Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre
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Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre
This series of six lectures introduces six plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Once popular and now little-known, they can tell us a lot about what their first audiences enjoyed, aspired to and worried about - from immigrants in early modern London to the role of women in the household,...
Recent Episodes
12 episodes
The Tamer Tam'd: John Fletcher
A riposte to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Fletcher’s play is a riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: in this lecture I discuss th...
Tis Pity She's a Whore: John Ford
Reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays This lecture discusses the play’s reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays, its s...
The Witch Of Edmonton
Witchcraft and bigamy. A collaborative play about witchcraft, bigamy - and a talking Dog - what more could you want?
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: Thomas Middleton
This lecture discusses comedy, fertility, and all those illegitimate children in this play about sex, economics and meat.
The Alchemist: Ben Jonson
Written in the context of plague in London, The Alchemist’s plot and language are deeply concerned with speed and speculation.
Dr Faustus: Christopher Marlowe
My lecture on this infernal play discusses Elizabethan religion, the revisions to the play, and whether we should think about James Bond in its final...
The Duchess of Malfi: John Webster
In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy articulates perennial questions about female autonomy and class...
The Roaring Girl: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
Based on a contemporary scandal of a woman who dressed in male clothing, this play of topsy-turvy genders has fun with some very modern ideas about se...
The Revenger's Tragedy: Thomas Middleton
A blackly camp tragedy - Hamlet without the narcissism - set in a court corrupted by lust and self-interest, this play is both fascinated and repelled...
The Shoemaker's Holiday: Thomas Dekker
Like a Busby Berkeley depression-era musical, Dekker's comedy is a feel-good antidote to a context of shortages, political malaise and general pessimi...
Arden of Faversham: Anon
A true crime story of the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife and her lover, this play is concerned with the politics of the household, with gender rol...
The Spanish Tragedy: Thomas Kyd
Popular tragedy in which Hieronimo pursues aristocratic murderers of his son Horatio and takes revenge. It speaks, like Hollywood Westerns, to questio...