
"Speak that I may see thee": Performing Shakespeare's Rival Playwrights Today
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Shakespeare’s reputation today overshadows the outstanding achievements of the other great English playwrights who, between the late 1580s and 1642, created the most extraordinary array of innovative new writing bequeathed to us from any period of European theatre.
This lecture-cum-performance, building on the Shakespeare’s Rivals research project in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, will explore the bravura opportunities offered to its performers by this rich repertoire, as well as the technical challenges it sets them.
It will combine close script analysis with fully staged performances of virtuoso sequences from some of the finest, and most popular, plays of the period, including Middleton’s Women Beware Women, Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Massinger’s The Roman Actor, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady.
The performers in these sequences will be returning theatre graduates of the School, who are now professional actors.
Join us and them to experience in action the exuberant and entertaining brilliance of some of the finest scripts of the pre-Civil War stage.
A drinks reception will take place following the event in the TFTI building foyer. (8:30pm - 9:00pm)
About the speaker

Michael Cordner
Michael Cordner is one of the co-founders of the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media (which has now become, since its amalgamation with the Department of Music, the School of Arts and Creative Technologies) and was its first Head of Theatre. He has directed six productions of plays from the pre-1642 repertoire on its main stages.
The Shakespeare’s Rivals research project, which he leads, aims to develop new ways to enable actors to cope ambitiously with the challenges of early modern dramatic verse. One example of the results achieved is a performance, by Lauren Moakes, of Isabella’s soliloquy from the second scene of Middleton’s Women Beware Women. You can see a recording of this example here.
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