Skip to main content
Back to King's College London homepage

The Shakespeare Centre London is an ambitious development of a 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.

---

"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

---

 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 Dr Sarah Lewis and Dr Will Tosh.

People

Rebecca Adusei

PhD Candidate

Richard Ashby

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Sophie  Baramidze

Shakespeare Centre London Alumni

Hanh Bui

Interim Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe

Hannah Crawforth

Reader in Early Modern Literature

Graham Fifoot

Shakespeare Centre London Alumni

Projects

EMSOC logo
Early Modern Scholars of Colour (EMSOC)

In Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies there is significant underrepresentation of faculty of colour employed in permanent positions in UK universities. There are various reasons for this: institutional racism in higher education; unconscious and conscious bias in selection of candidates for study and employment; lack of opportunities for students of colour to progress to postgraduate study; lack of funding opportunities, networking and socialisation opportunities for postgraduates of colour; Shakespeare and early modern literature/drama is not consistently presented in schools and universities as an inclusive site of enquiry. The Scholars of Colour Network is an anti-racist collective that will aim to address some of these challenges while working to nurture and enable students, ECR and academics of colour to develop academic and pedagogic networks; find and/or create intellectual spaces that are inclusive and progressive; and enable inclusive practices in the discipline through mentoring. It will also interrogate academic gatekeeping and provide a safe space for scholars of colour to share their work and the challenges and experiences of the predominantly white UK Shakespeare and Early Modern academy.

Image of a royal pattern.
Shakespeare in the Royal Collections (ShaRC), AHRC-funded project 2018-21

What has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? This is the central research question for 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collections', a three-year AHRC funded project (launched in September 2018), PI Gordon McMullan, which focuses on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collections and the stories they have to tell, primarily during the period 1714-1945. Shakespeare and the royal family have long had a close, interdependent relationship. Shakespeare addresses royal history in many of his plays; his works have also functioned across the centuries as a vehicle for the development of royal ideology and for the education of young royals. Equally, royal patronage has tangibly affected the nature of the Shakespearean afterlife. Each has, in key ways, legitimised the other. A key dimension of this history has been the inclusion of Shakespeare-related items - manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, performance records, printed books, photographs, and other projects - in the Royal Collections. These objects, never systematically researched, will be the primary subject of investigation over the course of this project, which will produce: a publicly accessible database of all the Shakespeare-related holdings, and set of 3D visualisations of key spaces at Windsor Castle where Shakespeare's plays were performed; two monographs, written by the postdoctoral research associates; a collection of essays focusing on a series of individual objects in the Collections; an exhibition of selected Shakespeare-related holdings; and a major TV documentary. For further details about the project and the team, please see:

image of a portrait of Shakespeare
Wartime Shakespeare, Leverhulme-funded Research Project, 2018-2021

This project - Primary Investigator Sonia Massai - considers how Shakespeare has been used to justify or to critique war efforts. It explores how Shakespeare's works, together with Shakespeare's cultural capital, have been mobilized to encourage resistance, to bolster recruitment, and to boost morale by rallying the nation around shared values and heritage; or to criticize war and expose the mechanisms of state propaganda and the realities of wartime destruction, oppression and imprisonment. The focus of this project is on major conflicts involving the United Kingdom, with special emphasis on the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the First and the Second World Wards, the Cold War, the Falklands War, and the Iraq War. Shakespearean performance is understood in its most capacious sense, as both the action of performing a play, piece of music or ceremony inspired by Shakespeare and as the process of carrying out a task or activity related to Shakespeare and the cultural legacy of his works. The team of researchers involved in this project are therefore examining archival evidence ranging from artifacts related to theatrical performance - production photographs, audio and video recordings, reviews, etc. - to other types of performances and art forms - e.g. radio recordings, film, satirical cartoons.

    theatre shot of an actress in costume and Shakespeare's portrait shadowed in the background
    Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond

    An international collaborative research project led by Clare McManus (University of Roehampton), Melinda Gough (McMaster University, Canada), Peter Cockett (McMaster University), and Lucy Munro (King's College London). 'Engendering the Stage' explores resonances between the history of gendered performance on the early modern stage and our contemporary drive to achieve gender equity in today's professional theatre industry through archival work and performance-as-research. We have led and facilitated workshops at the Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario (September 2018), King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe (May 2019). For further details, please see:

    Shakespeare's sonnets
    Sonnet Structures (a 'King's Together' project 2018)

    Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Victoria Moul (with Paul Caton and Clare Whitehead). In 2018, LSC members Crawforth and Scott-Baumann collaborated with colleagues in Classics and King's Digital Lab to organise a series of workshops in which experts from different disciplines and art forms discuss objects from their field (buildings, songs, account books, legal transcripts) in relation to the sonnet form. With barristers, singers, translators, architectural curators, legal historians and poets, we explored various means and metaphors for interdisciplinary exchange. Records of the events are on the blog:

      Image of a tempest study, featuring a globe, book, and guitar.
      Widening Participation

      Our long-running Shakespeare Academy brings hundreds of school students into contact with Shakespeare's work each year. Working with groups from years 9 to 11 (ages 13-16), we introduce students from diverse backgrounds to approach Shakespeare's work in new and exciting ways, including practical workshops (run with actors from the Globe), creative writing tasks (led by well-known poets) and independent self-driven research. We foster transferable skills and confidence by helping students to produce presentations on Shakespeare that they deliver before an audience of LSC faculty, teachers and family. We also work directly with teachers, offering our perspective on new areas in Shakespeare research they might bring to the classroom and engaging their views on what Shakespeare means today.

        Image of a Medieval map of London
        Grasping Kairos Network

        Sarah Lewis is a Director of this international and interdisciplinary research network. In line with the recent 'temporal turn' in a number of related fields across the arts and humanities, this group studies a specific idea of time, that of kairos from its earliest mention in Greek literature to modern and postmodern ideas about exceptional time across the globe. The network brings together researchers from classics, music, gender studies, history, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology and theology to better understand the history and development of this key concept, analysing its various manifestations across a broad range of texts and contexts. The network has a strong early modern contingent, and we have explored questions of kairos in relation to Shakespeare and the early modern period at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference, at the London Renaissance Seminar, and at the University of Amsterdam.

          Shakespeare 400
          Shakespeare400

          Shakespeare400 was a consortium of twenty-five leading cultural, creative and educational institutions in and around London that together created a major season of events, performance and outreach activities during 2016 to celebrate four hundred years of Shakespeare's cultural impact. The season included theatre, music, opera, dance, ballet, exhibitions and educational and widening-participation events, vividly demonstrated the ongoing vibrancy of Shakespeare's creative influence in national and global culture. Together we reflected on four centuries of Shakespeare-inspired work across all the art forms and looked forward to the next hundred years in the unparalleled afterlife of Shakespeare's plays and poems. For a list of the hundreds of events that took place across the year, please see:

          Image missing an alt value
          Letterlocking

          This collaborative and interdisciplinary project based on the study of 250,000 archival documents sets out a complete theory for the study of letterlocking.

          Publications

          Reading list

          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, 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 (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 (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.

          King's publications

            Activities

            Grand Theft Auto Online
            A play within a game: Grand Theft Hamlet brings Shakespeare to life

            Without access to physical theatrical performances during the pandemic, two actors decided to bring the tale of Hamlet to life within the Grand Theft Auto gamescape, where they were seeking entertainment and solace in lockdown. Dr Emily Rowe, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English, explains why this setting and interpretation matched the mood of the times.

            News

            Shakespeare Centre London opens call for Early Career Fellowships

            The Shakespeare Centre London is supporting two Early Career Fellowships for those who have recently completed a PhD in Shakespeare or any other aspect of...

            ShakespearesGlobe

            Shakespeare's poems take centre stage in new yearbook by King's academics

            Dr Hannah Crawforth and Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Readers in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English, guest edited Shakespeare Survey 77, and...

            241101 shakespeare survey 77

            King's professor to lead Folger Shakespeare Library

            Professor Farah Karim-Cooper from King’s Department of English has been named as the new director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be the first...

            Professor Farah Karim-Cooper

            'Nobody is entitled to Shakespeare just because of the colour of their skin' – Professor Farah Karim-Cooper

            A new book - The Great White Bard - by Professor of Shakespeare, Farah Karim-Cooper reveals how rethinking Shakespeare might help us rediscover a playwright,...

            The photo shows Professor Farah Karim-Cooper holding her book The Great White Bard at Shakespeare's Globe

            Shakespeare Centre London launched in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe

            Formalising 20 years of collaboration between two world-renowned institutions, Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s have established a new research centre with a...

            Globe - Resize

            Events

            23Apr

            London Shakespeare Seminar with Dr Richard Ashby and Professor Alison Shell

            Join Shakespeare Centre London for our second London Shakespeare Seminar of the year, hosted at King's College London with Dr Richard Ashby (King's) and...

            21Nov

            London Shakespeare Seminar with Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami and Dr Andrea Stevens

            Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami and Dr Andrea Stevens present the London Shakespeare Seminar.

            Please note: this event has passed.

            11Jul

            Research in Action: Marlowe in Repertory

            Professor Lucy Munro celebrates Christopher Marlowe's innovative work in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe.

            Please note: this event has passed.

            10May

            Shakespeare Centre London & Shakespeare's Globe Postgraduate Conference 2024

            This postgraduate research conference is themed around 'Early Modern Innovation' and hosted jointly by the Shakespeare Centre London and Shakespeare's Globe.

            Please note: this event has passed.

            23Feb

            Anti-Racist Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus

            Globe host Dr Hanh Bui is joined by Co-Director of Education Professor Farah Karim-Cooper to discuss race and social justice in Titus Andronicus.

            Please note: this event has passed.

            Related courses

            BA (level 6):

            6AAEC052 Shakespeare's London

            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’.

             

            People

            Rebecca Adusei

            PhD Candidate

            Richard Ashby

            British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

            Sophie  Baramidze

            Shakespeare Centre London Alumni

            Hanh Bui

            Interim Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe

            Hannah Crawforth

            Reader in Early Modern Literature

            Graham Fifoot

            Shakespeare Centre London Alumni

            Projects

            EMSOC logo
            Early Modern Scholars of Colour (EMSOC)

            In Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies there is significant underrepresentation of faculty of colour employed in permanent positions in UK universities. There are various reasons for this: institutional racism in higher education; unconscious and conscious bias in selection of candidates for study and employment; lack of opportunities for students of colour to progress to postgraduate study; lack of funding opportunities, networking and socialisation opportunities for postgraduates of colour; Shakespeare and early modern literature/drama is not consistently presented in schools and universities as an inclusive site of enquiry. The Scholars of Colour Network is an anti-racist collective that will aim to address some of these challenges while working to nurture and enable students, ECR and academics of colour to develop academic and pedagogic networks; find and/or create intellectual spaces that are inclusive and progressive; and enable inclusive practices in the discipline through mentoring. It will also interrogate academic gatekeeping and provide a safe space for scholars of colour to share their work and the challenges and experiences of the predominantly white UK Shakespeare and Early Modern academy.

            Image of a royal pattern.
            Shakespeare in the Royal Collections (ShaRC), AHRC-funded project 2018-21

            What has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? This is the central research question for 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collections', a three-year AHRC funded project (launched in September 2018), PI Gordon McMullan, which focuses on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collections and the stories they have to tell, primarily during the period 1714-1945. Shakespeare and the royal family have long had a close, interdependent relationship. Shakespeare addresses royal history in many of his plays; his works have also functioned across the centuries as a vehicle for the development of royal ideology and for the education of young royals. Equally, royal patronage has tangibly affected the nature of the Shakespearean afterlife. Each has, in key ways, legitimised the other. A key dimension of this history has been the inclusion of Shakespeare-related items - manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, performance records, printed books, photographs, and other projects - in the Royal Collections. These objects, never systematically researched, will be the primary subject of investigation over the course of this project, which will produce: a publicly accessible database of all the Shakespeare-related holdings, and set of 3D visualisations of key spaces at Windsor Castle where Shakespeare's plays were performed; two monographs, written by the postdoctoral research associates; a collection of essays focusing on a series of individual objects in the Collections; an exhibition of selected Shakespeare-related holdings; and a major TV documentary. For further details about the project and the team, please see:

            image of a portrait of Shakespeare
            Wartime Shakespeare, Leverhulme-funded Research Project, 2018-2021

            This project - Primary Investigator Sonia Massai - considers how Shakespeare has been used to justify or to critique war efforts. It explores how Shakespeare's works, together with Shakespeare's cultural capital, have been mobilized to encourage resistance, to bolster recruitment, and to boost morale by rallying the nation around shared values and heritage; or to criticize war and expose the mechanisms of state propaganda and the realities of wartime destruction, oppression and imprisonment. The focus of this project is on major conflicts involving the United Kingdom, with special emphasis on the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the First and the Second World Wards, the Cold War, the Falklands War, and the Iraq War. Shakespearean performance is understood in its most capacious sense, as both the action of performing a play, piece of music or ceremony inspired by Shakespeare and as the process of carrying out a task or activity related to Shakespeare and the cultural legacy of his works. The team of researchers involved in this project are therefore examining archival evidence ranging from artifacts related to theatrical performance - production photographs, audio and video recordings, reviews, etc. - to other types of performances and art forms - e.g. radio recordings, film, satirical cartoons.

              theatre shot of an actress in costume and Shakespeare's portrait shadowed in the background
              Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond

              An international collaborative research project led by Clare McManus (University of Roehampton), Melinda Gough (McMaster University, Canada), Peter Cockett (McMaster University), and Lucy Munro (King's College London). 'Engendering the Stage' explores resonances between the history of gendered performance on the early modern stage and our contemporary drive to achieve gender equity in today's professional theatre industry through archival work and performance-as-research. We have led and facilitated workshops at the Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario (September 2018), King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe (May 2019). For further details, please see:

              Shakespeare's sonnets
              Sonnet Structures (a 'King's Together' project 2018)

              Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Victoria Moul (with Paul Caton and Clare Whitehead). In 2018, LSC members Crawforth and Scott-Baumann collaborated with colleagues in Classics and King's Digital Lab to organise a series of workshops in which experts from different disciplines and art forms discuss objects from their field (buildings, songs, account books, legal transcripts) in relation to the sonnet form. With barristers, singers, translators, architectural curators, legal historians and poets, we explored various means and metaphors for interdisciplinary exchange. Records of the events are on the blog:

                Image of a tempest study, featuring a globe, book, and guitar.
                Widening Participation

                Our long-running Shakespeare Academy brings hundreds of school students into contact with Shakespeare's work each year. Working with groups from years 9 to 11 (ages 13-16), we introduce students from diverse backgrounds to approach Shakespeare's work in new and exciting ways, including practical workshops (run with actors from the Globe), creative writing tasks (led by well-known poets) and independent self-driven research. We foster transferable skills and confidence by helping students to produce presentations on Shakespeare that they deliver before an audience of LSC faculty, teachers and family. We also work directly with teachers, offering our perspective on new areas in Shakespeare research they might bring to the classroom and engaging their views on what Shakespeare means today.

                  Image of a Medieval map of London
                  Grasping Kairos Network

                  Sarah Lewis is a Director of this international and interdisciplinary research network. In line with the recent 'temporal turn' in a number of related fields across the arts and humanities, this group studies a specific idea of time, that of kairos from its earliest mention in Greek literature to modern and postmodern ideas about exceptional time across the globe. The network brings together researchers from classics, music, gender studies, history, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology and theology to better understand the history and development of this key concept, analysing its various manifestations across a broad range of texts and contexts. The network has a strong early modern contingent, and we have explored questions of kairos in relation to Shakespeare and the early modern period at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference, at the London Renaissance Seminar, and at the University of Amsterdam.

                    Shakespeare 400
                    Shakespeare400

                    Shakespeare400 was a consortium of twenty-five leading cultural, creative and educational institutions in and around London that together created a major season of events, performance and outreach activities during 2016 to celebrate four hundred years of Shakespeare's cultural impact. The season included theatre, music, opera, dance, ballet, exhibitions and educational and widening-participation events, vividly demonstrated the ongoing vibrancy of Shakespeare's creative influence in national and global culture. Together we reflected on four centuries of Shakespeare-inspired work across all the art forms and looked forward to the next hundred years in the unparalleled afterlife of Shakespeare's plays and poems. For a list of the hundreds of events that took place across the year, please see:

                    Image missing an alt value
                    Letterlocking

                    This collaborative and interdisciplinary project based on the study of 250,000 archival documents sets out a complete theory for the study of letterlocking.

                    Publications

                    Reading list

                    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, 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 (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 (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.

                    King's publications

                      Activities

                      Grand Theft Auto Online
                      A play within a game: Grand Theft Hamlet brings Shakespeare to life

                      Without access to physical theatrical performances during the pandemic, two actors decided to bring the tale of Hamlet to life within the Grand Theft Auto gamescape, where they were seeking entertainment and solace in lockdown. Dr Emily Rowe, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English, explains why this setting and interpretation matched the mood of the times.

                      News

                      Shakespeare Centre London opens call for Early Career Fellowships

                      The Shakespeare Centre London is supporting two Early Career Fellowships for those who have recently completed a PhD in Shakespeare or any other aspect of...

                      ShakespearesGlobe

                      Shakespeare's poems take centre stage in new yearbook by King's academics

                      Dr Hannah Crawforth and Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Readers in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English, guest edited Shakespeare Survey 77, and...

                      241101 shakespeare survey 77

                      King's professor to lead Folger Shakespeare Library

                      Professor Farah Karim-Cooper from King’s Department of English has been named as the new director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be the first...

                      Professor Farah Karim-Cooper

                      'Nobody is entitled to Shakespeare just because of the colour of their skin' – Professor Farah Karim-Cooper

                      A new book - The Great White Bard - by Professor of Shakespeare, Farah Karim-Cooper reveals how rethinking Shakespeare might help us rediscover a playwright,...

                      The photo shows Professor Farah Karim-Cooper holding her book The Great White Bard at Shakespeare's Globe

                      Shakespeare Centre London launched in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe

                      Formalising 20 years of collaboration between two world-renowned institutions, Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s have established a new research centre with a...

                      Globe - Resize

                      Events

                      23Apr

                      London Shakespeare Seminar with Dr Richard Ashby and Professor Alison Shell

                      Join Shakespeare Centre London for our second London Shakespeare Seminar of the year, hosted at King's College London with Dr Richard Ashby (King's) and...

                      21Nov

                      London Shakespeare Seminar with Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami and Dr Andrea Stevens

                      Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami and Dr Andrea Stevens present the London Shakespeare Seminar.

                      Please note: this event has passed.

                      11Jul

                      Research in Action: Marlowe in Repertory

                      Professor Lucy Munro celebrates Christopher Marlowe's innovative work in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe.

                      Please note: this event has passed.

                      10May

                      Shakespeare Centre London & Shakespeare's Globe Postgraduate Conference 2024

                      This postgraduate research conference is themed around 'Early Modern Innovation' and hosted jointly by the Shakespeare Centre London and Shakespeare's Globe.

                      Please note: this event has passed.

                      23Feb

                      Anti-Racist Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus

                      Globe host Dr Hanh Bui is joined by Co-Director of Education Professor Farah Karim-Cooper to discuss race and social justice in Titus Andronicus.

                      Please note: this event has passed.

                      Related courses

                      BA (level 6):

                      6AAEC052 Shakespeare's London

                      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’.

                       

                      SCL Logo

                      Group leads

                      • Sarah Lewis

                        Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature

                      • Will Tosh

                        Interim Director of Education (Higher Education and Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe

                      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
                      VWB 5.08, Virginia Woolf Building
                      Strand Campus
                      London
                      WC2R 2LS

                      Read more about the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network

                      Follow us