News & Events

Shakespeare and Performance Seminar:
'Laughter in Shakespeare's Playhouse'

Thursday 12 February, 6-8 pm
Nancy Knowles Lecture Theatre, Shakespeae's Globe

Dr Indira Ghose, Univeristy of Fribourg
'Laughter in the Shakespearean Theatre'
In this talk, Dr Ghose will explore the development of a professional entertainment industry, in which humour was a staple. She will highlight the shift in taste within this period, visible in Shakespeare's plays, from physical comedy to wordplay, which is linked to the emergence of the wise fool. Finally, she will examine the general change in attitudes towards laughter, with decorum playing an increasing role (jokes that go too far), and will argue that didacticism is found to be increasingly dropping out of the picture.

Dr Matthew Steggle, Sheffield Hallam University
'Thinking about laughter in early modern theatres'
What did early modern audience laughter sound like? What did early audiences laugh at? And what tools do we have at our disposal to attempt to historicize something as apparently intangible and evanescent as audience laughter?

Tom Cornford, Artist in Residence, the CAPITAL Centre, University of Warwick
'The Skilful Laugh'
Tom Cornford will examine laughter in the theatre from the perspective of a contemporary director and in relation to the major theories of acting from the last century. Is all laughter the same? Why and when does it happen? Can it be categorized? Is it always to be encouraged? What does it show us and what might it hide?

The Shakespeare and Performance Seminar is open to research students, theatre practitioners and academics. For further information and to reserve a place, please contact ed.events@shakespearesglobe.com.

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Performing Sonnets: Men, Women and Passionate Pilgrims

Thursday 5 March
Time: 7pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £15 (£10 FoSG /concs/students) Includes a glass of wine

2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets. However, his experimentation with the sonnet form had already been made public in playhouses in Romeo & Juliet, All’s Well That Ends Well and Love’s Labour’s Lost. In this year’s Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture, Katherine Duncan-Jones will explore Shakespeare’s performed sonnets and in particular those spoken by his ‘passionate pilgrims’ in Romeo & Juliet and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Katherine Duncan-Jones is a Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College at Oxford University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Research Fellow of University College, London. She edited Arden’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets and, with Henry Woudhuysen, Arden’s Shakespeare’s Poems.

Sam Wanamaker, an American actor, director and producer, was the founder of the project to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe. He died in 1993 after 23 years of tireless campaigning, advancing research into the appearance of the original Globe and planning its reconstruction.

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You Kiss By The Book

Time: 19.00
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £10 (£8 FoSG /concs/students) Includes a glass of wine

This spring, Globe Education invites academics and practitioners to provide a range of perspectives on Romeo & Juliet. We will be ‘pairing’ the talks to offer a chance to hear two speakers in one evening. Each talk will last approximately 45 minutes with a short interval. Subjects range from the physical and social rules of kissing to a fascinating book binding demonstration.

Tuesday 17 March
THE RULES OF KISSING by Dr Helen Berry
What were the rules of kissing in Shakespeare's time? Did people kiss more freely as a form of greeting than we do today? What were the rules about kisses between lovers, family members, or between friends of the same or opposite sex? In an era of poor dental hygeiene, were kisses even considered sexy? Historian Helen Berry explores some of the pleasures and pitfalls of puckering up in Elizabethan England.

STAGING KISSES by Dr Lucy Munro
What was the impact of a kiss on the all-male stage? How was kissing staged in the early modern playhouse? What effects did early modern commentators think that kissing might have on spectators? Dr Lucy Munro will explore the theatrical valences of kissing in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the debates that the staging of kisses aroused.

Tuesday 24 March
UNBOUND LOVERS by Bernard C Middleton MBE

This precious book of love, this unbound lover
To beautify him, only lacks a cover
Romeo & Juliet I, iii

Lady Capulet’s description of the County Paris as an unbound book relates to book buying and book-binding practices of the 16th and 17th centuries. If you wanted to buy a copy of Romeo & Juliet when it was first published in 1597 or any other book for that matter, you would have bought it “unbound” before taking it a binder to have it bound according to your taste and purse.

Bernard C Middleton MBE is this country’s most respected and sought after bookbinder and restorer. He is commissioned by private collectors, specialist antiquarian bookshops and public institutions alike. Many of the books in the John Wolfson library, bequeathed to Shakespeare’s Globe, have been restored and bound by Bernard Middleton.

Tuesday 31 March
KISS AND MAKE-UP by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper
Farah Karim-Cooper explores the Renaissance stage convention of the poisoned kiss and its relationship to the notion of erotic terror in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

‘BUT WILT THOU LEAVE ME SO UNSATISFIED?’ by Dr Jane Kingsley-Smith
Jane Kingsley-Smith explores the way in which the frustration of desire in Romeo & Juliet heightens its erotic power, with consequences for the whole Western tradition of understanding love.

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Read Not Dead: Hero and Leander

by Christopher Marlowe (1598)
Sunday 15 March

Hero & Leander was not published until 1598, a year after Romeo & Juliet appeared in print, but Marlowe had died in 1593 before Romeo & Juliet was written. Romeo & Juliet has clear echoes from Marlowe’s poem which suggests that Shakespeare must have read it in manuscript, or heard it read, before it was published. A second version of the poem with additional verses by Chapman was also published in 1598. This staged reading will focus on Marlowe’s original.

Boy meets girl. Or, rather, a nun of Venus meets an amorous youth who lives on the other side of a dangerous narrow strait, the Hellespont. Despite Marlowe’s protests that his ‘slack muse’ and ‘rude pen’ are not up to the task of retelling the classic narrative, his incomplete poem was an instant success in the print-shops of late 1590s England. A rare chance to hear one of literature’s most quoted and parodied lines in its original context: ‘Where both deliberate, the love is slight; Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?’

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