A Bit Lit

The Tower of London is hosting an immersive experience that combines live performance and digital technology to explore the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to kill the King and Parliament. Audiences get to decide whose side they are on as they encounter the world the plotters inhabited.In this film, historian Tracy Borman, joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, tells us about the Gunpowder Plot experience, its place at the Tower of London and the research and creative work behind the show. Tracy offers us a history of the Tower itself, from its early purpose to 'subdue the evil inhabitants of London' for William the Conquerer, to its emergence as a tourist attraction and its later Victorian revamps. Finally, we hear about Tracy's own extensive publishing career, her 15 books ranging across fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on the cultural impact of the British monarchy.For more information on The Gunpowder Plot, and to book, go to: https://gunpowderimmersive.comFor more information on Tracy Borman, go to: http://www.tracyborman.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Engendering the Stage are re-investigating the evidence base for early modern theatre, and using these findings to make space for an inclusive performance history that involves female-identified and gender-non-conforming performers as well as performers of colour. We discuss failed performance, the porousness of theatre, the politics of domestic performance, rope-dancing, tumblers, sword-dancing, performing masculinity, dynamic femininity, androgynous clothing, the famous ‘Jumping Judy', cocoanut shies, forbidden students, The Roaring Girl, the Fortune playhouse, female shareholders, archival research in an age of Covid, practice-as-research, and more...

Sacha Coward tells us about life as a queer tour guide, graveyard explorer, folklore expert, escape room designer and mermaid enthusiast - what a CV! All of these things, he tells us, are rooted in storytelling, in a conversation that ranges across 'the strange tension between life and death', Zelda and the Muppets.

Richard O'Brien discusses his new collection, The Dolphin House, a poetic exploration of “a failed NASA research project to teach a dolphin the English language in a flooded apartment on a Caribbean Island.” He introduces us to this strange and compelling story and the people involved, and reads from the collection, while also discussing his other poetic hats, including his tenure as Poet Laureate of Birmingham (2018-20), which features the first public reading of his poem written for Warstone Lane Cemetery. We also hear about the benefits of poetic forms, the relationship between indie music and poetry, and visual and material elements of printed poetry pamphlets (by way of Broken Sleep Books and the Emma Press).

Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University) talks to her mentor, friend, and collaborator Jennifer Higginbotham (The Ohio State University) about the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women in the early modern period. They discuss how early moderns grappled with the racialized presence of foreign queens and how they became loci of competing ideologies. Finally, Assaf Kafantaris and Higginbotham reflect on the conversation surrounding Meghan Markle's marriage into the British royal family, which sparked transatlantic, even global, conversations about race, nation, belonging, and reproduction. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

Ronan Hatfull speaks with Rebecca MacMillan and Tom Wilkinson from Impromptu Shakespeare about improvisation.

The very polymathic Phoenix Andrews talks us through some of the polys that they math. We hear about the development of fan and internet cultures via Ed Balls, which Phoenix uses to work up a really rich and convincing political history of the early twenty-first century across the UK and US. Visit ABitLit.co for more conversations, and to book our brand-new courses and events. How to Make an Elizabethan Theatre starts on 14 February 2022: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-make-an-elizabethan-theatre-tickets-198132237857 Warning: some strong language.  

In this film Eric Weiskott tells us about his new book, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 which explores English poetry across its forms and across time periods often divided up and isolated in conventional academic discussion. The book is, Eric tells us, an attempt to 'get around the retrospective reading of form'. The book traces three metrical traditions across 300 years: alliterative (that is, lines features words starting with the same letter), tetrameter (lines of usually 8 syllables) and pentameter (lines of usually 10 syllables). This historical and cross-metrical approach allows the book to identify iambic pentameter, in its earliest years, as a specifically London-based compositional practice. Asked to define 'literature', Eric says that it recognises and responds to life, and invites us all to turn to the poem Piers Plowman as a poem about close reading practices. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University) talks to her mentor, friend, and collaborator Jennifer Higginbotham (The Ohio State University) about the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women in the early modern period. They discuss how early moderns grappled with the racialized presence of foreign queens and how they became loci of competing ideologies. Finally, Assaf Kafantaris and Higginbotham reflect on the conversation surrounding Meghan Markle's marriage into the British royal family, which sparked transatlantic, even global, conversations about race, nation, belonging, and reproduction. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

In this film Luke Kennard tells us about his new collection of prose poems, Notes on the Sonnets, which responds to Shakespeare's sonnets from the point of view of someone at a really bad party. We at A Bit Lit love a really bad party, so we were excited from this discussion! Luke tells us that Shakespeare's poetry is obsessed with avoiding wrinkles, as though written by the 'military-industrial beauty complex', and he wants his poems to be somewhere between insolent and impudent in their relation to Shakespeare's work. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

In this film Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta tell us about their new book, Shakespeare and Latinidad, which they hope will be 'of value to anyone wanting to make culturally-relevant Shakespeare' productions. The book contains 25 essays by both theatre scholars and practitioners and celebrates the more than 130 Latinx productions of Shakespeare taking place since 1969. Trevor and Carla emphasise the importance of co-creation between art and knowledge, practitioners and scholars, and exploring new ways for theatres to create self-documentation and archiving practices. Both literature and theatre are made by 'living and breathing real people', they tell us, and they stress the need to ground ourselves in the orality, sound, noise and silences of creative work. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

The actor and writer Richard Katz tells us about devising work, the creative space between play and playtext and the joys of being a clown. In devised work, Richard tells us, everyone directs, and there is no power structure in which the director is in charge of a group of actors. Clowning involves being in the moment, escaping the Freudian need to ask why a character does something. This film is a fascinating insight on theatre from a performer who has worked across The Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, Complicité, Told By an Idiot and Improbable.For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

In this film we hear from Felix, Jamie, Johan, Ewan and Will about performing in Edwards' Boys' forthcoming production of John Marston's The Fawn. The boys tell us about the play and their experience of working in this boys company, based at King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Perry Mills tells us about his forthcoming production of John Marston's The Fawn, on sale now and onstage in early October. See http://edwardsboys.org for more.

We hear about moving from short stories to the novel as a creative writer, and the balance between historical and contemporary issues in the study of literature. We also hear what it has been like to study at a time of Covid, both the good and the bad sides of lockdown learning.Oli and Lauren also tell us about Fincham Press, Roehampton's own publishing house, which nurtures new writing from students and staff. We hear about student trips to Paris and across the streets of London, bringing literature back into the real world that produced it and where it is set. They both speak powerfully about love, literature and stories, and working as a student community to take each other seriously and help one another to develop. Literature, they tell us, is something that records who we are and who we might be, and documents our lives even as it changes them.For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

The project draws on the transgressive histories of British popular theatre, including the Victorian music hall, variety theatre, the Shakespearean stage, and fairgrounds and circuses. In a far cry from the polite theatre that dominates today, Music Halls were bold and scandalous spaces where feats of strength and exhibitions of wrestling were interwoven with comedy, popular songs, and other variety acts such as human statuary and animal performances. In this interview, Richard Summers-Calvert and Sam West tell us about making these films, celebrating a time 'before wrestling was pinned down' and fixed, and instead mingled with other art and festival forms in what Claire Warden has called a 'queer music hall sport'. This work allows us to 'see wrestling differently', and connect wrestlers to the long history of their craft. Richard and Sam tell us about recreating and reimagining rare archival footage, and creating an 'experimental learning space' as a 'structure in which only wrestlers could thrive' - celebrating the unique skillset of a wrestler. The film also celebrates the importance of failure in any form of performance experiment, which is music to Andy Kesson's ears! You can see the documentary itself in our previous film, and be sure to check out our other wrestling films with Claire Warden and Sam West at Wrestling Resurgence, and the wrestlers Nick Radford, Chuck Mambo, RJ City, The OJMO and Josef Kafka. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

He talks us through The Devil upon Two Sticks, which sees the devil looking into people's houses, which feels both spooky and also like an early version of reality TV. John Milton's Paradise Lost, Daniel Defoe's A Political History of the Devil and Eliza Heywood's A Spy upon the Conjuror all also feature, as does the anonymous The Adventures of Lucifer in London, in which the devil is a kind of human connoisseur and body-hops his way around England's capital city.For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

Eleanor Janega tells us about her new book, ‘The Middle Ages: A Graphic History', illustrated by Neil Max Emmanuel. She tells us about the Eurocentric and Italian ways that history has been told, seeing the very concept of time periods as an Italian, imperial kind of ‘infomercial'. The idea of the middle ages, she explains, is defined by the so-called collapse of the Roman Empire at its start and the rise of the Italian Renaissance at its end. It is a period rooted in claims of origin for so many modern nations, as seen by the English fixation on 1066. We also hear about how modes of travel and movement defined this period, from its roads and horses to its shipping lines and sailing logistics, and Eleanor discusses who does and doesn't belong in this period, detailing a series of ‘others', from women to Jews to queers.

In this film Olia Hercules tells us about food writing, and her career moving from journalism to food and books. We hear about how her work is rooted in family history and cultural research, and about specific practices such as fermentation, which Olia describes as ‘self-sustained eating'. Olia sees her writing as pitched between memoir, diary and research, looking to open up knowledge about Eastern European and Central Asian cuisine. Look out for first-day crayfish, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust!

Erik Wade tells us about the global origins of the ideas of sex and race in early English literature and language. We hear about Alfred the Great and his search for 'books most needful to know', and the need to work across text and images to understand this period. Erik's discussion of art history includes surprising truths about the sexiness of hares, and stresses the importance of queer possibility over straight(forward) certainty. Islamic armies, Viking boats and a Cadbury's Creme Egg all make surprising appearances. For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

Klara and the Sun, the eighth novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, was published in March 2021. Ishiguro is well-known for the combination of a subtle, understated style of narration, often delivered by unreliable and compromised narrators, with devastating revelations of ethical, political and emotional trauma. His new novel is no different: Klara and the Sun is set in a future near to ours, but which has made a few key advances in artificial intelligence and related biotechnologies; and the novel is narrated by an 'artificial friend', Klara. Klara's narrative reflects on the status of the human and its relationship to ecology, technology and ethics in a rapidly-changing world - and in the most intimate circumstances of lived experience. In this episode, leading Ishiguro scholars Yugin Teo (University of Bournemouth) and Dominic Dean (University of Sussex) are joined by Amelia DeFalco (University of Leeds), a researcher of posthumanism and ageing, to explore the ethical and political questions raised by Ishiguro's latest novel, and their relevance both for Ishiguro's work as a whole and for critical issues of our contested future. For more videos about literature and all things creative please see https://abitlit.co/.

Nedda Mehdizadeh tells us about the networks existing between Safavid Persia and Tudor and Stuart England, and how English fantasies of ancient Persia as a fallen Empire affected their ability to interact with the contemporary country they actually encountered. We hear about Biblical depictions of Persia in the Book of Daniel and Roman and Greek obsessions with Hyrcanian tigers, and about the journey through Russia and across the Caspian Sea that members of the English Muscovy Company undertook to get to Persia. In both their real and imagined encounters with Persia, the English were thinking and worrying about their own place in the history of Empire. Nedda also tells us about the place of social justice in her teaching and research, including a new book on Anti-Racist Shakespeare she is co-writing with a previous Bit Lit contributor, Ambereen Dadabhoy. We are very excited about this book! For more details on our films and further resources, go to our website at https://abitlit.co

In this film, Noreen Masud talks to James Bailey about his new book, Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. They discuss Spark's brevity, polish and precision, 'the impossibility of her novels', the way Spark was able to write first drafts that were also finished versions. We hear that 'the experimental creates cracks into which we might creep', Spark's multimedia experiments enabling literary researchers to take similar risks in the forms and methods of their work. James and Noreen tell us too about the two amazing archives Spark has left us, one filled with receipts, diaries and correspondence, the other with working manuscripts of mid-composition notes and research. Very different views of Spark emerge depending on which of these archives we see her from, and this is just one example of how James' new book has reset the terms in which we might understand this vital and vitality-rich novelist.

In this film we celebrate Catherine Fletcher's new book, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance. Catherine also talks to us about the opportunities and challenges of writing for the public as an academic, and we discuss the way this kind of work is often gendered and depends on the scholarly labour of early-career, precarious and often female researchers. Please see more about this film and many others at https://abitlit.co/books/catherine-fletcher-on-public-engagement-academic-labour-and-her-new-book-on-the-italian-renaissance/ For more videos about literature and all things creative please see https://abitlit.co/.

Rachel Mesch has recently published her new book, Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France, and Dustin Friedman has recently published Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. In this film, we bring the two of them together and ask what happens when we think about beforeness, transness and queerness across France and England in the nineteenth century. As you'd expect, the conversation ranges across histories of gender, literature and queer and transgender people. But it also asks about what it is possible to say about such histories, and traces historical people 'relating to and renegotiating the narratives' and identities available to them. We hear about why scholars might want to break up with Michel Foucault, and how literature is 'an aesthetically self-aware, empathy-generating kind of writing'. 'One of the best reasons for writing a book', Dustin says, 'is hearing other people speak about it', but we like to think that he also does a pretty good job of speaking about it, alongside Rachel and Andy!

Bodie Ashton tells us about the nineteenth-century formation of Germany as country and concept, exploring issues such as work, communal ritual, religious belief, language and dialect, and the Brothers Grimm and their role in forming a German brand of folklore.

Reading Greek Tragedy Online started in response to the UK lockdown and is a long-lost twin of A Bit Lit! In this film, Paul O'Mahony speaks to the actor Evelyn Miller and the classics professor Joel Christensen about bringing actors and academics together to explore Greek tragedy, creative and intellectual responses to panic, the anachronistic potential of classical plays, and liveness and asynchronicity in online performance. We also hear about big questions: what is the necessity of art, what does it mean to be human, how can remote performance generate community? Plus the cathartic appeal, in the midst of recent news cycles, of simply "doing some wailing"!

Becky Yearling and Tom Harrison discuss early modern satire, a popular genre for the stage and page which achieved its greatest notoriety in the 1590s, when the Bishops' Ban resulted in the censoring and burning of satirical texts. Becky and Tom look in particular at the works of John Marston and Ben Jonson, and discuss how these two writers exploited and innovated this messy and combative literary form.

Derek Dunne, Tom Harrison and Paul Salzman discuss Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.

Mathew Lyons puts the current lockdown into historical perspectives, and suggests that ‘though we are separated by space, we aren't necessarily separated by time'.

Jeffrey Wilson gets to turn the tables on Andy Kesson and asks him about his public-facing work, in particular Before Shakespeare and A Bit Lit. Jeff and Andy discuss the art of collaboration, what public audiences and creative practitioners can bring to scholarship, and ask how value is attributed to particular writers and what it means to make publicly-accessible scholarship. This film is the first of two between Jeffrey Wilson and Andy Kesson, and they'll be back next week to explore Jeff's work on public Shakespeare, the ethics of literary study and his new book on Game of Thrones.

Tom Harrison talks about the works of Aphra Behn with Elaine Hobby and Claire Bowditch, two of the general editors of the new Cambridge Edition of Aphra Behn (published 2021-5). Topics include The Rover, authorial personas, cheeky chimney sweeps, the excitement and problems of editorial work, and much more. 1:10 The Rover: why is it so interesting? 11:10 Behn's plays onstage 16:33 ‘Other' Behn texts: The Second Part of the Rover, The False Count, Oronooko 27:55 The Cambridge Behn: what's in it? 29:38 Editing texts: editorial practices, collation, and press variants 37:17 The Widdow Ranter: prose or verse? 45:10 What does literature mean to you?

Professor Nandini Das and Preti Taneja introduce us to the TIDE project, which asks how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human identity based on cultural identification and difference. We hear in particular about the project's creative work, which culminated in an online Salon responding to and transforming the research. We discuss the boundaries and boundary-crossing of the project and the histories it studies, the cultural silencing and 'invisible debate' of the history of Empire in modern Britain, and the ways in which race and racism are used to internalise concepts of who does and doesn't matter. The TIDE project is doing fantastic work to transform the teaching of the history of migration in schools, producing learning packs and other resources, as well as open-access research tools such as a series of Keywords which show the different stories a word can be used to tell. Preti and Nandini show us that it is possible to 'worry against the root's of a word's historical meaning in order to 'make another language'. This film includes footage of the Salon, created by Preti Taneja, Ben Crowe, Sweety Kapoor, Steve Chandra Savale, Sarathy Korwar, Shama Rahman, Ms. Mohammed, Sanah Ahsan and Zia Ahmed. For more on this fantastic project, see: http://www.tideproject.uk https://www.tideproject.uk/tide-salon/

Sophie Russell tells us about clowning and performing Shakespeare, especially playing Richard III at Shakespeare's Globe

Anne G. Morgan talks to Emma Whipday about why dramaturgy is like cartography, new writing, how literature connects us, and what a dramaturg actually does

Artist and theatre-maker E. M. Parry and design historian Ella Hawkins tell us about acts of 'worlding', of world-creation, visual dramaturgy and material-making. They shift us away from traditional ways of seeing theatre design as secondary to text, a belated after-thought, and instead show how design is fundamental to the way that historical and contemporary theatre companies create their work.

Harry McCarthy explores the relationship between theatre history and contemporary performance as a way of learning about the past.

Last month, archaeologist Stephen White of University College London announced the discovery of the Red Lion site, an often-forgotten Elizabethan playhouse that is the earliest we know of. Theatre historian Holger Syme discusses the implications of this discovery, especially the way that archaeological discoveries of the past thirty-five years seem to be cumulatively disproving the idea of the thrust stage. For more on the earliest years of the London playhouses, see Holger's theatre history posts on his website, http://www.dispositio.net, as well as the Before Shakespeare project, on the earliest years of the London playhouses, for which Holger is an advisor, BeforeShakespeare.com. Like so many early modern performances, this film guest stars his very excited dog...

Sathnam Sanghera tells us about his new book, Empireland, on the historical and contemporary legacy of the British Empire. Sathnam's book asks where the history of empire sits in the UK's current education system and cultural debate, at a time when concepts of sovereignty and national greatness are being mobilised - 'Take Back Control'; 'Make American Great Again' - and governments across the world seem to turn to history to tell only positive stories about national identity. Sathnam also tells us about moving between his various roles as journalist, novelist, memoirist, popular historian and broadcasting, and introduces us to Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Indian author writing in England, who also opened the first curry restaurant and set himself up as a Brighton 'Shampooing Surgeon', leading to what Sathnam calls 'dangerous shampooing'. 'He was the Neil Armstrong of my field', as Sathnam puts it in his book. [CW: some strong language]

Alison Bomber, voice coach, tells us about making the 'right noise', using breath and vibration to make connections between sounds, bodies and imagination. You'll never think about inspiration in the same way again.

Nick Radford is the poet laureate of pro wrestling, and tells us about how he uses the writing and reading literature in his matches. He explores the crossovers between wrestling and eroticism and reflects on the changes in professional wrestling over the last five years (whilst Andy Kesson gets characteristically excited about combat and poetry in the sixteenth century too).

Happy Canada Day! In celebration, Canada's finest and wisest queer poetics professor tells us about his new book, Shakespeare and Queer Representation and literature as an art of construction and decoration, an 'aesthetically-ambitious art made out of words'.

Will Tosh, Research Fellow and Lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe, talks to Emma Whipday about little-known Elizabethan sonneteer (and friend of Shakespeare) Richard Barnfield, sexual identity, literature as consolation and why sexual desire is like a nest of snakes under a hedge…

Ian Burrows chats to Emma Whipday about slapstick, so-called ‘snowflake' students, and content warnings for Shakespeare Ian works on early modern drama, and is particularly interested in how actors' physicality was presented and interpreted on stage and in print.

Who were the important Cavendish family? Lisa Hopkins and Tom Rutter talk about their new volume on the family's extraordinary cultural innovation and social importance, in particular women's "right to write" and the many different forms of media covered by exploring such a dynamic group of people. The discussion celebrates the release of A Companion to the Cavendishes with Amsterdam University Press (2020).

Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Andy Kesson about working between the worlds of research and TV, the Tudor court, a French Protestant community of women, and why academics should be more like upside-down swans.

Sophie Reynolds from Jane Austen's House chats to Emma Whipday about Jane Austen's life, why her heroines are always searching for a home, the miraculous survival of the house where she was finally able to finish her novels - and the mysterious circumstances of her death....

Box Office Bears: Animal-Baiting in Early Modern England is a new Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that begins today. In our first film for the project, its lead researchers - Hannah O'Regan, Greger Larson and Andy Kesson - have a preliminary conversation about what animal-baiting is, and what it means to work across the fields of archaeology, DNA analysis and theatre history in order to understand it.

Ambereen Dadabhoy tells us about the early modern Mediterranean, the English playhouse and the history of race. We hear about the lack of racial literacy in early modern studies, the way 'a white way of knowing' has dominated scholarship, and how to 'follow the lead of those who have championed racial literacy'.

Marc Elliott tells us about acting as a kind of ‘pretending to be lots of different people', and how TV acting can often feel just as live as in the theatre. We hear about the surprising similarities between modern TV script learning and repertory system that Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew.

Eleanor Janega tells us about medieval European sex positivity, Black Death and revolution, and argues that the fourteenth century was ‘the best century'.