ETS Interview with A Bit Lit

In summer 2021 the ETS team met up with A Bit Lit’s Emma Whipday to  discuss the work of Engendering the Stage. We talked about 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’, coconut shies, forbidden students, The Roaring Girl, the Fortune playhouse, female shareholders, archival research in an age of Covid, practice-as-research, and more…

Many thanks to the A Bit Lit team for hosting us! You can check out the work they’re doing to create and share research and creative communities at https://abitlit.co/

Women’s Investment and Performance at the Fortune Playhouse

This is the second of a series of posts that set out Engendering the Stage’s research into the roles of women in the economic structures that surrounded the early modern stage. They derive from our documentary research project, ‘Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance’, funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust.


As part of our work in the archives, Lucy Munro and Clare McManus have been delving into the history of the Fortune playhouse between the 1620s and 1640s. Building on earlier research, we have discovered a remarkable story of women’s investment in this playhouse and have begun to connect it with the history of female performers such as the rope-dancer and tumbler, Cecily Peadle.[1]

In this post we will set out what we have found, tell the stories of some of the women who invested in the playhouse, and consider how their involvement with the theatre relates to the broader history of performance at the Fortune, where plays were staged alongside rope-dancing and other ‘feats of activity’.


Introducing the Fortune

First, a little background. The Fortune playhouse was located between Whitecross Street and Golding Lane (now Golden Lane) in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, just outside the northern walls of the City of London. It was originally built by Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, the actor husband of Henslowe’s step-daughter, Joan Woodward, in 1600. It followed the pattern of the Globe playhouse, being a timber-framed building open to the elements, but it was square rather than polygonal. 

C. Walter Hodges, ‘Variations Upon the Fortune Playhouse’, Folger Shakespeare Library, ART Box H688 no.1 pt.22. Published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Open in a new tab or window by right-clicking to see larger versions of any of these images.

In 1621, the Fortune suffered a catastrophic fire and burned down. In order to finance rebuilding the playhouse – this time in brick – Alleyn created a 12-part lease, issuing full and half shares in the second Fortune to investors who paid up to £83 6s. 8d. for a full share and £41 13s. 4d. for a half share. The National Archive’s Currency Converter suggests that these sums would be worth around £11,000 and £5,500 today, so the leaseholders had to be relatively well-off or have access to loans. Their leases were to last 51 years and they were to pay £10 13s. 10d. or £5 6s. 11d. rent per annum. The lease agreements included a clause stating that the leaseholders should not ‘divide, part, alter, transport, or otherwise convert the … edifices and buildings … to any other use or uses than as a playhouse for recreation of his majesty’s subjects, his heirs and successors’.[2]  This clause was to create problems when the London playhouses were closed temporarily during outbreaks of the plague in the 1630s and early 1640s, and then closed indefinitely when the Civil War broke out in 1642.

Documentation for early modern playhouse investment rarely survives, but most of the original set of lease documents issued by Alleyn, dating from 1622-4, have been preserved in the archive of Alleyn’s papers at Dulwich College, the charity that he founded in 1619. Some of them can be viewed on the wonderful Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project website, led by the theatre historian Grace Ioppolo, which includes digital photographs of some of the most important documents in the Alleyn archive.

The leases show that early investors in the second Fortune included actors, the carpenter and bricklayer who had worked on the playhouse, two merchant taylors, an innholder, a barber surgeon, a stationer, a glazier and a clothworker. They also included three women, all of them widows: Frances Juby, widow of the actor Edward Juby and an old friend of Alleyn, who acquired her half share on 20 May 1622; Mary Bryan, who acquired her full share on 24 March 1624; and Margaret Gray, who acquired a half share on 1 August 1623, added a full share on 29 January 1624, and then added another half share on 21 April 1624. Gray’s lease can be viewed on the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project.  We have also known for some time from other documents at Dulwich that Susan Baskerville – who was the widow of two actors and also had an interest in the Red Bull playhouse – held a share in the Fortune lease. These four women have been researched by other theatre historians, notably Susan Cerasano, who in 1998 published a detailed account of their investments in the Fortune, drawing on the leases and some transcriptions of legal documents that also survive at Dulwich.[3]  


New Findings

Our new research into overlooked and neglected documents reveals an even more remarkable story. When Alleyn established Dulwich College in 1619, he settled his property, including the Fortune, on the College. After his death in 1626, the playhouse leases were managed by the College, and the leaseholders appear in a set of rent books and account books that are preserved at Dulwich. These fascinating documents detail the payment – or non-payment – of rent by the Fortune leaseholders, quarter by quarter, between 1626 and 1649, when the College evicted the leaseholders for non-payment of their rent during the Civil War. They present the most detailed evidence that has yet been discovered for the finances of a seventeenth-century playhouse, allowing us to track the movement of shares between different individuals when they were sold, transferred or inherited, and to see moments at which leaseholders refused or were unable to pay their rent. 

Extract from entries of rent paid for Fortune leases in 1628-9, Rent Book, Dulwich College MSS, Second Series, 35-6.

Alongside the account books, we have been reading wills and documents connected with lawsuits that were periodically waged by the leaseholders and the College in the Court of Chancery. Some of these documents survive in the court’s records at The National Archives at Kew; others are preserved at Dulwich, having been prepared for the College’s legal team. Detailing the inside stories of battles over individual shares, they allow us to trace interactions and relationships between the leaseholders and to identify individuals who were never officially recognised as leaseholders by the College but who nonetheless had a claim to the playhouse’s profits.

We did not discover these documents on our own, but with the help of earlier theatre historians. We thought that the Dulwich archive might include documents recording the rents paid for the Fortune leases because in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century Edmond Malone made notes from one of the documents and his notes were transcribed later in the nineteenth century by James Orchard Halliwell Phillipps and pasted into a scrapbook now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. 

Transcription of Register Book of Accounts, Dulwich College MSS, Second Series, 27, in a scrapbook compiled by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Folger Shakespeare Library MS W.b.156.

Another scholar, John Payne Collier, drew attention to financial accounts at Dulwich in his 1841 book, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, writing, ‘in Dulwich College account books, kept by Mathias Alleyn, “the widow Massye” is entered as the tenant paying rent for her share of the Fortune’.[4]  We were also able to draw on earlier scholarship on Dulwich College and its archive by George F. Warner, William Young and Francis B. Bickley.[5] We had leads to follow up in the Court of Chancery because in the early twentieth century the husband-and-wife team Charles William Wallace and Hulda Berggren Wallace undertook an exhaustive study of these records, leaving notes and transcriptions that are now in the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. 

Drawing on these sources, and with help from Calista Lucy, Keeper of the Archive at Dulwich College, we have pieced together a near-complete history of women’s investment in the Fortune playhouse. We can demonstrate that 24 of the 71 identifiable individuals who claimed an interest in the playhouse between the mid 1620s and late 1640s – either by buying a share, inheriting a share or having a claim to a mortgage on a share – were women. In other words, around one third of the investors in the Fortune were women. Moreover, the number of shares held by women never drops below 2½ shares, out of the total of 12 shares, and in some years it rises to 6 and even 6½ shares, meaning that the majority of shares were in women’s hands.

The Fortune is not the only early modern playhouse in which women had a financial stake. Nonetheless, the way in which a diverse group of women invested in it over an extended period of time is remarkable, as is the amount of detail that we have been able to reconstruct about these women’s lives and the circumstances in which they invested in the theatre. 


The Women

Some of the women who invested in the Fortune held shares only briefly, inheriting them from relatives and quickly passing them on. Others held them for extended periods of time. Here is a roughly chronological list of the women whose investments in the Fortune we have traced:

Frances Griffith Juby (c. 1574-1631) (leaseholder 1622-31). Widow of the actor Edward Juby. She leased a half-share from Edward Alleyn on 20 May 1622.

Margaret Gray (c. 1562-1648) (leaseholder 1623-1639). She leased from Alleyn one half-share on 1 August 1623, one full share on 29 January 1624, and another half-share on 21 April 1624. Another half share was mortgaged to her by Eleanor Massey in October 1623.

Mary Fitch Symonds Bryan (c. 1557-1626) (leaseholder 1624-6). Widow of Robert Symonds, haberdasher, and of Luke Bryan, Yeoman of the Guard. She leased a full share from Alleyn on 24 March 1624.

Eleanor Coleman Massey (fl. 1605-35) (leaseholder 1625-34). Widow of the actor Charles Massey, whose half share she inherited. From October 1623 it was mortgaged to Margaret Gray.

Margaret Wayte Wigpitt (fl. 1609-1630) (leaseholder 1626-8). Widow of Thomas Wigpitt, bricklayer, whose half share she inherited.

Thomasine Astley (fl. 1627-42) (leaseholder 1627-35, 1642-9). Granddaughter of Thomas Gilbourne, merchant taylor, who held a full share. When he died in 1627, Gilbourne left it to his daughter, Anne, and his granddaughters, Thomasine and Margaret, in a complex arrangement in which it went to Thomasine and Margaret during the lifetime of their father, Richard Astley, and after his death to Anne. Thomasine regained the share in 1642 when her mother died. 

Margaret Astley (fl. 1627) (leaseholder 1627-35). Granddaughter of Thomas Gilbourne.

Elizabeth Massey (fl. 1634-5) (leaseholder 1634-5). Widow of George Massey, merchant taylor, whose half share she inherited. 

Rebecca Dunn Warren Fisher (fl. 1605-39) (leaseholder 1634-?38). Daughter of Cuthbert Dunn, farrier, and widow of Simon Warren, merchant taylor, whose half share she inherited.

Sara Massey Hawley (1606-39) (had an interest in a share c. 1634-5). Daughter of the actor Charles Massey and his wife, Eleanor, and the wife of another actor, Richard Hawley. She seems to have had an interest in the share inherited by her mother.

Anne Gilbourne Astley (1594-42) (leaseholder 1635-42). Daughter of Thomas Gilbourne. She inherited his share after the death of her husband, Richard Astley, in 1635.

Grace Fulwell Smart Rhodes (fl. 1607-35) (leaseholder c. 1635). Widow of John Rhodes, vintner, from whom she inherited a full share; she left it to her brother, William Fulwell, in her will.

Susan Shore Browne Greene Baskerville (1573-1649) (leaseholder 1635/6-49). Widow of the actors Robert Browne and Thomas Greene. In 1635 she acquired the half share formerly held by Frances Juby.

Sara Jackson Blomfield (c. 1606-40) (leaseholder 1636-9). Widow of Edward Jackson, a clerk in the Custom House, whose full share she inherited.

Rose Walrond Hill (fl. 1598-1639) (had an interest in a share 1638-9). She inherited an interest in the share of Sarah Blomfield, which had been mortgaged to her husband Lawrence Hill, grocer.

Anne Hudson Morrant (fl. 1610-40) (leaseholder c. 1639). Daughter of Richard Hudson, stationer, and wife of Edward Morrant, stationer and later brewer. She inherited her husband’s full share and two half shares.

Mary Walker Minshawe (1604-42) (leaseholder 1639-42). In 1639, 2½ shares formerly belonging to Margaret Gray and Mary Bryan were acquired in trust for Mary and her sister, Susan Cade. Mary’s husband Edward Minshawe, player, musician and stationer, was also a Fortune leaseholder.

Susan Cade (fl. 1610-39). Sister of Mary Minshawe.

Elizabeth Birt Shank (fl. 1634-40) (leaseholder c. 1639). Wife of the actor John Shank Jr. She acquired a half share in 1639.

Winifred Shank Fitch (fl. 1610-49) (leaseholder (1640-9). Widow of the actor John Shank and mother of John Shank Jr. She bought two half shares, including one from her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, in 1640.

Margaret Delahay Santon (fl. 1621-43) (leaseholder 1641-3). Widow of Philip Santon. She inherited his two half shares and left them in her will to her servant Elizabeth Pierpoint.

Anne Minshawe (fl. 1629-49) (leaseholder 1642-9). Daughter of Mary Minshawe. With her brother Arthur she inherited her mother’s interest in 2½ shares.

Susan Cade Jr (fl. 1639-49) (leaseholder c. 1643-9). Daughter of Susan Cade, from whom she inherited an interest in 2½ shares.

Elizabeth Pierpoint (fl. 1643-9) (leaseholder 1643-9). A servant of Margaret Santon, who left her two half shares in 1643.

Most of these women came from what historians have termed the ‘middling sort’ – those who were neither very rich nor very poor. As the Middling Culture project explains, women like these emerged from ‘literate, urban households whose members engaged with a variety of cultural forms for work and beyond’. They were the daughters, wives and widows of London tradesmen, officials and actors. Many of them had enough literacy to leave signatures or complex marks on legal documents such as wills and depositions.

We do not have space here to tell the stories of each of these women, but here are some highlights.


Margaret Gray, the Great Survivor

The most enduring leaseholder in the history of the second Fortune playhouse was a London widow, Margaret Gray. For at least 16 years she held one full share and two half shares in her own right, having leased them from Edward Alleyn. Eleanor Massey then mortgaged another half share to her in 1623, meaning that Margaret controlled a full share and three half shares, nearly a quarter of the 12 shares into which the Fortune lease was divided. In 1639, a long dispute between Margaret and Dulwich College ended with the College forcibly taking back her shares. She continued, however, to claim her right in them – in 1646 she gave evidence in a lawsuit involving the College and asserted that her leases were ‘still in force and being’.[6]  We haven’t yet been able to find out much about her background or family, but she signed her own name on her deposition, which suggests that she had received some formal education. 

Signature of Margaret Gray in Tobias Lisle v. Thomas Alleyn, Master of Dulwich College, Court of Chancery, 1645-6, The National Archives, Kew, C 24/695/40.

Margaret claimed in her deposition that she was ‘aged 84 years or thereabouts’. If this was true, she was in her early 60s when she took on her first Fortune lease, making her a notable example of an economically independent older woman in seventeenth-century London.


Theatrical Connections

Some of the women who had a financial stake in the Fortune playhouse already had strong connections with the theatre. Eleanor Massey inherited a half share from her husband Charles Massey, an actor at the first Fortune and colleague of Edward Alleyn. Her daughter, Sara, who claimed an interest in Eleanor’s share in the mid 1630s, was married to another actor, Richard Hawley. Other theatre women actively sought out investments in the Fortune. Frances Juby acquired a half share from Alleyn in 1622, four years after the death of her husband, Edward, another long-term colleague of Alleyn. In 1635, a few years after Frances’s death, her half share was taken on by Susan Baskerville. Susan was the widow of two actors, Robert Browne and Thomas Greene, from whom she inherited a stake in the Red Bull playhouse; her third husband, James Baskerville, appears to have married her bigamously and eventually deserted her.[7] She acquired her share from John Shank Jr, son of the famous comic actor John Shank and himself an actor at the Fortune. 

The Shank family played a prominent role in Fortune shareholding. In 1634, when he was only 17, John Shank Jr married Elizabeth Birt, sister of William Birt, a locksmith from Whitechapel, who came into possession of Frances Juby’s half share after her death in 1631. In 1635, John acquired William’s share, selling it later that year to Susan Baskerville. Three years later, having apparently spent all her money, John abandoned Elizabeth and moved to Ireland to perform at the Werburgh Street playhouse in Dublin. According to William’s bill of complaint in a later lawsuit, Elizabeth’s ‘kindred and friends’ raised the sum of £20 to support her in John’s absence.[8] When John returned from Ireland, he urged Elizabeth to invest her money in the Fortune, allegedly promising that she would keep the ‘issues and profits arising thereby’. In May 1639, a half share was accordingly acquired and put in trust for Elizabeth. However, John broke his promise, took possession of the share, and eventually sold it to his mother, Winifred Shank Fitch. This story is not visible in the rent books at Dulwich College, which only feature John Shank, and it would have been lost if William had not gone to court on his sister’s behalf.

Winifred Shank Fitch’s playhouse investments were more successful than those of her daughter-in-law, but she was also struggling with an unhappy marriage. Winifred’s first husband died in January 1636 and a year later she married Stephen Fitch. He appears to have married her for her money and was outraged when it turned out that Winifred had protected herself against him ahead of the wedding by somehow getting him to seal a bond that meant she kept control over £400. By early 1638 the pair had separated, and when Winifred bought two half shares in the Fortune in 1640 she did so entirely on her own behalf. She is only ever called ‘Shank’ in the rent books at Dulwich College, and when she witnessed the will of Judith Merefield in 1645 she signed her name ‘Winifrid Shanck’.

Signature of Winifred Shank in the will of Judith Merefield, 1645, The National Archives, PROB 10/650.

The Fortune, London and Global Trade

Other networks to which these women belonged connected the Fortune with the livery companies of London and with England’s activities in global trade – especially, but not only, in the Islamic world – and colonisation. They are thus part of what the Medieval and Early Modern Orients project describes as ‘the intersecting webs of our pasts’.[9] William Birt’s lawsuit tells us that Elizabeth Shank’s Fortune share was bought from John Joyce, who was eager to sell quickly because he was ‘bound for Virginia, beyond the seas’. Earlier scholars thought that Mary Bryan was married to an actor, but her life actually links the playhouse with London’s trading networks, the English Midlands, and the Far East. She was the daughter of Thomas Fitch of Mackworth, Derbyshire, and sister of the merchant Ralph Fitch, who travelled to India, Burma and Malaysia, and published an account of his travels in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1599). She was married first to Robert Symonds, a London haberdasher, and later to Luke Bryan, a Yeoman of the Guard.

Mary Minshawe and Susan Cade were the nieces of John Ball, a merchant who traded in North Africa and Constantinople in the early seventeenth century. By the late 1630s, Ball was suffering from severe mental illness, and in 1639 his estate was brought under the control of the Court of Wards. His nieces were granted £10 per annum each during his lifetime for their maintenance and they looked for ways to invest it. The two women already had links with the Fortune: Mary’s actor husband, Edward, had held a half share in the Fortune since 1638; and Tobias Lisle, one of Ball’s trustees, had held a half share since 1635. Lisle acquired 2½ shares formerly belonging to Margaret Gray and Mary Bryan in trust for Mary and Susan. Their interest in the Fortune was later inherited by their children, Anne and Arthur Minshawe and Susan Cade Jr, who sued the College over the playhouse leases in 1649. 


Performance at the Fortune

These women’s activities as leaseholders took place against a broader context of performance at the Fortune. The playhouse’s history encompasses political insurgency, the activities of women as managers and performers, and histories of trans and nonbinary identities. 

In the period between 1626 and 1649, the Fortune appears regularly in the records of the Master of the Revels, Henry Herbert, who not only organised performances at court but also licensed playing companies and other kinds of performance, and acted as the official censor. Herbert had his work cut out with the Fortune. In May 1639, in the midst of controversies over the place of ritual and ceremony in Protestant religious practice, it staged a play that was interpreted as criticising the Church of England. Edmund Rossingham wrote to Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, a politician who was also an important patron of poets, reporting that ‘the players of the Fortune’ had been fined £1000 for ‘setting up an alter, a basin and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage’. The company claimed that they were reviving an old play and that it did not represent a Christian ceremony but ‘an alter to the heathen gods’; Rossingham comments, however, that ‘it was apparent that this play was revived of purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the Church’.[10]

£1000 would have been a significant fine – The National Archives’ currency converter suggests that it would be nearly £120,000 in today’s money – but it didn’t deter players at the Fortune from staging controversial material. On 8 June 1642, two months before the outbreak of civil war in England, the actor-dramatist John Kirke paid Herbert £2 for licensing a play on current politics called The Irish Rebellion; on the same day Herbert refused to license another play, describing it as ‘a new play which I burned for the ribaldry and offence that was in it’ but still charged Kirke £2 nonetheless.[11]

The Fortune companies of this period also performed plays dealing with gender relations, another hot topic in the period. In 1639 the playhouse hosted plays called Woman Monster and A Queen and No Queen, which were licensed by Herbert but are sadly now lost. The early 1640s are also likely to have seen a revival of an old Fortune favourite, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, a play dealing with the career of the real-life London character Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, who was attacked by the authorities for wearing male clothing and performing a song to a lute at the side of the stage in the first Fortune playhouse in 1611. Frith is a figure of complex identities who may have relished the freedom offered by new ways of describing gender in the early twenty-first century.

Title-page of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (London, 1611), Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 17908. Published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

We don’t know to what extent the Fortune leaseholders supported the artistic policy of the players, but the rent books at Dulwich show that none of them gave up their shares in protest. 


Feats of Activity

Alongside plays, the Fortune also staged feats of activity such as rope-dancing, a mode of performance that involved men, women and children and which was ubiquitous across Europe and into the North African littoral. Rope-dancing could be put on in playhouses, inn-yards, town squares or in the street. Using an easily assembled kit of ropes and poles, rope-dancers leapt, walked, and ran on the tight rope; they spun around the slack rope, hung from it by their legs or feet, or lounged on it in a display of impossible leisure; they ran up or ‘flew’ down sharply angled ropes on the diagonal. 

Palestra Noribergensis, by Peter Troschel after Johan Andreas Graff (1651): British Museum 1880,0710.512. Published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

We know that rope-dancing was taking place at the Fortune from at least the 1620s because the Master of the Revels also sought to control these performances. Surviving transcriptions from Herbert’s records show in addition that there was another woman working behind the scenes at the Fortune. On 19 March 1624 ‘Mrs Gunnell’ paid Herbert 10s. to license ‘a masque for the dancers of the ropes’: in this record we see Elizabeth Gunnell, wife of the Fortune actor and leaseholder Richard Gunnell, working alongside her husband in the management of the playhouse.[12] Rope-dancing formed a significant portion of the Fortune leaseholders’ income. In a lawsuit in 1641, Tobias Lisle described the performance of ‘dancing on the ropes and other exercises’ at the Fortune, commenting that the investors received their share of the proceeds ‘every night of the day wherein such dancing and exercises were had’.[13]

One group of tumblers and rope-dancers had a particularly strong connection with the Fortune: a well-established multi-generational family troupe called the Peadles, who were based in London and in Flushing in the Netherlands. By the early 1630s they had been touring southern England, the Midlands and continental Europe for over thirty years; they had played at the English courts of James VI and I and his wife, Anna of Denmark, and at the court of the Elector of Brandenburg. Their number included William Peadle Sr, who rented property within the Fortune complex in the early 1620s, his sons Abraham – who lived in an alley off Golding Lane in 1623 and was described in 1624 as an actor at the Fortune – and William Jr, and Cicely, William Jr’s wife. 

Evidence from the 1630s suggests that Cicely was both a performer and, at one point, the leader of the troupe itself. In 1631, the Master of the Revels issued a licence to ‘Cicely Peadle, Thomas Peadle her son, Elias Grundling and three more in their company to use and exercise dancing on the ropes, tumbling, mauling and other such like feats which they or any of them are practised in or can perform’. As Sara Mueller noted in 2008, Cicely’s name appears on the licence in the place where the name of the troupe leader is usually found.[14] Cicely seems to have taken over the troupe in the early 1630s during hard times for the Peadles: two years after the licence was issued, Thomas Peadle was arrested for stealing ruffs from a hedge in Wells, Somerset. We have not yet found any proof that Cicely led the troupe on the Fortune stage, but the evidence that she was a performer, the clustering of Peadle family members around the Fortune complex and Golding Lane, and the fact that we know that rope-dancing took place at the Fortune mean that it is quite likely that she performed there.


Our new research reveals that the Fortune playhouse was an important site for women’s activities as theatre investors, managers and – quite possibly – performers. In turn, the careers of women such as Cecily Peadle and Mary Bryan connect its activities to broader networks of performance, trade and investment, in London, across England and across the globe. 



Note: We are very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding us a Research Project Grant (RPG-2019-215) and the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library for awarding us research fellowships during which some initial research was undertaken. We would especially like to thank for their support Calista Lucy, Keeper of the Archive at Dulwich College, and Dr Daniel Gosling, Legal Records Specialist (Early Modern) at The National Archives.



[1] Lucy has led on research into women’s investment in the Fortune, and Clare has led on research on women’s performance there. We have co-authored this post and we are working on a co-authored essay that will set out our findings in more detail.

[2] Dulwich College Archives, Muniments, Series 1, 58, https://henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/catalogue/muniments-series-1/group-058.

[3] S.P. Cerasano, ‘Women as Theatrical Investors: Three Shareholders and the Second Fortune Playhouse’, in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594-1998, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998), 87-94.

[4] John Payne Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn (London, 1841), 194. Matthias Alleyn was a cousin of Edward Alleyn and held the offices of Warden (1626-31) and Master (1631-42) of Dulwich College.

[5] George F. Warner, Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1881); William Young, The History of Dulwich College (Edinburgh: Morrison and Gibb, 1889); Francis B. Bickley, Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich, Second Series (London: Governors of Dulwich College, 1903). Warner catalogues and describes some of the copies of legal documents among the papers at Dulwich (see vol. 1, 54-6, 245-7), which suggested to us that other women were involved in the Fortune. Young transcribes – albeit not always accurately – the account for 1626-7 from the Register Book of Accounts, Dulwich College MSS, Second Series, 27, and cites other documents in the Additional MSS, for which a catalogue has not yet been published (see vol. 1, 97-100, 103, 122; vol. 2, 263, 264). Bickley catalogues the Register Books and Rent Books. 

[6] Deposition of Margaret Gray, 9 August 1646, in Tobias Lisle v. Thomas Alleyn, Master of Dulwich College, Court of Chancery, 1645-6, The National Archives (TNA), C 24/695/40.

[7] For a valuable summary of Susan Baskerville’s life and engagement with the theatre, see Eva Griffith, Baskervile [née Shawe], Susan’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/74435.

[8] William Birt v. Tobias Lisle, John Shank Jr and Winifred Shank Fitch, Court of Chancery, 1640, TNA, C 2/ChasI/B54/63.

[9] We are also indebted here to ongoing scholarship that rethinks early modern English literary cultures through their connections to global and colonial trade, stimulated by Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), and examined in another theatre-historical context in our earlier blog.

[10] TNA, SP 16/420, f. 266.

[11] N.W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623-73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 211.

[12] Bawcutt, ed., Control and Censorship, 161, 

[13] John Beale v. Thomas and Mathias Alleyn and Tobias Lisle, Court of Chancery, 1641, TNA, C 2/ChasI/B44/13.

[14] Sara Mueller, ‘Touring, Women, and the English Professional Stage’, Early Theatre 11 (2008), 53-76.

Diverse Shakespeare at the Globe: Part 2

Before Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan even opened at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer, it provoked reactions from critics and commentators for its presentation of Joan of Arc as non-binary. Despite the historical record of Joan’s gender identity being inconclusive at best, many were surprised and challenged by the invitation to consider Joan as ‘they’ – as someone whose identity corresponded to neither male nor female, and whose dress and appearance shifted across the gender spectrum in response to their developing self-knowledge. Those who rejected this invitation, who sought to impose a particular label on Joan in the name of ‘historical accuracy’, queried how ‘modern’ ideas of non-binary identity could be used in a play set in fifteenth-century France.

It was precisely this kind of question that the Diverse Shakespeare training sessions discussed with the brilliant volunteers and education practitioners of Shakespeare’s Globe. We spent some time learning more about the diverse and varied performers and performances of the early modern era, ranging from the well-known Moll Cutpurse to unnamed ‘Mayd’ and ‘Girl’ rope-dancers, before talking about how we might incorporate this into our public-facing work. We hoped that this knowledge would help the Globe in their ongoing anti-racist work to challenge white, Euro-centric, cis, and able-bodied views about the diversity of the period in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

As I planned this session, I found much of my own preconceptions and understandings of the period being challenged. I knew there were people of colour living and working in early modern London; I didn’t know that some families were engaged in the silk trade, or that others were baptised in their parish churches as babies. I knew that women performed in a variety of spaces; I didn’t know that women danced on ropes at the same playhouses that staged Shakespeare and other canonical playwrights’ written drama. I knew there were disabled people living and working in early modern England; I didn’t know that a blind musician performed in Carlisle or that a female acrobat with a limb difference performed in Norwich.


The first challenge I faced was to decide which examples of performers to include: we only had ninety minutes to discuss the exciting diversity of early modern England and its performance industry and, as you will discover, so much to talk about. Most of these examples have been drawn from the Records of Early English Drama project (https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca/), and therefore are already catalogued, digitized, or otherwise organized by archivists and historians.

We began with the cross-dressing thief and performer Moll Cutpurse, who sums up early modern England’s contradictory approach to gender and its performance. Both celebrated and censured, Moll is most famous for playing their lute and singing at the Fortune Theatre in 1611. While the epitaph on Moll’s grave genders them female, the poem also speculates that the ashes and dust inside would ‘perplex a Sadducee / Whether it rise a He or She / Or two in one, a single pair’. Much like Joan of Arc, Moll’s identity remains mutable even after their death, offering us space to consider early modern experiences of the non-binary.

A black and white drawing of an androgynous figure wearing a large hat, a jerkin, and a dagger at their hip.
Moll Cutpurse, or Mary Frith. Line engraving, printed after 1662. National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons License 4.0.

Rope-dancers often performed in the playhouses owned by the shareholders of the acting companies, including the Swan, the Hope, and the Red Bull. A surviving handbill from Bristol in the 1630s describes how ‘one Mayd of fifteene years of age, and another Girl of foure years of age doe dance on the lowe Rope’ and ‘turne on the Stage’. (Our thanks to Clare McManus for her brilliant work on this exciting area of early modern performance, which you can read more about in some of the suggested further reading below!) The youth and gender of these performers is important: just as young boys were recruited and apprenticed to the playing companies, children of all genders worked and performed across the country.

A Scottish “gentlewoman minstrel” was paid 2s in 1603 for performing in Carlisle. Both her gender and nationality distinguish her from the payments made to other musicians, but in every other respect, it seems they were paid the same. The description of “gentlewoman” is interesting: women who performed in public were often conflated with sex workers or deemed sexually available, so perhaps this label attempted to safeguard the reputations of both her and the event at which she performed. A blind harper was paid 12d in 1602 for a civic performance, also in Carlisle. While his disability is noted in the record of payments, his wages seem on a par with sighted musicians. This suggests that while he was not discriminated against with low pay for his disability, his skill was not considered worth extra renumeration despite his lack of sight.

Sometimes disability itself was the attraction: Adrian Provoe and his wife were granted a four day licence in Norwich in 1632 for her to ‘show diverse works &c done with her feet’. Provoe’s wife is not named, and is only mentioned in connection to her husband. Their relationship may have been a true and supportive partnership, or an exploitative and abusive one, or anywhere in between. The power differences between husbands and wives, the able-bodied and the disabled, are not preserved in the record.


Our discussion then moved on to how we might include evidence such as this, and the questions they raise, in the work the Globe does with schools and the public. This was a brave and honest discussion as we moved away from the historical detail to more challenging subjects such as how to broach the racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia of the period, while acknowledging these issues are still very present in our society.

Everyone participating in these sessions was asked to complete a very short survey at the beginning and end, consisting of just two questions. We were keen to learn how much knowledge and confidence participants had in discussing these issues before we ran the sessions, and if this changed because of the training. The responses were overwhelmingly positive – everyone’s knowledge about these issues, and their confidence in broaching them with the public and education groups they worked with had risen.  Some participants commented they appreciated the range of inclusive language that had been offered during the session, giving them new tools and strategies to discuss these important historical moments with their students or tour groups.

The evidence of diverse performers and performance across early modern England is already before us: we just need to look for it.


Further reading

Printed resources

Astington, John, ‘Trade, Taverns, and Touring Players in Seventeenth-Century Bristol’, Theatre Notebook, 71.3 (2017), 161–68

Brown, Pamela Allen, ‘Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Actresses?’, Shakespeare Survey, 70 (2017), 182–87

Brown, Pamela Allen, and Peter Parolin, eds., Women Players in England 1500 – 1660 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2005)

Clare, Eli, Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, & Liberation 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2009)

Faye, Shon, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (London: Penguin, 2021)

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018)

Heyam, Kit, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (London: Hachette, 2022)

Korda, Natasha, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

Loftis, Sonya Freeman, Shakespeare and Disability Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Love, Genevieve, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2018)

McManus, Clare, “Sing it Like Poor Barbary’: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33.1 (2015), 99 – 120

McManus, Clare, ‘The Vere Street Desdemona: Othello and the Theatrical Englishwoman, 1602 – 1660’ in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, & Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 221 – 232 

Nardizzi, Vin, ‘Disability Figures in Shakespeare’ in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality and Race ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 454–467

Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities eds. Jos Twist, Meg-John Barker, Ben Vincent, & Kat Gupta (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2020)

Page, Nick, Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man (London: HarperCollins, 2001)

Schaap Williams, Katherine, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021)

Siebers, Tobin, ‘Shakespeare Differently Disabled’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 434–454

Shakespeare, Tom, ‘The Social Model of Disability’ in ed. Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader 5th edn (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 195 – 203

Whittlesey, Christy, The Beginners’ Guide to Being a Trans Ally (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2021)

Online resources:

Anderson, Susan, ‘Disability in Shakespeare’s England’, That Shakespeare Life, 2019

cassidycash.com/ep-76-susan-anderson-on-disability-in-shakespeares-england/

Bibby, Mariam, ‘Moll Cutpurse,’ Historic UK, 2019

historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Moll-Frith/

‘Disabled Shakespeares’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 2009

dsq-sds.org/issue/view/42

Davies, Callan, ‘Women and Early English Playhouse Ownership’, Engendering the Stage, 2018

engenderingthestage.humanities.mcmaster.ca/2018/12/10/engendering-before-shakespeare-women-and-early-english-playhouse-ownership/

Grange, S., ‘History, Queer Lives, and Performance’, A Bit Lit, 2020

youtube.com/watch?v=TrLFz5KzFJs

James, Susan, ‘Jane the Foole’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2019 oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-112276?rskey=sxtbPQ&result=2

Keywords for Disability Studies, NYU Press, 2021

keywords.nyupress.org/disability-studies/

Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, NYU Press, 2021

keywords.nyupress.org/gender-and-sexuality-studies/

Lipscomb, Suzannah, ‘Disability in the Tudor Court’, Historic England  

historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1485-1660/disability-in-the-tudor-court/

Marsden, Holly ‘Dangerous Women: Cross-dressing Cavalier Mary Frith’, Historic Royal Palaces, 2021 blog.hrp.org.uk/curators/dangerous-women-the-cross-dressing-cavalier-mary-frith/

McManus, Clare, ‘Feats of Activity and the Tragic Stage’, Engendering the Stage, 2019

engenderingthestage.humanities.mcmaster.ca/2019/04/30/feats-of-activity-and-the-tragic-stage/

McManus, Clare, ‘Shakespeare and Gender: The Woman’s Part’, British Library, 2016

bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/shakespeare-and-gender-the-womans-part

McManus, Clare, ‘Women Performers in Shakespeare’s Time’, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2019

folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/women-performers

Rackin, Phyllis, ‘The Hidden Women Writers of the Elizabethan Theatre’, The Atlantic, 2019

theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/shakespeares-female-contemporaries/590392/

Schaap-Williams, Katherine, ‘Richard III and the Staging of Disability’, British Library, 2016

bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-the-staging-of-disability

Shakespeare, Tom, ‘We need to talk about Charles I’s ‘pet dwarf”, Royal Academy, 2018

royalacademy.org.uk/article/charles-i-jeffrey-hudson-van-dyck-dwarf-tom-shakespeare

Thomas, Miranda Fay, ‘A Queer Reading of Twelfth Night’, British Library, 2016

bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/a-queer-reading-of-twelfth-night

Diverse Shakespeare at Shakespeare’s Globe: Part 1

This is the first of a mini-series of blogs reflecting on the Diverse Shakespeare at Shakespeare’s Globe programme led by myself and Mel in November 2021, which offered training sessions on the diversity of the early modern period to Globe Education Practitioners and volunteer tour guides at Shakespeare’s Globe. With the guidance of our external consultant Dr Onyeka Nubia (University of Nottingham) and Dr Will Tosh (Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe) we devised and ran four sessions over two weeks. The sessions aimed to equip staff with the information and skills to educate the public and educational groups that visit the Globe about the diversity of early English modern society. By working with the Globe’s guides and education practitioners, we aim to disseminate our materials with a large audience over a long period of time.

We divided the training workshops into two specific sessions. One session considered the diverse gendered and disabled bodies of early modern performers in the period, while the other session focused on early modern ideas of racemaking (i.e. the creation of ideas of race, ethnicity, and identity), evidence of performers of colour in the period, and how these tropes are embedded in or resisted by popular culture today. Each session was designed to support the organisation’s ‘one Globe’ approach to their anti-racist commitments, which seeks to empower all colleagues to inform the communities visiting the Globe, to counter any misinformation about the period and so to disseminate an inclusive understanding of the diversity present within the Shakespearean period.

In addition to equipping participants with the intersectional knowledge to contextualise early modern performance cultures, the sessions also provided a ‘toolbox’ to support attendees to reappraise the Shakespearean texts that we think we know inside out. We asked participants to rethink how markers of difference were achieved in early modern performance – such as how Black or disabled characters were depicted on the Shakespearean stage – while exploring the pervasive ways in which systems of oppression are so deeply embedded in material from the period that they might be rendered invisible. Drawing on rich fields of scholarship, the sessions dedicated time to identify specific terminology that signposts misogynistic, ableist, and racist attitudes, exploring how these references might be connected to wider networks of early modern culture. There’s nothing harder for an academic than answering a seemingly simple question from a member of the public: these questions send us back to first principles and push us to think and communicate more clearly than any other. Because of this, the training sessions aimed to support Globe staff answer these kinds of open, general questions from the enthusiastic publics who visit their building or take their classes and who are seeking to understand the Shakespearean period more deeply. Some of these overarching questions included:

• Did women perform in early modern England?
• Were there performers of colour on the early modern stage?
• What value is there in producing/performing/studying texts that include problematic content?
• What methods best allow us to negotiate this content in a meaningful way without repeating the violence of the past?
• Was Shakespeare racist?

We found these questions, some intentionally provocative, very useful to draw out conversation, find nuance and demonstrate how complex lived experiences can be rendered (in)visible on both page and stage. While these conversations might be difficult or uncomfortable, they encourage people to reflect not only on their own relationship with these well-known plays but also their position in the present world. We intended to create a safe space for volunteers and education practitioners to build the confidence to contribute and lead these discussions at the Globe. However, in building and running the sessions, we encountered a similar sense of self-reflection. While preparing the sessions, we found questions arising about curation. Providing an overview of any marginalised community in history can be daunting and challenging, with limited time to discuss extant archival records, textual clues, and visual material such as artwork or emblems. While these sources contribute to a rich tapestry of lived experiences and communities, almost inevitably, we would never be able to talk about every account or voice. Building the sessions, we spent time thinking about what materials we include and exclude, as well as how these curatorial decisions might impact the shape of the sessions and thus, the breadth of diversity presented to attendees. How do we ensure we do justice to the lives often rendered invisible through hostile archival practises? How do we recover the humanity that historically has been diminished or queried?

This three-part series will respond to these questions, as we rethink diversity in Shakespeare and beyond. In the following two entries, Mel and I will each detail the content of our respective sessions. This includes the archival evidence demonstrating female, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming performers across a range of cultures of performance in England; how the popular early modern maxim ‘to wash an Ethiop’ has permeated and resurfaced in present-day popular culture; critically appraising a taxonomy of terms that might refer to diverse, and often marginalised identities in the early modern period. In doing so, the series will act as an experiential reflection to consider how notions of diversity operate in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and how we receive or respond to these representations today.

The Diverse Shakespeare at Shakespeare’s Globe project was made possible by funding from the Southlands Methodist Trust (SMT). This public engagement project called on the research findings of Engendering the Stage, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Special thanks must go to Dr Onyeka Nubia at the University of Nottingham and Dr Will Tosh at Shakespeare’s Globe for supporting this project and so generously sharing their time and expertise. Thank you to Shakespeare’s Globe staff and volunteers, whose kind welcome and thoughtful participation made for excellent discussions. We look forward to sharing more about the work from this project on this blog in the coming weeks!

Frances and Judith: Parallel Lives

This is the first in a series of blog-posts that will draw attention to the roles of women in the economic structures that surrounded the early modern stage. These posts derive from our documentary research project, ‘Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance’, funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and they are based on our work in the National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives and other collections.

Future posts will focus on women’s involvement in the ownership and leases of playhouses, but I want to start by looking at the broader network of financial interactions that supported the playhouses, a network that extended far beyond Britain’s shores. This material was first presented at the ‘Theatre Without Borders’ conference in June 2021 as part of a panel on ‘Staging Bodily Technologies’.

In this post I take a close look at the activities of two entrepreneurial women with connections to the seventeenth-century stage: Frances Worth and Judith Merefield. Both were related to actors and both operated within family networks that link theatre finance with colonial exploitation, in particular the colonization of the West Indies between the 1620s and 1650s.

Frances was born in 1602. The daughter of a painter-stainer, Thomas Bartlett, she was married successively to two actors. In 1620, when she was only 18 years old, she married the 19-year-old Thomas Holcombe. Holcombe was probably still an apprentice at the time, playing female and juvenile roles on the stages of the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses. He died only a few years later, in late August or early September 1625, during a virulent outbreak of plague in London. In January 1626 Frances married for a second time. Her new husband was Ellis Worth, whose long career centred on the Red Bull and Fortune playhouses, where he was successively a member of Queen Anna’s Men, the Revels Company and Prince Charles’s Men. 

Ten years older than Frances, Judith was the daughter of John Heminges, a long-time actor with the King’s Men – the company of which Shakespeare was also a member – and the master to whom  Thomas Holcombe was apprenticed in 1618. Judith was one of fourteen children born to John and his wife Rebecca, of whom six daughters and two sons survived to adulthood. In 1613, at the age of 19, Judith married the 21-year-old Ralph Merefield, a member of London’s Weavers’ Company who also appears to have worked as a scrivener. Heminges appears to have had his daughters as well as his sons educated: when Judith made her will in 1645 she signed it in her own hand, and the will also bears the signature of her sister Margaret Sheppard, who was one of the witnesses.

Figure 1: Judith Merefield’s signature and seal, and the signature of her sister, Margaret Sheppard, on the original copy of Judith’s will, dated 7 June 1645. The National Archives (TNA), PROB 10/650. Open in a new tab or window by right-clicking to see larger versions of any of these images.

Frances and Judith must have encountered each other many times in the close-knit communities that surrounded and sustained the seventeenth-century stage, and both of their histories reveal women with an entrepreneurial streak. Frances was unusual by seventeenth-century standards in that she exercised her own profession, independent from that of her husbands. On 26 January 1622, during the life-time of her first husband, she was appointed by St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, London, as a ‘surgeon’ specialising in curing skin disorders such as ‘scald heads’ and, perhaps, venereal disease.[1] The records of the hospital show that this trade provided her with a lucrative income for many years. By the early 1630s her earnings were regularly topping £100 per annum and she was still being paid for her work by the hospital in the mid 1660s. These wages would have meant that she was earning substantially more than a skilled tradesman, and she also appears to have out-earned her male colleagues at the hospital. In 1629, for example, she earned £58, while the physician William Harvey was paid £33 and the apothecary, Richard Glover, was awarded £40.[2]

Figure 2: Cures for scald heads in John Hester’s The Pearl of Practice, or Practicer’s Pearl, for Physic and Chirurgery (London, 1594).

In a lawsuit of the mid 1650s, Ellis Worth refers to the income that his family makes through Frances’s ‘great pains and industry in a way of surgery as relating to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, London, and otherwise’, describing himself as ‘having no trade’.[3] His testimony and that of a series of witnesses make clear both Frances’s status as a surgeon and the importance of her work to the family. Charity Earles, for example, declares that there is ‘none in London or elsewhere that can do the like cure besides the defendant Frances’.[4] The witnesses also offer an account of the way in which Frances has trained her 26-year-old son, Ellis Worth junior, in ‘the art of chirurgery as to the curing of scald heads and leprosies’. [5]  Somewhat ungraciously, Ellis junior acknowledges the esteem in which his mother is held but only in the course of complaining that he is ‘hindered and obstructed’ in exercising that ‘art’ for himself because his mother ‘so long as she lives gets that practice which otherwise this deponent might (as he believes) have had’.

Figure 3: Deposition of Ellis Worth junior, 25 August 1654, TNA, C 24/780. In the description of his occupation the word ‘chirurgeon’ (that is, surgeon) is crossed out and ‘gent.’ (for ‘gentleman’) written in above it.

Frances’s earnings as a surgeon probably helped to sustain her family’s other activities, which encompassed not only theatrical investment but also investment in England’s colonization of the West Indies. Her stepdaughter, Jane Worth, married as her first husband Henry Ricroft, who invested in the Fortune playhouse alongside Ellis Worth in the early 1630s. Alongside the Fortune, the Ricrofts also invested in a plantation in Barbados, and after Henry Ricroft’s death Jane married another colonizer, Peter Alsop. In his 1659 will, Ellis Worth mentions ‘my daughter Jane Alsop wife of Peter Alsop in Barbados’ and ‘her eldest son Ellis Ricroft which she had by her former husband Henry Ricroft deceased’; as Jennifer L. Morgan points out, Ellis was to make bequests of enslaved people to his own children two decades later. [6] 

It is likely that Frances’s substantial earnings financed Ellis Worth’s investment in the Fortune in the 1620s and early 1630s, and they may also have supported the theatrical and colonial activities of the Ricrofts and Alsops. In the 1640s and 50s, when the commercial presentation of plays in London was prohibited and the livelihoods of actors were rendered precarious and at times non-existent, Frances’s trade appears to have been the family’s main source of income and prestige.

Judith Merefield’s career connects the theatre with colonial projects even more strongly. Her husband, Ralph Merefield, financed the ships that arrived in early 1624 at the island then known as St Christopher, now better known as St Kitts, and called ‘Liamuiga’ or ‘fertile island’ by the indigenous population that was later massacred by the colonizers. On 13 September 1625, Ralph and his partner, Thomas Warner, were issued with a grant that appointed Warner as the colonial governor of ‘Saint Christopher’s alias Merwarshope’, Nevis, Barbados and Monserrat, which were described as ‘inhabited by savage people and not in the possession or government of any Christian prince or state’. The grant also gave Ralph the authority ‘to traffic to and from the said island … and to transport men and do all such things as tend to settle a colony and advance trade there[in]’.[7]

Figure 4: Grant to Thomas Warner and Ralph Merefield, 13 September 1625. Privy Council Register, 27 March 1625-17 July 1626, TNA, PC 2/33, f. 103r. The name ‘Merwarshope’ combined parts of the names of Merefield and Warner. It did not endure.

Other members of Judith’s family were also involved in colonial schemes. Her father, John Heminges, was not only a major shareholder in the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses, and one of the men who helped to prepare the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, but also an investor in at least two colonial projects. One investment involved his eldest surviving son, also called John; the other was a project that was referred to in a lawsuit after his death in 1630 as ‘a desperate adventure unto the West Indies’.[8] It is highly likely that Heminges invested in Merefield’s expedition, which was being planned and executed at the same time as he was at work on the First Folio, a volume that opens with Shakespeare’s colonial play, The Tempest.[9]

The family’s colonial connections were not limited to Ralph Merefield. The husband of Judith’s sister Rebecca, named as ‘Captain William Smith’ in Heminges’s will, is probably the man of that name who appears to have captained the second ship to St Christopher in 1624 and later travelled there as the captain of another ship, the Hopewell, in October 1627. Two of Judith’s own daughters, Judith and Mary, would go on to marry men involved in colonial trade and exploitation: the privateer and slave-trader William Jackson and Thomas Sparrow, who was governor of Nevis around 1636-7.

Ralph Merefield quickly exercised the authority granted to him by setting up tobacco plantations on St Christopher.[10] The Cambridge playwright Peter Hausted refers to the pleasures of ‘a thatch alehouse, and St Kitts Tobacco’ in his 1632 play The Rival Friends, suggesting something of the commercial reach of this project.[11] However, Ralph spent well beyond his means in financing the colonization of St Christopher and soon faced financial disaster. He is described in one of the lawsuits connected with John Heminges’s estate as dying ‘a prisoner in the Fleet of little or no estate at all and many hundred pounds in debt’, and his burial is recorded in the register of St Bride, Fleet Street, on 26 December 1631, as that of ‘a prisoner in the Fleet’.[12]

Figure 5: Record of the burial of ‘Ralphe Meryfielde a prisoner in the ffleete’, 26 December 1631. Parish Register, St Bride, Fleet Street, London Metropolitan Archives, P69/BRI/A/004/MS06538.

Judith did not simply have a family connection with these activities. After Ralph’s death she appears to have both defended his right to property in the West Indies and to have profited from the trade in tobacco that he established. In 1636, Nicholas Burgh, who accompanied Warner and Merefield to St Christopher and was a co-author of the earliest account of the colonization of the island, claimed that 

[Judith] hath received for several parcels of tobacco sent unto her from the Island of Saint Christopher’s by Sir Thomas Warner, governor thereof, as belonging to the estate of the said Ralph Merryfield, several sums of money (that is to say) for tobacco sold to Master Armstrong £9 8s. 6d., for tobacco sent home to her by Captain Paul Thompson £37 15s., for tobacco sent her home in the Adventure £22 10s., for tobacco sent her home by Captain Cork £15 10s., for tobacco brought her home by Sir Thomas Warner £78, amounting in all to the sum of one hundred [and] sixty three pounds or thereabouts[.] [13]

These are substantial sums. According to the National Archives’ historical currency converter, it would have taken a skilled tradesman in the 1630s over six years to earn £163.

The Merefields’ trade in tobacco was indelibly linked to playhouses, where it was sold and consumed. In the early 1630s, the anti-theatrical writer William Prynne decries both actors and playgoers as ‘tavern, alehouse, tobacco-shop, [and] hot-water-house haunters’ (that is, drinkers of strong, distilled spirits), describing a ‘walk’ from ‘a playhouse to a tavern, to an alehouse, a tobacco-shop, or hot-water brothel-house; or from these unto a playhouse’, ‘where the pot, the can, the tobacco-pipe are always walking till the play be ended’. [14] It is not unlikely that some of the tobacco imported by and on behalf of Ralph and Judith Merefield found its way into the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses used by the King’s Men, creating a circuit in which the playhouse investments of men like Heminges fuelled colonial expansion and trade, the products of which were then sold in the playhouse.

Figure 6: Woodcut of a tobacco smoker from the title-page of The Downfall of Temporizing Poets (1641).

The activities of Frances Worth and Judith Merefield bring to the fore a set of transnational networks to which the early modern theatre was connected, pointing not only to London’s developing status as a colonial city but also to the place of its cultural institutions within circuits of colonial trade. Frances’s trade in scald heads would have facilitated her family’s investments in theatre and colonization, while the trade in tobacco from which Judith profited was one of the most tangible signs of theatre’s implication in colonial enterprise and exploitation. Theatre history was shaped not only by generations of assertive and entrepreneurial women but also by the imperialist project of early modern Britain. 

By tracing stories like those of Frances and Judith, Engendering the Stage seeks to expand our understanding of the roles that women have played in the history of the stage and also to acknowledge the sometimes troubling aspects of that history. 

***

If you are interested in knowing more about early modern women’s involvement in theatre finance, we recommend the following:

S.P. Cerasano, ‘Women as Theatrical Investors: Three Shareholders and the Second Fortune Playhouse’, in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594-1998, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998), 87-94 [This essay examines the investments of Frances Juby, Margaret Gray and Mary Bryan in the second Fortune playhouse.]

Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) {This book discusses the activities of women as investors in theatrical enterprisers, lenders of money within theatrical circles and ‘gatherers’, that is, collectors of money in playhouses.]

The King’s Women 1594-1642 [This new blog by Meryl Faiers, Lucy Holehouse, Héloïse Sénéchal, Jodie Smith and Jennifer Moss Waghorn presents fresh research on the women connected with the King’s Men.]

For further reading on the early modern Caribbean and broader histories of colonization and enslavement, see Vanessa M. Holden and Jessica Parr, ‘Readings on the History of the Atlantic World’, in Black Perspectives.


***

Notes

[1] James Paget, Records of Harvey: in Extracts from the Journals of the Royal Hospital of St. Bartholomew (London: John Churchill, 1846), 36. I have put all quotations from early modern documents into modern spelling.

[2] Norman Moore, The History of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (London: Pearson, 1918), 230.

[3] Zachary Baggs v. Ellis and Frances Worth, Court of Chancery, 1653-4, The National Archives (TNA), C 7/402/32.

[4] Deposition of Charity Earles in Baggs v. Ellis and Worth, 30 July 1654, TNA, C 24/780/110. This document was first drawn to scholars’ attention by C.J. Sisson in ‘Shakespeare’s Helena and Dr William Harvey’, Essays and Studies 13 (1960), 1-20.

[5] Deposition of Ellis Worth, junior, 25 August 1654, TNA, C 24/780/110.

[6] E.A.J. Honigmann and Susan Brock, Playhouse Wills, 1558-1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 209; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 98.

[7] Grant to Thomas Warner and Ralph Merefield, 13 September 1625, Privy Council Register, 27 March 1625-17 July 1626, TNA, PC 2/33, f. 103r.

[8] Joint and Several Answers in Thomas Kirle v. William Heminges, John Atkins and Judith Merefield, Court of Chancery, 1632, TNA, C 2/ChasI/K5/42. I first encountered this document in 2016 in a transcription among the papers of the early twentieth-century theatre historians Charles William Wallace and Hulda Berggren Wallace at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. I would like to thank the Huntington Library for awarding me a Francis Bacon Fellowship to look at these materials.

[9] I will write about this connection at greater length in forthcoming work on John Heminges and Henry Condell, and their role in shaping Shakespeare’s plays on page and stage.

[10] Signet and Other Warrants for the Privy Seal, August-November 1626, TNA, PSO 2/67; Privy Council Registers, 1 June 1627-28 February 1628, TNA, PC 2/36, f. 269.

[11] Peter Hausted, The Rival Friends (London, 1632), sig. C2r.

[12] Bill of complaint in Kirle v. Heminges, Atkins and Merefield; Parish Register, St Bride, Fleet Street, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), P69/BRI/A/004/MS06538.

[13] Answer of Nicholas Burgh in Arthur Knight v. Nicholas Burgh, John Atkins, Judith Merefield, et al., Court of Chancery, 1636-9, TNA, C 2/ChasI/K18/50.

[14] Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), sig. 2T1v.

Engendering the stage on tour: Hocktide

This is the first of a series of blogs that will spotlight various forms of early modern performance by a range of gendered, classed bodies. Using examples drawn from archival sources such as the Records of Early English Drama project, we hope this is a space that allows (re)discovery of the many energetic and challenging performances and skills exhibited across England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These snapshots of performances and performers, from those on street corners to those who played in noble households, might challenge some of our ideas about early modern music, dance, and drama, and the hierarchies we have constructed around them.

This series will attempt to follow some of the touring routes of the early modern professional playing companies, most of whom originated in London. They toured frequently, not just when the London theatres were closed because of the plague, along routes that were well planned and well-travelled. Their own performances were part of a much wider culture of performance in both rural and urban areas; they were in competition and conversation with dancers, musicians, tumblers, animal trainers, acrobats, fencers, and many others, as well as civic parades, pageantry, and community drama such as the mystery play cycles.

Our first stop is on the road to Oxford: the Berkshire towns of Reading and Windsor for the Hocktide celebrations. 

HOCKTIDE

Hocktide was a raucous and physically robust festival spread over the Monday and Tuesday two weeks after Easter that marked the transition from spring to summer and raised money for the parish. It began as a day for collecting the termly rents, before developing into a larger celebration. The first day, women of the town roamed the streets, playfully tying up unwary men and demanding money for their release. The second day, the gender roles were reversed, with the men ‘hocking’ money from the women. The money collected went to support the parish. Records from Berkshire indicate the women were much more successful than the men in raising money: their total sums were usually double that of the men. The women of St. Laurence parish, Reading, won 10 shillings from the men they bound on 22nd April 1555, while the men only gathered 4 shillings 8 pence from the women the following day. (All figures taken from the Records of Early English Drama Berkshire, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston, 2018.) The women of St Mary’s, Reading, were even more successful that year, collecting a whopping 22 shillings 8 pence. Perhaps this can be attributed to men being more likely to have spare cash they were able to donate to the parish.

Hocktide does seem to have been a more female-focused event, as with many of the pre-Reformation and medieval civic performance traditions; the triumphant women of St Mary’s were treated to a supper paid for by the parish at a cost of 3 shillings 4 pence in 1555, with no comparable record for the men. This communal meal must have had a victory celebration feel to it, as women celebrated their organisation skills, financial savvy, and physical prowess. By banding together and roaming the public spaces of the town, they took up space in the streets and public buildings, exerting dominion over the men of the town. By physically restraining the menfolk and taking control of their bodies and their purses, they performed a reversal of what happened to a woman’s autonomy, body, and possessions upon getting married. Of course, all was righted the following day, as the men playfully revenged themselves upon the townswomen. Hocktide began to fade away across most of England by the end of the sixteenth century, helped along by religious disapproval of the topsy-turvy sexual dynamics and carnivalesque frivolity the games invoked.

It was not just Protestants who disapproved of Hocktide: in a 1450 letter sent by John Lawern, the Bishop of Worcester to the clergy and cathedral almoner, he complains of a ‘noxious corruption tending to reduce persons of either sex to a state of (spiritual) illness’. The symptoms of this ‘illness’ included:

‘women feign[ing] to bind men, and on another (or the next) day men feign to bind women, and to do other things – would that they were not dishonourable or worse! – in full view of passers-by, even pretending to increase church profit but earning a loss (literally, damnation) for the soul under false pretences. Many scandals arise from the occasion of these activities, and adulteries and other outrageous crimes are committed as a clear offence to God, a very serious danger to the souls of those committing them, and a pernicious example to others.’

Notebook of John Lawern
Bodleian Library: MS Bodley 692 f 163v 6 April 1450

Even accounting for hyperbole, it seems a range of illicit sexual behaviours were conducted under the auspices of Hocktide. We can see traces of this behaviour in the last remaining place to celebrate Hocktide today: Hungerford in Berkshire, a little to the west of Reading. There, the ‘Tutti-men’ visit each household to collect a penny and solicit a kiss from the women of the house, sometimes even going to extreme lengths:

A black and white photo from the 1930s of two women at the first floor window of a brick house with vines. A man is standing on a ladder and kissing one of the women, while the ladder is held by two other men.
Hocktide celebrations, 1930. Photo: Hungerford Virtual Museum

Hungerford continues to celebrate Hocktide today, as this BBC News report shows:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-27214352

The Hocktide of today continues the playful inversion of gender roles that the medieval festival initiated. Hocktide was a space for men and women to lapse from strictly regimented expectations of class and gender and behave in potentially promiscuous ways with members of the opposite sex to whom they were not married. There were plenty of opportunities to speak, flirt, and dance with others, who were able to performatively protest, pointing to the ropes ‘tying’ them up to safeguard reputations. Those who raged against the practice, such as Lawern, may have been reassured by the order in which the events occurred: much like the winter Lord of Misrule games, events began with an upturning of social norms, before the second day which saw the men of the town assert their authority over their wives, sisters, and daughters, reclaiming the public space and their power.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE ROYAL COLLECTION: DOING MATERIAL RESEARCH BY ZOOM (Part 2)

This blog is the second part of Engendering the Stage’s interview with Shakespeare in the Royal Collection (ShaRC). In Part 1 we discussed questions about lockdown closures and archival access. In part 2 we discuss the merits of the “digital archive”.

THE LIMITS OF THE DIGITAL

Lucy Munro: You mentioned earlier that you’ve had to change plans around other parts of the projects and that the exhibition that was planned to be a physical exhibition has moved online. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Sally Barnden: We were at the point of estimating loan requests when the pandemic began and it became apparent, for various reasons, that a physical exhibition just wasn’t going to happen. We had quite a detailed account of what we wanted to be in that exhibition and how it would be structured and what the rationale was for all of those objects. So then we reconceived it for an online space. Which has various effects – one of which was that, when we were thinking beyond the Royal Collection about what objects we might want to contextualize, we were suddenly able to be a lot more ambitious, because the costs of packing up a big painting, shipping it to a location, and insuring it, were no longer a factor. We’re now able to think in terms of contextualizing things with paintings, rather than with small prints after paintings, and that kind of thing.

But it does also change the way that the narrative of the exhibition works, because if you imagine these things in a space, then things like scale and colour have a lot more impact on how the different parts of the exhibition impact the viewer. We were going to have this exhibition which would have a few very big oil paintings and some very small things that we think are very interesting, but maybe were at risk of getting lost in a room. We can now make those objects equal size – for better and worse because you lose the sense of scale, but you can also make the smaller things pop a little more.

LM: Your project – of all the projects we’re talking to – has the most art-historical aspects to it. We’re dealing with archival materials, and we’re interested in the physical objects, but the outputs of the project won’t depend on them in quite the same ways as maybe they will in your project. I wondered whether there was anything else to say about that – the problems of going virtual when you have intellectual investments in the ‘thing’ itself?

SB: I can say it’s certainly been an issue on the cataloguing side because one of our main outputs is a website, which will be effectively a database of all the objects. I mention things like inscriptions and describing bindings but scale is lost when you’re describing everything in a virtual realm, both in the exhibition where it will now seem like a three-metre-high painting and three-inch-high photograph are equivalent objects in some way and while we are asking for dimensions of everything, a small bit of text that says “this is three centimetres high” doesn’t really register in the same way that it would, if you were actually in the same space as the objects.

Kate Retford: Yeah. We’ve got that photograph of Princess Helena Victoria as Ophelia.

SB: She was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter.

Sepia photograph of woman floating on her back in water. the woman's eyes are closed as she pretends to be drowned like Hamlet's Ophelia
“Ophelia”. Photograph attributed to Princess Louise (1848-1939). Royal Collection Trust | © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

KR: I remember when we saw that in the archive and we knew intellectually it was tiny. But the scale of it only really hits you when you see it in person, and that is a real shame for the project, particularly for the exhibition, because, you know we’re losing a lot about the materiality and the individuality of the objects. It’s a particular shame because it’s such an incredibly diverse body of material. I’ve not worked on anything which has such engagement with, you know, print, dec[orative] arts, painting, architecture, sculpture, and what we like to call “chod”! There’s so much to say about material and scale and hierarchies of genre, media. And I think we’re having a particular struggle with the digital exhibition because you know the [web design] company want to have neat identical little square views onto objects before you then click through and I’m saying “no, you’ve got see the whole object straight off.” And then we’ve had discussions about “is there any way we can give people a sense of relative scale? Because they’re going to think this miniature’s the same size as this full-length painting.” And there are various ways you can try and communicate that but none of them are great really. So that, I think, is a particularly big challenge.

18th century painted portrait of a woman. The woman wears a light brown and white dress and is seated next to a small dog on a small cut out piece of ground. She is surrounded by trees and lawn.
Thomas Gainsborough, Mary Robinson as Perdita (ca 1781). Royal Collection Trust |© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

Gordon McMullan: Another fundamental difference is that when we were going to have an exhibition at the Globe, we knew we’d have a captive audience of about half a million people who were going to come to the Globe in the course of the three months that the show would have been on. Anyone doing a Globe tour would be offered, for an extra quid or something, the chance to have a look at the exhibition. A proportion of them would have done that, and then we would have got our impact* feedback from those people. Well, it’s a touch more tricky when it’s an online exhibition and zero additional funding to market it!

KR: One of the things that was going to be great about the Globe was that a lot of people would have seen the exhibition who would never have gone to see an exhibition of that sort, normally. So we would have had greater impact. The danger with the online exhibition is that the people who look at it will be the people who think “oh, Shakespeare!” The Globe is so much more on the tourist trail that I think we would have got sort of more surprising reactions from people.

GM: That was always the hope – that we would have audiences who wouldn’t naturally go to a royal palace or a royal exhibition coming to see it anyway.

KR: And it would have been global.

Clare McManus: That’s really interesting, because we’re keen to find out how the pandemic has affected archive projects in terms of questions of access. Not only how we get into things but also in terms of bringing things out of the archives for other people. The universal panacea is often seen as digitization, but your experience is saying something different. It can actually be harder to gather a new, more diverse, and inclusive audience for the kind of things you want to show in the virtual environment. [But] if you have a building that’s already associated with some kind of openness towards Shakespeare and some kind of global audience . . .

GM: Yeah, the Globe exhibition wouldn’t have required anyone deliberately going to see it: they would have just kind of wandered through it while coming to visit the Globe, so it didn’t require any marketing in that sense; it was just “well, while you’re here, why don’t look at this?” So we’re frustrated to have lost that opportunity to reach a really broad audience.

THE ADVANTAGES OF THE DIGITAL

GM: But one particular advantage of the digital exhibition is that it will show objects, most of which are not on public display. Scholars can request to go into the Royal library and see things as long as they’re working on an appropriate project and go through all the security clearances, but the items are not generally visible. It was very much a part of our application to the AHRC that we were seeking to democratize one aspect of this immense collection and to make the holdings more generally visible. The more we show the world the materials that they have, the more subsequent scholars, whether in Shakespeare, whether in art history, will know that those things are there and ask to go and look at them. We don’t think Covid has got in the way of that particular aspiration.

And, of course, the digital exhibition has one advantage over a physical exhibition: it doesn’t conk out after three months. However, we will find out how current such a thing can remain beyond the usual three-month lifespan of an exhibition because it may or it may not.

I think there’s a lot to be learned from it when it comes to impact. There is a diminution when you don’t have, as it were, the real thing, but in terms of, for example, school materials, having the online exhibition available for anyone to look at if they’re doing an EPQor whatever – so there are gains. But it’s interesting that we won’t quite be able to quantify the gains until long after the project is over. [And p]rojects with digital outputs will require longevity of impact data acquisition, which is not catered for by the duration of a funded project with a fixed end date.

Erin Julian: There’s been a lot of conversation recently about what hybrid conferences, events, performances might look like in the future. It seems to me that your project raises particular challenges to hybrid work. Has the project team been thinking about what your work would look like in this new, post-Covid world?

SB: In terms of hybridity between sort of real-world experiences and digital experiences, Gordon mentioned one of our outputs, which is these 3D interactive visualizations of spaces at Windsor castle. And we were certainly envisioning those when we started as something which would allow you to interact with these spaces in a different way when you were in the space. So we were imagining that hybridity, if you like, between experiencing the space live and experiencing it digitally and that you would be able to think about that overlay between the room as it is now and the room, as it was in the 19th century and how the spatial politics of that room worked for Shakespeare performances. And then because of the huge interest in 3D visualizations and virtual versions of real spaces that’s happened as a result of the pandemic, people will respond differently to those properties and probably more of them will be experiencing them exclusively as virtual properties. We’ll have to think about how that changes what we, what sort of packaging, we need to give them, what textual guides and introductions are necessary when you’re thinking about those spaces as spaces that you’re experiencing exclusively virtually rather than as a comparison with a real space.

KR: Over the last year everyone’s got much more used to online, and I think people’s dexterity, say, with our visualizations is going to be better because everyone’s spent all year looking at and manipulating things online and [paying attention to] which gallery has got the best whizzy digitized version of its collection so, on the one hand, that facilitates that and on the other hand, I worry that it won’t be quite as distinctive as it would have been? So, and I hadn’t really thought about that, actually, before this this conversation, that that’s a real pro and con side to all this.

CMcM: Brilliant. This is all the time we have. Let’s see what Zoom auto transcription does to our conversation!

Notes

*impact under the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, refers to how research affects, changes, or benefits society outside of academia.

EPQ within the UK’s education system, an additional piece of research that students can undertake alongside their A levels – qualifications taken in the last year of secondary school – for additional credit

SHAKESPEARE IN THE ROYAL COLLECTION: DOING MATERIAL RESEARCH BY ZOOM (Part 1)

When the first lockdown was announced in the UK in March 2020, the ETS team was forced to urgently confront questions connected to archival access. Questions about who has been left out of early modern archives, how and why were already built into our project but became much more pressing. With these issues came broader questions of how we might rebuild inclusive archives and libraries after the pandemic – both ones used by scholars and more generally.

We decided to reflect on our pandemic experience in conversation with other archival projects, to share resources and solutions to some of the obstacles that the pandemic created, and to think about the social and cultural roles that libraries and archives play in research, learning, and community building.

Our first interview is with members of the AHRC-funded project, Shakespeare in the Royal Collection. We spoke with Prof Gordon McMullan (King’s College London), Prof Kate Retford (Birkbeck, University of London), and Dr Sally Barnden (King’s College London). The Royal Librarian approached McMullan early in 2016 to ask if he might include the Royal Collection Trust’s exhibition of Shakespeare-related items from the Royal Collection in the publicity for the Shakespeare400 season (which was led by King’s in partnership with twenty-five major London cultural organizations). In due course, this led McMullan and Barnden (the latter employed for six months by King’s to scope the project) to investigate the Shakespeare-related holdings of the Royal Library, which were for the most part acquired from the 18th century onwards (after a period of dissolution following the death of Charles 1). In McMullan’s words, the project explores “the mutual value that Shakespeare the cultural phenomenon and the Royal Family have had for each other over time”, a relationship which “begins with the accession of the George I”.

McMullan is PI and Retford Co-I, and Barnden and Dr Kirsten Tambling are the project’s postdoctoral fellows who, until Covid closures hit, were working in the Library and Archives at Windsor Castle. The project is both literary and art historical, with McMullan and Barnden (broadly) handling literary historical matters and Retford and Tambling the art history side of things.

Colour photograph of a book, a Shakespeare folio, open to the first page of The Tempest.
“Mr William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories & tragedies. Published according to the true original copies.” Royal Collection Trust |© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

The project is hosting an online conference from 17-19 June 2021. Other outputs include a website providing comprehensive details of the RCT’s Shakespeare holdings; a digital exhibition; a set of 3D digital visualizations of three spaces in Windsor castle in which Shakespeare performances have taken place, created by Martin Blazeby in collaboration with Noho, with Globe actors providing voiceovers. Parts of these visualizations will be available to Windsor Castle to use in their visitor experience facilities. The ShaRC team will also release an image- and object-focused collection of essays, developed from the exhibit, of interest to academic and general readerly audiences. 

We present an edited transcript of our conversation in two parts. Part 1 discusses Covid-related lockdown closures and questions of archival access. Part 2 will include our conversation on the advantages and limits of the “digital archive”

WORKING IN LOCKDOWN, ADAPTING TO COVID

Erin Julian: We started this interview series as a way of reflecting on the obstacles to archival work during Covid. Can you tell us a bit about what’s happened to you in the past year?

Sally Barnden: Sure. Our project team is located mostly in London, but the vast majority of the material that we’re working with is at Windsor Castle. The Royal Archives themselves were mostly closed last February for cataloguing and inventory reasons. They briefly reopened during the period when we were on strike [the UCU strikes in February and March 2020], and then Covid hit, and Windsor Castle as a whole had to close. So there was a sort of preamble to the pandemic, as far as Windsor Castle was concerned. We were also making quite a lot of use of other archives: the National Art Library at the V&A, the British Library, and the National Archives. So general archival closures were a problem.

I suppose we were lucky insofar as all of these problems started when we were already 18 months into the project, so we had quite a significant archival base, a backlog to work with.

The Royal Archives’ peculiarities shaped our work here. They have very strict rules: you can’t take photographs, as you can these days in most archives, so we probably had taken more thorough notes than we would have done otherwise. So that was kind of a blessing and a curse insofar as we were probably already expecting that it wouldn’t be easy to just pop back in and check things – but also we didn’t have a vast library of archival photographs to refer back to.

Gordon McMullan: We were very, very fortunate that the timing meant that Sally and Kirsten had done the vast bulk of the archival work that was absolutely essential. I mean we originally budgeted to go to Sandringham and Balmoral and various other places to see what was there, and none of that has happened because visits haven’t been feasible.

It turns out, happily, that as far as we know there aren’t in fact major objects there that we absolutely must see, as it were.

POSITIVES OF ARCHIVAL CLOSURES?

SB: This is probably something we would have had to do anyway, but I think Covid moved forward the point where we had to let go of the idea of completely exhaustive coverage of every possible Shakespeare-related thing in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. That we had to come to a point where we decided that these are our 2000 objects and we’re going to say as many interesting things as we can about them rather than go on reading a million letters in the hope that somebody in passing quotes The Merchant of Venice in a historically interesting way. Becoming aware of our limits early last year rather than later was probably quite useful in the long run.

Colour photograph of three small wooden boxes, lying open, revealing insides lined with mirrored glass and metal engraved with Shakespeare's name.
Wood toothpick case, “Made of the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare.” Royal Collection Trust |© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

PUBLIC ACCESS AND THE ROYAL COLLECTION

GM: One of the issues we’ve had throughout – which has nothing to do with Covid – is that these buildings are not places where you can go and have a rummage around and see what you can find. The challenge that Sally and Kirsten have had to deal with throughout has been always being asked by an archivist, “What would you like to see and I’ll go and get it?” And, of course, the truthful answer to that is “I’d like to have a rummage in that cupboard, please!” But you’re not allowed to do that. So that has made it much less likely that we would find something startlingly undiscovered because you can’t ask: “Let me see the thing that nobody knows exists yet.” So Sally and Kirsten have been assiduously seeing what we could get to there.

SB: It’s worth mentioning the Georgian Papers programme (https://gpp.rct.uk/) have helped to cover for the fact that we haven’t had access to so many of these documents. The fact that the Royal Collection Trust had this vast digitization project, which was already well underway, has been really useful. Also the fact that that the Georgian Papers team were engaging with the Royal Archives as a whole meant that there were lists of the kinds of documents that existed, so we were able to slightly break that pattern of the archivist saying “what do you want to see?” and us saying, “well, we don’t know, have you got any of this? No. Have you got any of this? No.” And we were able to go through them slightly more systematically, which did help.

Lucy Munro: Have the Windsor archives actually opened at all since the pandemic began?

SB: No. They closed for Covid, I guess, early March last year, and they haven’t reopened at all. The staff have had access. I think in the first UK lockdown there were very few staff on site at all, and then, more recently, the library and print room staff have been in one day a week, something like that. There have been some staff in the archives, so it’s been possible to check some queries and things.

GM: It’s also worth adding that the Royal Archives and Windsor Castle derive their income from tourists visiting the Castle, which means that during Covid their activities and staffing have necessarily been reduced because they haven’t had the normal income stream from visitors. This has meant that the handful of curators that have been engaged in our project are in fact doing more work to help us than we had anticipated. The senior curators have been photocopying things for us, taking pictures of things for us – which is immensely kind of them!

SB: We’ve been quite lucky in terms of the Royal Collection curators making themselves available by email and by Zoom and putting in a huge number of hours with the objects that we otherwise would have hoped to examine ourselves. We’ve been relying very heavily on impressions of these prints or copies of these books that are in other libraries, where they have been digitized – and obviously that leads to some omissions and misunderstandings. So curators have had to go in and say, “oh no actually this print does have lettering” or “actually our copy has an inscription on the flyleaf that you haven’t mentioned, because you haven’t seen our copy”. It’s been very weird doing this kind of object-based research at so many removes from the objects that were interested in. We’re very grateful to the curators who are doing that work for us right now.

GM:  We are also very, very aware of our good fortune in having an AHRC grant and thus being publicly funded for this project, because the Georgian Papers project, for instance, didn’t have that public funding – they had a combination of funding from the States and the Royal Household – and when Covid and lockdown began they weren’t in a position to sustain the formal relationship, whereas RCT has been able to carry on working with us because the funding was public and thus external. So we’ve been very, very fortunate in that respect.

The first half of our conversation ends here. In the second half of our interview, coming soon, the ShaRC team tells us more about working under Covid conditions, how they adapted their planned exhibition to a digital format, and the advantages and limits of the “digital archive”.

We’re back! Things have changed . . .

As 2021 progresses, Engendering the Stage is reflecting on our past, present, and future, reflecting on the profound difficulties of the last 12 months and some hopeful – even exciting – work the project will be doing as we move forward.

To begin: as we have moved into the Leverhulme-funded arm of the Engendering the Stage project, begun in January 2020, we’re delighted to introduce (at long last!) the new members of our project team. We are thrilled to re-introduce Clare McManus (University of Roehampton) and Lucy Munro (King’s College London), co-investigators of the current project. We are also joined by new team members Mel Harrison (KCL) and Oliver Lewis (Roehampton). Mel’s project considers the intersections of disability and gender roles in representations of femininity in sixteenth-century performance, while Oliver’s research considers the idea of porous masculinity in early modern performance, particularly how dramatic texts experiment with the stability of masculine embodiment, exposing the spectre of immoderate and/or subversive forms of masculine identities that haunt early modern staged subjectivity. Erin Julian joined us as the project’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in March 2020, flying in from Canada only days before the first of the UK’s lockdowns.

Screenshot of the ETS team in a Zoom meeting.

In its current formation, the UK branch of ETS has shifted to archival research, working to expand, renew, and revitalise knowledge drawn from original documents connected to early modern theatre and performance – and through that work, opening up wider, more complex, and livelier models of early modern history and performance practice, opening further avenues for early modern women’s, queer, trans, and race studies. ETS of course, continues to be intrinsically connected with Performance as Research (PaR) work: an enriched understanding of the original texts and documents on which PaR is based can only lead to the strengthening of both archival and PaR work. Inevitably, our planned PaR event, a collaboration with Andy Kesson and Box Office Bears, “Ruff Play with Shakespeare”, was cancelled due to the UK’s first lockdown in response to COVID-19. 2020 was a testing time for theatre institutions and, in particular, performers – a test which continues under the present lockdown. With the rollout of vaccines internationally, however, we remain hopeful, and are committed to getting back to this work as soon as safely possible. In the meanwhile, the UK team is occupied looking for materials to bring to PaR scrutiny and to sharing our findings with the rest of the ETS team, Melinda Gough and Peter Cockett in Canada.

While Rome burned? Archival work in 2020

Getting an archival project up and running during a pandemic that closed the archives has been an ongoing challenge, necessitating changes to our working habits, research plan and methodologies (and, sadly, a pause from regular blogging). The obstacles we have faced in reorganising our research in response to shifting rules around on-site work, though, are nothing in comparison to the ongoing traumas of illness and bereavement, and the blighting of lives through racial oppression and economic neglect that came so sharply into view in 2020. But, in a year when the Higher Education sector in the UK seemed close to collapse under the weight of incautious marketisation, our commitment to our students and to the research that fuels university teaching brought the political and the professional emphatically together. We have always known that research-based learning trains students in the skills of critical thinking and the sifting of evidence; we know that it trains them to see their world more clearly, gives them tools of self-expression and expands the horizons of aspiration. But rarely have we understood how necessary those skills are and how much we need our students.

2020 taught us a lot about our students at Roehampton and King’s. Our students are frontline workers, key workers, parents and carers. They have pre-existing conditions that put them at greater risk from Covid-19 or disabilities that mean that the pandemic restrictions hit them harder than others. They are members of communities that are under-represented in UK Higher Education, who feel the full violence of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and who campaign for BLM and for a clear-sighted teaching of the UK’s history of imperialism and racial violence. Though they may not know it, our students were a constant source of support and sustaining hope for us throughout 2020. It will take a long time for us to forget their remarkable resilience and their commitment to their subjects, regardless of fashion.  

2020 has taught us lessons about our own precariousness, but most of all it has taught us about our privilege. We have worked long hours, but we worked (mostly) at home rather than being forced onto public transport and into risky working practices. When the national lockdown ended in late June, two of the major London archival collections we planned to work with – The National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives – were able to take measures to re-open their reading room services. We are incredibly grateful to these archives – as well as the Dulwich Archives, where we have located some delightful finds around the Fortune Theatre – for the astonishing efforts they made ensuring their buildings were safe. These archives offered us havens of normality, let us read early modern documents as our masks steamed up our glasses and our scarves kept the chill of the open windows away. We have felt lucky to be based in London and to be able to travel in relative safety to these national holdings, to make full use of our allotted weekly and monthly appointments at these archives despite shortened opening hours (provided, of course, that we won our ‘Tweedy Glastonbury’ tickets in the weekly Monday morning online race for a seat in TNA!). And – if this had to happen – we’re remarkably lucky that this happened when it did, when advances in digitisation and a commitment to open access research meant that we could go online to search through holdings and collections to see us through the see-sawing months of lockdown and shifting tiers.

What’s next for ETS?

While the pandemic has necessitated shifts in some of our research phases, it has also prompted deeper thinking about the methodologies underpinning early modern archival collections, digitisations, and access, refining what feels most urgent to our project. We’re planning three series of blogs over the coming months to share our unfolding reflections on methodology and praxis – as well as some of the delightful, fascinating riches of our archival findings. One series focuses on the problem of archival violence and inclusivity: Oliver and Erin will be thinking through some of the limitations of major manuscript and print documents and resources that have shaped early modern performance studies and our project, questions around digital curation and access, and – in conversation with experts working in and around curatorial and archival industries – how we reshape collections for more inclusive futures. Clare, Lucy, and Erin will be running a series where we speak with researchers at Roehampton and King’s, and colleagues working on collaborative early modern archival and PaR projects around the UK, about the challenges of – and strategies for – researching in a pandemic. Mel will be leading a series sharing moments from our work with REED (and, when archives re-open in future, original documents) that are phenomenologically rich, bringing to life the fascinating, funny, strange, and delightfully wide performance experience available in early modern England.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us in the coming months.

Ruff Play with Shakespeare: Postponed

We are very sorry to say that Ruff Play with Shakespeare, our forthcoming combat event, has been postponed. We will await future advice on public gatherings before announcing a new date, and will refund those who have bought tickets as soon as possible.

We would like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who helped to plan, contribute to and publicise the event, and look forward to making it happen in the near future.

Our project focuses on a time when paid public entertainment was repeatedly in tension with outbreaks of plague, with the playhouses often at the heart of government concerns about social gatherings. We are living through difficult times, but we take some comfort in the thought that generations of people negotiating similar problems retained their commitment to imagination, resistance and play.

We wish all of our readers and collaborators the best in the weeks ahead.

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