This series of six lectures introduces six plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Once popular and now little-known, they can tell us a lot about what their first audiences enjoyed, aspired to and worried about - from immigrants in early modern London to the role of women in the household,…
A riposte to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Fletcher’s play is a riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: in this lecture I discuss their interconnectedness as a way to identify Fletcher’s particular dramaturgy.
Reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays This lecture discusses the play’s reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays, its sensationalism, and its connections to anatomy.
Witchcraft and bigamy. A collaborative play about witchcraft, bigamy - and a talking Dog - what more could you want?
This lecture discusses comedy, fertility, and all those illegitimate children in this play about sex, economics and meat.
Written in the context of plague in London, The Alchemist’s plot and language are deeply concerned with speed and speculation.
My lecture on this infernal play discusses Elizabethan religion, the revisions to the play, and whether we should think about James Bond in its final minutes.
In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy articulates perennial questions about female autonomy and class distinction.
Based on a contemporary scandal of a woman who dressed in male clothing, this play of topsy-turvy genders has fun with some very modern ideas about sexuality, identity and whether we are what we wear.
A blackly camp tragedy - Hamlet without the narcissism - set in a court corrupted by lust and self-interest, this play is both fascinated and repelled by its own depravity.
Like a Busby Berkeley depression-era musical, Dekker's comedy is a feel-good antidote to a context of shortages, political malaise and general pessimism, but real life in the shape of war, class antagonism and civic tensions, always threatens to intrude.
A true crime story of the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife and her lover, this play is concerned with the politics of the household, with gender roles within marriage, and presents a black comedy of botched murder attempts rather like The Ladykillers.
Popular tragedy in which Hieronimo pursues aristocratic murderers of his son Horatio and takes revenge. It speaks, like Hollywood Westerns, to questions about private revenge versus public justice, and to the vexed religious questions of its age.
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