threads her way through several stories – Othello, The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. These plays provided an opportunity and framework to reflect on the myriad influences this ‘Dark Lady’ may have had on Shakespeare’s imagination, but crucially in Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm placed this revolutionary poet right where she is meant to be – at the centre of her own story.

At the beginning of 2019 we hosted our first ever new writing festival: responses to our winter production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The central Faustian bargain has traditionally been associated with the male 'soul', and so, we commissioned six female writers to give a feminine response to the central provocation at the heart of Doctor Faustus that asks 'what would you sell your soul for?' The responses were surprising, revealing, funny and truly moving, and the reaction from the audiences were similar. To have an opportunity to see how  classic plays sit in conversation with brand new ones is so exciting, and this festival of writing is something we want to do again and again, bigger and even better.

During the festival we experimented with different performance spaces and found that there’s so much more to play with than just a traditional stage. The Globe’s ‘Tiring House’ (where you would put on your ‘attire’ before a performance) makes a beautifully intimate and immediate playing space that created a ‘pop-up’ element to our first new writing festival. So, watch this space, and lots of other spaces around the building. 

If you’re a writer, here are a few things to bear in mind:

One of the exciting things that writers find here is that the Globe theatre demands writing that is truly active, epic and democratic. The audience can be your biggest supporter or your harshest critic: roughly half of a Globe audience is standing, and they've only paid five pounds, so if they don't like something, they can – and do – leave!

The Globe invites live and direct communication with its audience. It also responds brilliantly to declarations of huge shifts in space and time – think of Antony and Cleopatra where we move between Egypt and Rome again and again so swiftly, with nothing more than a different set of characters coming on to tell us that we have changed continent.

The space is the concept. The dramaturgy and structure of the play can be inspired by the necessity and parameters of the stage as much as the narrative that drives it forward. There are no sets, no amplified sound, no black outs – it’s a space that is completely shared with play, player and audience. And above us all is the sky. It’s a vertical as well as horizontal space. It’s mythic and domestic. It’s a tabula rasa that allows for an experiment in form as much as content, and that is a challenge our writers say they love to rise to.

Although Shakespeare himself has popped up in one or two of our new plays over the years, he's not in himself the most interesting subject matter. Shakespeare wrote about Kings and Queens, faeries and myths, fools and twins, but what he really wrote about was the human condition. We want to find our new Shakespeares. Writers with big ideas that speak to a contemporary audience. 

How to develop a play for Shakespeare’s Globe

We don't accept unsolicited scripts, mainly because we're not looking for finished, polished plays. Instead we want to support writers as you develop your plays bespoke to our playhouses.

If you're a writer with an idea for the Globe please don't spend your precious free time writing something without being paid for it! 

Instead send us the pitch, invite us to your shows, or rehearsed readings, or send us scripts you've written in the past, but please do not send us your new plays written for the Globe. Our space is full of ‘airy nothing’ that invites you to speak to it and to fill it with your imagination; all we need is you, your poet’s pen and your big idea.

If you would like to invite us to see your work performed please email us on literary@shakespearesglobe.com. The subject line should read: Invitation/Pitch (New Writing).

Building photography by Clive Sherlock  Emilia and Dark Night of the Soul photography by Helen Murray 

Who was Quentin Crisp? 

George Nichols is the Assistant Director of Tom Stuart’s new play, After Edward, a response to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II for which George is also the Assistant Director.

In this blog he looks at key characters from After Edward that were real people. At the heart of this he and the cast have been asking how much they should impersonate these real people and how much they should interpret them.

Quentin Crisp (played by Richard Cant in After Edward) was born into an inauspicious suburban family, the son of a solicitor and a governess; however, he went on to live an extraordinary life. He is now best known as a raconteur, writer and actor whose appearance and personality defied gender norms.

Crisp recounted that he was the subject of much bullying in his early life because of his effeminate behaviour. After leaving school in the 1920s Crisp moved to Soho where he met other young homosexual men and found more freedom to be able to wear women’s clothing and makeup. By his own account his appearance shocked Londoners and led to him being the victim of homophobic attacks. During this time Crisp also sold sex as a rent boy, he said in an interview later in his life that he was ‘looking for love, but found only degradation’.

In the rehearsal room we’ve talked a lot about the effect that Crisp’s early life might have on his character in After Edward. We keep returning to the feeling of personal invalidity felt by the characters because their way of being goes against the grain of society. As one character says ‘the world is made for white, male heterosexuals’.  

Before gaining public recognition, Crisp tried to enlist in the army in the early 1940s but was given a medical exemption on grounds of ‘sexual perversion’. It was in this period that Crisp became a life model for artists, something he would continue to do for 30 years.

Crisp’s fame came later in his life, following the publication of his book The Naked Civil Servant and its subsequent screen adaptation starring John Hurt. Following this he toured regularly with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, where he would perform for the first half before taking audience questions in the second. Crisp also became successful across the Atlantic and eventually he moved to New York. In New York, as in London, Crisp’s name and phone number were listed in the public directory. Crisp saw it as a duty to answer all calls and turn up to all invites, so as long as you paid for it all you had to do was pick up the phone to have him over for dinner.

This aspect of his personality was something that fascinated us. Was it because he loved conversation, or did it cover a hole in his personal life? We know from his own admission that he never quite felt loved or cared for. It’s here too that we see distinctions between the character of Quentin Crisp in our play, and the real life figure.

Crisp died aged 91 near Manchester as he was preparing for the revival of his one man show An Evening with Quentin Crisp. Throughout his old age he had remained thoroughly outrageous and thought provoking and Richard Cant’s performance marries these elements to a deeply affecting softness that makes Crisp sparkle.  

After Edward opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 21 March. 

Photography by Marc Brenner   

Music Instrument Design for Edward II. 

Our wonderfully talented Director of Music, Bill Barclay has built some unique instruments for our production of Edward II. In this blog he tells us about these instruments and the three different worlds of sound he has created for the production.

Christopher Marlowe’s dark history of Edward II still reverberates loudly today both in its powerfully modern assertion that love is love, and in the incompatibility between vulnerability and the corridors of power. To help tell the story of these contrasts that ripple through time, I’ve built two new musical instruments that provide natural reverberation in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which has a warm yet dry acoustic. These devices play alongside a raft of ethnic and period instruments to create three contrasting palates of sound.

The first world of sound: war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure

The first sound world describes the sounds of war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure. This is achieved through the creation of a steel cello, which is an instrument I first encountered in Boston built by musician Matt Samolis, also known by his stage name Uncle Shoe. I was infatuated with his creations and had used them in theatre before, but this is this instrument’s debut in the United Kingdom. With Matt’s guidance I’ve constructed a new kind of steel cello bespoke to the Sam Wanamaker. 

This is how it works: several large deep ride cymbals and metal rods are bolted to a large stainless steel resonating sheet, which amplifies the metal objects as they are bowed and struck. The instrument is capable of a wide range of sounds which are almost entirely below the frequencies of consonants in speech, making words intelligible over a rash of haunting textures. Amazingly, the instrument often sounds synthesised – digital, even – metallic, industrial, dark, and yet shimmering. Matt and I used to play it for sound meditations in long beautiful drone concerts, and yet it can also distort to provide an incredible lexicon of theatrical punctuation. The whole band takes a turn on it, but it is chiefly played by Music Director Rob Millett, and it is played throughout the production.

The steel cello is complemented by a bass drum, field drum, and Sarah Homer’s contra alto clarinet – a rare instrument lower than the bass clarinet which gurgles at the low end of the hearing spectrum under the steel cello’s reverberant strokes.

The second world of sound: love

The second sound world was meant to contrast with the first as much as possible in order to depict the love between Edward and Gaveston as incompatible with its oppressive cultural antipathy to homosexuality.  For this world we lean on Tunde Jegede’s kora – the West African harp, chiefly from the griot storytelling tradition of Mali.(A griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician).

The kora melds with a swarmandal, a Hindu harp the characteristic buzzing from its sympathetic strings. To fill out this pan-ethnic texture, we use a hammered dulcimer and a bass dulcimer, instruments that are from all over the world, though perhaps most prominent in music from the Middle East. These three harp-like instruments from around the world emphasise the beauty, the universalism, and perhaps the exotic presence that define love so unabashedly in this play. The textures these strings make with each other seems to chime perfectly with the candlelight, and lend an extraordinary atmosphere to the Playhouse.

The third world of sound: the church

The third sound world is of the church. Here the tubular bells, accordion (mimicking an organ), cello, and contra alto clarinet form a league of ominously low, yet sinuously melodic instruments that collect like vines around the ankles of the play’s characters – powerful yet beautiful. Also in this world is the singers, who at various moments intone the Latin prayers of the Requiem Mass, as if the death of Edward I (Longshanks, Edward II’s father), still looms over the cracked glass of our protagonist’s troubled reign.

The second original instrument is the spring machine. Two long helical springs are attached to the theatre’s back wall, and connect directly to the heads of two frame drums bolted to the face of the music gallery. When the springs are rubbed and struck, we discovered that the sounds that pour out of the drums are unearthly, unsettling, and hard to mentally place. For weeks I had been seeking sounds for the play’s horrible final scenes that were truly original – sounds that could only mean this peculiar horror. We tried attaching a double bass to the springs, and had 4 springs start on each string, going into four drums. The sound was amazing but I could still hear the double bass, and the sound was too familiar.

When we took the bass away and hung the springs to a hook instead, it focused the sound much more on the strange sounds of the springs themselves, which we then tightened to amplify the signal. This revealed the coups de grace: when the drum heads are struck with a mallet in a heartbeat pattern, the heartbeat flows to the back wall and out the drums again, creating an analogue looping system. The intention is to recreate the sound of hearing your own heartbeat thudding in your ears, as you imagine the worst. The secondary intention is to allow the truly horrible parts of the story be truly horrible, by preparing our subconscious with unsettling sounds that have no preconceived identity. We don’t want you to be listening to the ‘music’ here – we want the sounds to unsettle the psychological anticipation of Edward’s grisly demise.

Once the act occur, there is no need, or room, for any more music in its final pages. The stage stays mostly in darkness, the characters have their comeuppance, and silence seems the only appropriate ending. We are still processing the horror, and the tragedy, and after two hours of steady building to this moment, it feels right to go out with these solo odd springs.

Other instruments used in the show include the tagleharpa, a medieval bowed three-string harp made for the Globe by a Russian instrument maker in Karelia. This undergirds the ancient character of Old Spencer and provides a bit of the dark ages as an important colour for the older generation of this world. Paul Johnson also plays several ethnic flutes:

Occasionally Paul plays the bagpipes against Sarah Homer’s soprano saxophone – an entirely modern instrument but ones whose timbre, when mixed with the pipes, creates the sensation of two fanfaring trumpets.

Finally, the Nyatiti, the lyre from Kenya, makes a few important solo appearances. This instrument means ‘daughter-in-law’, and it is the female counterpart to the maleness of the West African kora. The two harps provide contrasting emotional colours – the kora in act 1 when love is free, and the Nyatiti in the second half when it is not.

The ambitious nature of this score is testament to the dozens of shows played at the Globe by these four incredible musicians; indeed, the score has been composed for their unique multi-instrumentalism. There is no other person in London who could double on kora and cello than Tunde Jegede, nor any other player than Music Director Rob Millett who plays the dulcimer at an expert level, yet can learn how to work magic from something so new as a steel cello. Paul Johnson and Sarah Homer each in turn provide similarly original contributions that speak to their true uniqueness as players.

The overarching goal here was for the Globe to do what it does best – be inventive, embrace the parameters of acoustic music, and lean heavily on the unique experience of its core artists. I remain a student of period music at the Globe, but only in service of bringing period sounds together with improvisation, new instruments, living composers, and surprising orchestrations.

In collaborating in this way, we attempt to fabricate an entirely unique sound world that can only define the world of this play, here, right now.

Edward II is in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April. 

Musical instrument photography by Hannah Yates  Edward II production photography by Marc Brenner 

‘This little hand’: Gesturing Lady Macbeth.

Catriona Bolt is one of this year’s students studying the Shakespeare Studies MA that we run jointly with King’s College London. In this blog, inspired by her MA research, she reflects on the use of gesture in performances of Lady Macbeth. 

Shakespeare’s company of actors – including the man himself – understood acting through a classical prism. The three tenets of the Roman lawyer Cicero’s handbook for orators were docere, delectare, movere: to teach, to delight, and to persuade. Even if you don’t know any Latin, you might be able to guess another meaning for movere: move. You can yourself move physically, or you can move someone else emotionally, which is closer to what Cicero meant. Early modern actors moved their audiences through accent and action, again key reference points for Roman orators. Accent described speaking the verse, while action meant the accompanying gestures. While we’ve developed many more techniques and theories about acting since the Globe was shut down in 1642, students at drama school today still have movement and voice classes daily, and most productions at the new Globe will have a Movement Director and a Vocal Coach in their company.

Gesture is a specific part of movement that normally uses the hands and arms. Our hands are one of our primary communication tools – for those who use sign language they are sometimes the primary communicator. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is doubly robbed of the means to communicate her brutal assault as both her tongue and her hands are removed. Good actors will use their hands expressively to convey how their character is feeling, sometimes using gesture to speak what is unspoken in the text. Perhaps the most famous example of this in Shakespeare comes towards the end of Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth signifies her breakdown by repeatedly rubbing and wringing – ‘washing’ – her hands, which have come to symbolise her guilty conscience. In interpreting Lady Macbeth at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), Michelle Terry employed brilliant gestural work to build a character with the terrifying, ultimately self-destructive ability to disconnect from her own actions.

As we first saw her, Terry’s Lady Macbeth was hunched upstage, alone, over a letter from her husband (I.v). However, as she reached the “unsex me here” soliloquy, Terry moved forward to command the space, holding a taper to light her face. This speech is more usually accompanied by expansive gesture that reflects its physical content. For example, Judy Dench’s celebrated interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 saw her act out a fearful physical sequence in evoking ‘you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.’ Terry hardly moved except to address the upper galleries, bringing a chilling determination to her performance. In gesturing little, a large part of her communicative power went untapped during this opening scene – in fact this became Lady Macbeth’s most potent weapon, because it meant she could use gesture to deceive other characters in the play-world; even when alone, her gestures were unnatural, divorced from her feelings and intentions. For us as audience members, it established a convention. While Lady Macbeth was alone, she gestured and moved little. But in the following scene, Macbeth (played by Paul Ready) arrived and Terry played much more physically, hence more expressively; when Joseph Marcell’s Duncan arrived, her gestures were stylised and courtly. So we saw that her original restraint was a deliberate choice, and that Lady Macbeth was a frighteningly good actor, even for her husband.

This pattern continued throughout the play, until a climactic scene between her and Macbeth after the banquet (III.iv). Terry’s gestures towards Ready throughout were responsive, not assertive, as her character manipulated his. But as Macbeth became more unhinged, Lady Macbeth became less able to control him. During the banquet she restrained him, holding her arms out to get rid of the rest of the court; by the end of this scene, he was throwing her around the stage, mastering her physically as he was unable to rhetorically. Terry closed the act alone with a scream.

Lady Macbeth appears only once more, in the sleepwalking scene (V.i), and as she does we are given a detailed description of her gestures that, particularly in this particular production, signposts her loss of control. These gestures are focused on her hands, which she rubs repeatedly to wash away the blood she sees there; her final gesture is to reach for her husband’s hand: “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.” Terry, hunched and tiny in an oversized nightgown, sobbed piteously as she seemed to physically wrestle with herself. Sleepwalking, her gestures had finally caught up with her conscience. Her hands were in tune with her thoughts, and she could no longer distance herself from her actions.

Macbeth production photography by Johan Persson 

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper reflects on International Women’s Day. 

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper is the Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. In this blog, written for International Women’s Day, Farah reflects on her position as a woman of colour, and a Shakespeare scholar and how these facts play a part in her everyday life. 

I’m a mother, a partner, a daughter, a Shakespeare scholar, a woman of colour and as it’s International Women’s Day, I am thinking hard about all of those labels and how I have to negotiate between them all the time.  At the Globe this year we are examining what it means to be a woman; what our relationship to power might be; how women are perceived when they are in leadership positions; and what, if anything, did Shakespeare–that great paragon of white male excellence–have to say about these questions? Given our extraordinary experimental production of Richard II with a cast of women of colour and the West End production of Emilia, a play born here at the Globe, consisting also of mainly women of colour, the subject of this blog will focus on Shakespeare’s notions of women of colour and what it means to me to be one.

Please note: this blog contains offensive language.

Last year I curated a festival about Shakespeare and Race. Coming home from a planning meeting that I happened to bring my 15-year-old daughter to, I was feeling excited and enthused about the important work we were doing to draw attention to race and intersectionality at Shakespeare’s Globe. But while my daughter and I were waiting at the pedestrian crossing, a white man rode by on his bike and told us ‘fucking Pakis to go home’. It was deflating, of course, and I was deeply worried about what my daughter would think. How she might internalise that comment and see herself as something alien in the country where she had been born. She didn’t quite catch what he said–thank goodness–but I did. After living here 22 years, I fear the word ‘Paki’ and always will, I suppose. Would he get off his bike and hit me? Would my daughter be attacked? Questions like this zip into your head until you brush them away quickly. By the time I got home, I felt even more motivated to be proactive in discussions about race and gender at my institution and beyond. I am inspired by the many women of colour who have had to overcome the same horrible effects of our visibility as well as the deflating effects of the invisibility that also come with being a woman of colour. This invisibility, being overlooked, being one of the last on the list make up the daily acts of erasure that gall and hurt.

The scholar Kim F. Hall who was last year’s Sam Wanamaker Fellow wrote a game-changing book about the early modern intersections of race and gender and in so doing unearthed and made visible an entire network of texts, poems and images that comment on, satirise or celebrate women of colour. She reminds us about Shakespeare’s dark women: Hermia ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Rosalind (Love’s Labour’s Lost), the dark lady of the Sonnets, for example. While her book shows us how blackness served in early modern England to highlight the superiority of the white European; she tells us that black female beauty was a possibility back then. Many have tried to identify who the dark lady of the sonnets was–perhaps it was Emilia Bassano, perhaps it was nothing more than a fantasy of a woman of colour. Maybe Shakespeare was imagining an alternative to the much-repeated ideal in renaissance poetry of a ‘fair’ or white, wealthy, chaste lady with golden locks, rosy cheeks and glassy bright eyes. Shakespeare in fact, never really describes the perfect beauty the way many other Elizabethan poets did. With his dark lady sonnets, he describes instead the raw, visceral reality of a woman of colour who was the opposite of the conventional ideal, but who his narrator/speaker desired above all else. She is bold, assertive, sexually autonomous and real. I don’t know if Shakespeare knew such a woman, but we do know that Tudor-Stuart London was not a singularly white city. We know that people of colour populated Southwark in fact; that ‘blackamoor’ kitchen maids, servants, metal workers, musicians and more, lived and worked in the metropolis. This is a London we don’t know well enough, a result of centuries of archival research that shows bias towards crafting a purely white history. Women of colour occupied Shakespeare’s imagination and his city; and he offers a beautiful alternative to what he must have felt was the tedious, conventional ideal. Women of colour of Britain must always remember that we have always been here. We belong here too and we aren’t going anywhere.

Further reading 

Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim F. Hall

Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper

What It’s Really Like To Be A Young Woman Of Color In Tech by Eda Yu   

Hear Farah speak on 15 May as she chairs a panel for  In Conversation: Activism, Women and Power, part of our forthcoming Women & Power festival.

Portrait of Farah Karim-Cooper by Bronwen Sharp  Richard II production photography by Ingrid Pollard 

Women on the Globe stages 2018-2019. 

To celebrate International Women's Day 2019, we've gathered together pictures of some (there are many more) of the women who have graced our stages recently.

Behind the stage, many of the designers, directors and other creatives on these productions were also women.

Who is your favourite female theatre maker?