Shakespeare’s Rivals

Posted on 24 August 2020

During lockdown research continued on the project Shakespeare's Rivals.

As a result of indispensable financial support from CREMS, we have been able to continue our Shakespeare’s Rivals research during the period of lockdown and after.

The project’s goal is to explore the distinctive demands each of Shakespeare’s major rivals places on his actors, and the unique opportunities the latter are offered as a result. This seems to us one of the most fundamental tasks that scholarship can undertake; yet it has received almost no academic investment. Its successful execution does, however, require an ambitious marriage of performance experiment and traditional scholarship, which our interdisciplinary work in TFTI positions us especially well to provide.

The project was launched in October 2019, with public performances which juxtaposed contrasting sequences from masterpieces by John Webster, Philip Massinger, and John Ford, in order to raise questions about the radical differences in the models of human interaction by which each of them worked.

The plan had been to follow this with a larger-scaled series of performances in June this year, focused on Jacobean city comedy, and a two-day symposium during the summer, bringing together leading theatre professionals and scholars, to explore practically the demands and challenges of inventively original sequences from great plays by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton.

The pandemic put paid to these plans. In response, we resolved to go online and pursue our inquiries via an exploration, on video, of the contrasting uses of soliloquy by a range of playwrights. This confronted us with a new learning curve. It was here that CREMS support was crucial. The funding it generously supplied allowed us to benefit from four hours of tutorials from the artistic directors of Theatre Uncut, specialists in online theatre for a decade.

With that under our belts, we have spent the summer exploring with current undergraduate actors, and also past TFTI graduates who are now professional actors, a variegated array of soliloquies from plays by Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, and Munday.

In the autumn the first results of this research will be made publicly accessible on a new Shakespeare’s Rivals website, which will also include a film of the performances from last October. This will then provide part of the basis for a major funding bid next winter, to enable us to pursue these researches on a more ambitious scale. Without the CREMS backing for which we are very grateful, we would not now be in a position to do this.

Michael Cordner
Ollie Jones

Feature image: Summer 2020 Shakespeare's Rivals tutorials workshop
Images: October 2019 performances of Shakespeare's Rivals