The Shakespeare Centre London is ambitious development of the 25-year relationship between King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Centre builds on two decades of successful collaborations between two renowned institutions, particularly the Research and Higher Education Teams at Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Department of English at King’s. Our collaborations so far have included the joint MA in Shakespeare Studies and our co-sponsorship of biennial postgraduate conferences.
We are an academic institute and a public-facing centre. Education, research, impact, diversity, and service underpin our activities. We promote knowledge in the broad field of the study of Shakespeare, early modern textual and performance culture, and contemporary reimagining of everything Shakespearean and early modern.
We aim to be a beacon for the inclusive study of Shakespeare, text, performance, theatre history, and premodern critical race studies.
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"Shakespeare's work has been for centuries one of the things people use to think with. The history of Shakespeare reception winds up being a focused history of our whole culture." Dr John Lavagnino.
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The core activities of the Centre are:
- to raise public awareness of the historical and contemporary role of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through a range of events, conferences, workshops, publications and partnerships with cultural and creative organisations, big and small, in London and elsewhere.
- to inspire wide engagement with Shakespeare across a range of non-traditional audiences in theatres, schools and higher education, providing resources and leadership in the field of widening participation and breaking down barriers to access
- to encourage and facilitate collaborative, interdisciplinary research relating to Shakespeare and his contemporaries across the range of disciplines and departments within the college and promote to facilitate engagement with the wider community
- to organise public engagement events, academic workshops and international conferences and to support entrepreneurial graduate students in running such events
- to secure externally funded grants for specific projects enhancing our understanding of the work of Shakespeare and other early modern poets and dramatists and the afterlives of that work.
The Centre Co-Directors are Professor Lucy Munro and Professor Farah Karim-Cooper.
Publications
Reading
Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds), On Shakespeare's Sonnets: a Poet's Celebration (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016)
The volume, published to mark 400 years since Shakespeare's death in 1616, presents new poetic work inspired by and written in response to the sonnets. The collection consists wholly of newly commissioned works from a range of prominent international poets, each of whom is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization with which we collaborated with on the book. Each poet has selected one of Shakespeare's poems that speaks to them, using the opportunity to reflect creatively on what it means to remember one of our greatest writers, and what the wider function of poetry can be in the process of memorialization. This elegantly presented book provides a reminder of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations, a season of events designed to commemorate Shakespeare across London in 2016, and a testament to what his memory means to today's poets.
Hannah Crawforth, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, Shakespeare in London (Arden Bloomsbury, 2015)
This co-written book was authored by an LSC academic (Crawforth) along with two scholars who had then recently received their PhDs through the LSC (Dustagheer and Young). It provides a lively account of Shakespeare's Creative relationship to the city in which he lived and worked, revealing for the first time the full extent of his engagement with the sights, sounds and smells of early modern London. Taking readers on an imaginative journey through the city from east to west, it provides highly interdisciplinary readings of some of his major - and less well-known plays, including Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus and Henry VIII. It considers the impact upon the development of Shakespeare's writing practice of the legal life of early modern Inns of Court, of political intrigue at Westminster, of the treatment of the mentally ill at Bedlam, of executions at Tyburn, and of the emerging scientific community centred on Lime Street.
The Norton Shakespeare, 3E (W.W. Norton & Co, 2015)
General editor, Stephen Greenblatt; volume editors Walter Cohen, Jean Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus; general textual editors Suzanne Gossett and Gordon McMullan. The Norton Shakespeare has been the bestselling edition of Shakespeare's works in the United States since its first edition in 1997. The third edition (3E) differs from the first two, which used a modified version of the Oxford Shakespeare text of the plays and poems, by offering a completely new text of Shakespeare's works edited by forty editors from around the world and general-edited by Suzanne Gossett and the LSC's Gordon McMullan. Born digital, the edition comes in a range of paper formats from the traditional 'brick' complete works to custom-crafted anthologies, and offers a wealth of assistance for the reader, especially in its digital version, which offers a wide range of additional textual and critical materials. The new text of The Norton Shakespeare, 3E is based on the principle of single-text editing - that is, the editors have created multiple editions of their play where there is more than one early authoritative text rather than blending and meshing early texts into an editor's idea of what Shakespeare might have written: this way the reader can engage with Shakespeare's plays and poems as they were originally printed yet in fully modernised and punctuated versions that are fully accessible to the contemporary reader.
Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead, with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan, Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018)
Despite a recent surge of critical interest in the Shakespeare Tercentenary, a great deal has been forgotten about this key moment in the history of the place of Shakespeare in national and global culture – much more than has been remembered. This book offers new archival discoveries about, and new interpretations of, the Tercentenary celebrations in Britain, Australia and New Zealand and reflects on the long legacy of those celebrations. This multiply authored monograph gathers together five scholars from Britain, Australia and New Zealand to reflect on the modes of commemoration of Shakespeare across the hemispheres in and after the Tercentenary year, 1916. It was at this moment of remembering in 1916 that ‘global Shakespeare’ first emerged in recognizable form. Each contributor performs their own 'antipodal' reading, assessing in parallel events across two hemispheres, geographically opposite but politically and culturally connected in the wake of empire. Gordon McMullan’s contribution highlights the central role of King’s professor Sir Israel Gollancz in the creation of the Shakespeare Tercentenary events of 1916 which in one way or another led, he argues, to the establishment of Britain’s key Shakespearean theatres: the National Theatre, the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe.
Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden Bloomsbury, 2017)
The volume, published to mark 400 years since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, presents new poetic work inspired by and written in response to the sonnets. The collection consists wholly of newly commissioned works from a range of prominent international poets, each of whom is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization with which we collaborated on the book. Each poet has selected one of Shakespeare’s poems that speaks to them, using the opportunity to reflect creatively on what it means to remember one of our greatest writers, and what the wider function of poetry can be in the process of memorialization. This elegantly presented book provides a reminder of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations, a season of events designed to commemorate Shakespeare across London in 2016, and a testament to what his memory means to today’s poets.
Benedict Schofield, “Shakespeare Beyond the Trenches: The German Myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ in Transnational Perspective” (in Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
This chapter is part of the volume Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, edited by Anita Mancewicz and Alexa Alice Joubin, part of the series ‘Reproducing Shakespeare’, which explores the turn in adaptation studies towards recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence and the many different ‘afterlives’ of Shakespeare. The work began in 2012 with a project documenting the ‘Globe to Globe’ festival at Shakespeare’s Globe during the Cultural Olympiad, as part of which audiences were exposed to a German production of Timon of Athens. That production is discussed in this chapter, which assesses the legacy of the German myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ (‘our Shakespeare’) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It explores the development of this myth of Shakespeare as the German national poet and the ways in which this idea was challenged as it entered into transnational circulation. It reveals how figures such as the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, the director Thomas Ostermeier, and companies such as the Bremer Shakespeare Company, who performed Timon of Athens in German at the Globe, have supported the dissemination of the myth of a German Shakespeare, ultimately tracing how German Shakespeare has evolved into a broader myth of German transgressive theatre, itself frequently conflated with the notion of a radical European performance aesthetic.
Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio, ‘Unfolding action: letters as props in the early modern theatre’, in Early British Drama in Manuscript, eds Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (Brepols, 2019)
What did letters actually look like on the early modern stage, and in what ways might they have signified beyond their written contents? This study argues that a better material understanding of real early modern letters can inform modern productions and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, enabling directors, prop-makers, actors, and critics to explore characters and themes in new ways. The essay is part of a larger project, led between King’s English Department and MIT Libraries, to study the history of letterlocking, a vital technique of communication for centuries which is only now receiving sustained attention. Smith and Dambrogio made props for a production of The Merchant of Venice, basing them both on real contemporary letters and on characters’ descriptions of the letters they send and receive. The paper led to a special Research-in-Action workshop at Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘By your leave, wax’, run with Will Tosh, on 8 July 2019. The research behind it ties in closely to Daniel Smith’s broader interests in the manuscript circulation of early modern literature, including an edition of the anonymous dramatic fragment the Melbourne Manuscript, a study of the term ‘foul papers’, and the analysis of texts by John Donne.
Sarah Lewis and Emma Whipday, 'Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello' (in ‘Experiencing Time’, special edition of Shakespeare, forthcoming 2019)
This co-authored essay is part of a special edition of the journal Shakespeare, and is the final output of a collaborative research project carried out over the last three years. This work began in 2016 with a 'Research in Action' workshop at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and it has been presented in its various phases of development at the World Shakespeare Congress and the London Shakespeare Seminar. The essay explores offstage calling in Othello in relation to offstage knocking in Macbeth. It examines how both sets of offstage sounds can mediate an audience’s experience of time and space, arguing that the spatial and temporal boundaries between play-world and real world are in fact disrupted and complicated by these sounds, which simultaneously embed audience members in the action and yet also force them to register a critical distance from the play-worlds within which they are immersed.
Sonia Massai, Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Shakespeare's Accents offers the first history of the reception of Shakespeare on the English stage to focus on the vocal dimensions of theatrical performance. The four chapters in this book consider key moments in the history of the theatrical reception of Shakespeare, when English accents as used in the Shakespearean stage have caused controversy, if not public outrage. The accents discussed in this book include national accents, such as Scots, Welsh and Hiberno-English, regional accents, ranging from broad geographical variations, such as Northern, Southern or South-Western, to local ones, such as Kentish, and class accents, as they started to be codified soon after the emergence of standards of pronunciation, known as 'usual speech', in the early modern period to the rise of Standard and Received Pronunciation in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Accents are discussed alongside their cultural connotations in order to establish how accents have catalysed concerns about national, regional and social identities and how national, regional and social identities are constantly re-constituted in and through Shakespearean performance. Special attention is devoted to overlooked theatre makers and theatre reformers, elocutionists and historical linguists, as well as directors, actors and producers who have had a major impact on how accents have evolved and changed on the Shakespearean stage over the last four hundred years.
Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020)
A study of the relationship between Shakespeare and the playing company that performed, sustained and exploited his works between 1603 and 1642. It focuses on three aspects of Shakespeare: the dramatist who wrote plays within a vibrant framework in which his work was in constant dialogue with those of the other writers retained by the company; the company man, who was an actor, company sharer and playhouse investor; and the theatrical commodity, a label for a set of plays that would continue through their regular revival to fuel actors' ambitions and playwrights' imaginations for decades to come. In doing so, it explores the impact of the work of individual actors - from leading players such as Richard Burbage and Joseph Taylor to boy actors such as John Rice and Richard Sharpe - on Shakespeare's plays, the construction of the theatrical repertory and Shakespeare's place within it, and the responses of successive generations of playgoers.
Related courses:
BA (level 6):
This final-year undergraduate module explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the social, cultural, political and theatrical environments in which they were written and includes a two-week section taught at Shakespeare’s Globe.
MA (level 7):
7AAEM222 Early Modern Playhouse Practice: The Spaces, The Companies, The Business
Taught at Shakespeare’s Globe as a core component of the MA Shakespeare Studies, this module examines the conditions of early modern performance by exploring the material, social and economic contexts of the London theatre industry in Shakespeare’s time.
7AAEM620 Global/Local Shakespeares:
This optional MA module focuses on the roles played by appropriations of Shakespeare in a globalised cultural market, looking at a selection of localities and cultures and reflecting on the shift in Shakespeare’s identity from ‘national poet’ to ‘global playwright’.
Publications
Reading
Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds), On Shakespeare's Sonnets: a Poet's Celebration (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016)
The volume, published to mark 400 years since Shakespeare's death in 1616, presents new poetic work inspired by and written in response to the sonnets. The collection consists wholly of newly commissioned works from a range of prominent international poets, each of whom is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization with which we collaborated with on the book. Each poet has selected one of Shakespeare's poems that speaks to them, using the opportunity to reflect creatively on what it means to remember one of our greatest writers, and what the wider function of poetry can be in the process of memorialization. This elegantly presented book provides a reminder of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations, a season of events designed to commemorate Shakespeare across London in 2016, and a testament to what his memory means to today's poets.
Hannah Crawforth, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, Shakespeare in London (Arden Bloomsbury, 2015)
This co-written book was authored by an LSC academic (Crawforth) along with two scholars who had then recently received their PhDs through the LSC (Dustagheer and Young). It provides a lively account of Shakespeare's Creative relationship to the city in which he lived and worked, revealing for the first time the full extent of his engagement with the sights, sounds and smells of early modern London. Taking readers on an imaginative journey through the city from east to west, it provides highly interdisciplinary readings of some of his major - and less well-known plays, including Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus and Henry VIII. It considers the impact upon the development of Shakespeare's writing practice of the legal life of early modern Inns of Court, of political intrigue at Westminster, of the treatment of the mentally ill at Bedlam, of executions at Tyburn, and of the emerging scientific community centred on Lime Street.
The Norton Shakespeare, 3E (W.W. Norton & Co, 2015)
General editor, Stephen Greenblatt; volume editors Walter Cohen, Jean Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus; general textual editors Suzanne Gossett and Gordon McMullan. The Norton Shakespeare has been the bestselling edition of Shakespeare's works in the United States since its first edition in 1997. The third edition (3E) differs from the first two, which used a modified version of the Oxford Shakespeare text of the plays and poems, by offering a completely new text of Shakespeare's works edited by forty editors from around the world and general-edited by Suzanne Gossett and the LSC's Gordon McMullan. Born digital, the edition comes in a range of paper formats from the traditional 'brick' complete works to custom-crafted anthologies, and offers a wealth of assistance for the reader, especially in its digital version, which offers a wide range of additional textual and critical materials. The new text of The Norton Shakespeare, 3E is based on the principle of single-text editing - that is, the editors have created multiple editions of their play where there is more than one early authoritative text rather than blending and meshing early texts into an editor's idea of what Shakespeare might have written: this way the reader can engage with Shakespeare's plays and poems as they were originally printed yet in fully modernised and punctuated versions that are fully accessible to the contemporary reader.
Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead, with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan, Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018)
Despite a recent surge of critical interest in the Shakespeare Tercentenary, a great deal has been forgotten about this key moment in the history of the place of Shakespeare in national and global culture – much more than has been remembered. This book offers new archival discoveries about, and new interpretations of, the Tercentenary celebrations in Britain, Australia and New Zealand and reflects on the long legacy of those celebrations. This multiply authored monograph gathers together five scholars from Britain, Australia and New Zealand to reflect on the modes of commemoration of Shakespeare across the hemispheres in and after the Tercentenary year, 1916. It was at this moment of remembering in 1916 that ‘global Shakespeare’ first emerged in recognizable form. Each contributor performs their own 'antipodal' reading, assessing in parallel events across two hemispheres, geographically opposite but politically and culturally connected in the wake of empire. Gordon McMullan’s contribution highlights the central role of King’s professor Sir Israel Gollancz in the creation of the Shakespeare Tercentenary events of 1916 which in one way or another led, he argues, to the establishment of Britain’s key Shakespearean theatres: the National Theatre, the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe.
Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden Bloomsbury, 2017)
The volume, published to mark 400 years since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, presents new poetic work inspired by and written in response to the sonnets. The collection consists wholly of newly commissioned works from a range of prominent international poets, each of whom is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization with which we collaborated on the book. Each poet has selected one of Shakespeare’s poems that speaks to them, using the opportunity to reflect creatively on what it means to remember one of our greatest writers, and what the wider function of poetry can be in the process of memorialization. This elegantly presented book provides a reminder of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations, a season of events designed to commemorate Shakespeare across London in 2016, and a testament to what his memory means to today’s poets.
Benedict Schofield, “Shakespeare Beyond the Trenches: The German Myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ in Transnational Perspective” (in Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
This chapter is part of the volume Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, edited by Anita Mancewicz and Alexa Alice Joubin, part of the series ‘Reproducing Shakespeare’, which explores the turn in adaptation studies towards recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence and the many different ‘afterlives’ of Shakespeare. The work began in 2012 with a project documenting the ‘Globe to Globe’ festival at Shakespeare’s Globe during the Cultural Olympiad, as part of which audiences were exposed to a German production of Timon of Athens. That production is discussed in this chapter, which assesses the legacy of the German myth of ‘unser Shakespeare’ (‘our Shakespeare’) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It explores the development of this myth of Shakespeare as the German national poet and the ways in which this idea was challenged as it entered into transnational circulation. It reveals how figures such as the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, the director Thomas Ostermeier, and companies such as the Bremer Shakespeare Company, who performed Timon of Athens in German at the Globe, have supported the dissemination of the myth of a German Shakespeare, ultimately tracing how German Shakespeare has evolved into a broader myth of German transgressive theatre, itself frequently conflated with the notion of a radical European performance aesthetic.
Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio, ‘Unfolding action: letters as props in the early modern theatre’, in Early British Drama in Manuscript, eds Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (Brepols, 2019)
What did letters actually look like on the early modern stage, and in what ways might they have signified beyond their written contents? This study argues that a better material understanding of real early modern letters can inform modern productions and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, enabling directors, prop-makers, actors, and critics to explore characters and themes in new ways. The essay is part of a larger project, led between King’s English Department and MIT Libraries, to study the history of letterlocking, a vital technique of communication for centuries which is only now receiving sustained attention. Smith and Dambrogio made props for a production of The Merchant of Venice, basing them both on real contemporary letters and on characters’ descriptions of the letters they send and receive. The paper led to a special Research-in-Action workshop at Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘By your leave, wax’, run with Will Tosh, on 8 July 2019. The research behind it ties in closely to Daniel Smith’s broader interests in the manuscript circulation of early modern literature, including an edition of the anonymous dramatic fragment the Melbourne Manuscript, a study of the term ‘foul papers’, and the analysis of texts by John Donne.
Sarah Lewis and Emma Whipday, 'Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello' (in ‘Experiencing Time’, special edition of Shakespeare, forthcoming 2019)
This co-authored essay is part of a special edition of the journal Shakespeare, and is the final output of a collaborative research project carried out over the last three years. This work began in 2016 with a 'Research in Action' workshop at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and it has been presented in its various phases of development at the World Shakespeare Congress and the London Shakespeare Seminar. The essay explores offstage calling in Othello in relation to offstage knocking in Macbeth. It examines how both sets of offstage sounds can mediate an audience’s experience of time and space, arguing that the spatial and temporal boundaries between play-world and real world are in fact disrupted and complicated by these sounds, which simultaneously embed audience members in the action and yet also force them to register a critical distance from the play-worlds within which they are immersed.
Sonia Massai, Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Shakespeare's Accents offers the first history of the reception of Shakespeare on the English stage to focus on the vocal dimensions of theatrical performance. The four chapters in this book consider key moments in the history of the theatrical reception of Shakespeare, when English accents as used in the Shakespearean stage have caused controversy, if not public outrage. The accents discussed in this book include national accents, such as Scots, Welsh and Hiberno-English, regional accents, ranging from broad geographical variations, such as Northern, Southern or South-Western, to local ones, such as Kentish, and class accents, as they started to be codified soon after the emergence of standards of pronunciation, known as 'usual speech', in the early modern period to the rise of Standard and Received Pronunciation in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Accents are discussed alongside their cultural connotations in order to establish how accents have catalysed concerns about national, regional and social identities and how national, regional and social identities are constantly re-constituted in and through Shakespearean performance. Special attention is devoted to overlooked theatre makers and theatre reformers, elocutionists and historical linguists, as well as directors, actors and producers who have had a major impact on how accents have evolved and changed on the Shakespearean stage over the last four hundred years.
Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020)
A study of the relationship between Shakespeare and the playing company that performed, sustained and exploited his works between 1603 and 1642. It focuses on three aspects of Shakespeare: the dramatist who wrote plays within a vibrant framework in which his work was in constant dialogue with those of the other writers retained by the company; the company man, who was an actor, company sharer and playhouse investor; and the theatrical commodity, a label for a set of plays that would continue through their regular revival to fuel actors' ambitions and playwrights' imaginations for decades to come. In doing so, it explores the impact of the work of individual actors - from leading players such as Richard Burbage and Joseph Taylor to boy actors such as John Rice and Richard Sharpe - on Shakespeare's plays, the construction of the theatrical repertory and Shakespeare's place within it, and the responses of successive generations of playgoers.
Related courses:
BA (level 6):
This final-year undergraduate module explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the social, cultural, political and theatrical environments in which they were written and includes a two-week section taught at Shakespeare’s Globe.
MA (level 7):
7AAEM222 Early Modern Playhouse Practice: The Spaces, The Companies, The Business
Taught at Shakespeare’s Globe as a core component of the MA Shakespeare Studies, this module examines the conditions of early modern performance by exploring the material, social and economic contexts of the London theatre industry in Shakespeare’s time.
7AAEM620 Global/Local Shakespeares:
This optional MA module focuses on the roles played by appropriations of Shakespeare in a globalised cultural market, looking at a selection of localities and cultures and reflecting on the shift in Shakespeare’s identity from ‘national poet’ to ‘global playwright’.
Our Partners
Arizona State University
Group leads
Lucy Munro
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature
Farah Karim-Cooper
Globe Professor of Shakespeare Studies
Contact us
Mailing list: Join our mailing list and receive updates about forthcoming activities from The Shakespeare Centre London
Twitter: @ldn_shakespeare
Mailing address:
Shakespeare Centre London
K1.18, King’s Building
Strand Campus
London
WC2R 2LS
Read more about the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network