49 research outputs found
Ailsa Grant Ferguson And Gordon McMullen discuss the Shakespeares Hut
No full textProfessor Gordon McMullan of King’s College London, academic director of Shakespeare400 and director of the London Shakespeare Centre, and Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson of the University of Brighton, recorded in conversation about the Shakespeare Hut, July 2016.
Find out more about the Shakespeare Hut project - http://shakespearehut.lshtm.ac.u
Hall's Croft:A Spatial Archive
No full textThe spatial archive has been developed as part of the ‘Susanna Hall and Hall’s Croft Project’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson, University of Brighton, working in a project team with Roz Sklar and in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Ailsa works across disciplines on early modern texts and lives, specialising in Shakespeare, drama and 17th-century women’s texts. Roz is a senior curator, with particular expertise in medical history; she is currently working on her doctoral research on 15th-16th century women practising medicine. The Archive has been realised by ARCADE XR, the digital agency of the future
Hall's Croft:A Spatial Archive
No full textThe spatial archive has been developed as part of the ‘Susanna Hall and Hall’s Croft Project’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson, University of Brighton, working in a project team with Roz Sklar and in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Ailsa works across disciplines on early modern texts and lives, specialising in Shakespeare, drama and 17th-century women’s texts. Roz is a senior curator, with particular expertise in medical history; she is currently working on her doctoral research on 15th-16th century women practising medicine. The Archive has been realised by ARCADE XR, the digital agency of the future
Susanna:A Soundscape
No full textImmerse yourself in a soundscape of Susanna’s world – recordings within Hall’s Croft, its garden and at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage undulate with voices singing the ballads Susanna could have heard in her day-to-day life. A voice, perhaps it is Susanna, reads, thinks and acts on the writing of early modern women, including Amelia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Dorothy Leigh – and the anonymous ‘receipts’ (recipes) for easing women’s health. A new poem responds to these women’s words.Free to listen wherever you are, meet early modern women and their world…This Soundscape is one of the outputs from The Susanna Hall & Hall’s Croft Project - a research and engagement project exploring Susanna Hall and her home, Hall's Croft, led by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson (University of Brighton) in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Funded by AHRC (part of UKRI
Shakespeare, Cinema, Counter-culture:Appropriation and Inversion
No full textAddressing for the first time Shakespeare’s place in counter-cultural cinema, this book examines and theorizes counter-hegemonic, postmodern, and post-punk Shakespeare in late 20thand early 21stcentury film. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, Grant Ferguson presents an interdisciplinary approach that offers new theories on the nature and application of Shakespearean appropriations in the light of postmodern modes of representation. The book considers the nature of the Shakespearean inter-text in subcultural political contexts concerning the politicized aesthetics of a Shakespearean ‘body in pieces,’ the carnivalesque, and notions of Shakespeare as counter-hegemonic weapon or source of empowerment. Representative films use Shakespeare (and his accompanying cultural capital) to challenge notions of capitalist globalization, dominant socio-cultural ideologies, and hegemonic modes of expression. In response to a post-modern culture saturated with logos and semiotic abbreviations, many such films play with the emblematic imagery and references of Shakespeare’s texts. These curious appropriations have much to reveal about the elusive nature of intertextuality in late postmodern culture and the battle for cultural ownership of Shakespeare. As there has yet to be a study that isolates and theorizes modes of Shakespearean production that specifically demonstrate resistance to the social, political, ideological, aesthetic, and cinematic norms of the Western world, this book expands the dialogue around such texts and interprets their patterns of appropriation, adaptation, and representation of Shakespeare
Performing commemoration in wartime:Shakespeare galas in London, 1916–19
Full text linkCelebrations for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in 1916 in London barely resembled those planned and discussed before the outbreak of war. Official commemorations of Shakespeare were suddenly reassessed in a wartime context and adapted to be frugal and patriotic, selective and pertinent. As a result, the gala revue format, selecting as it could the smallest of textual fragments or the stylised ‘Shakespeares’ expressed in songs and tableaux, was, perhaps, bound to flourish. In 1916, a flamboyant yet tactfully (ostensibly) inexpensive gala took place to mark the Tercentenary at Drury Lane. In the same year, the Shakespeare Hut, a YMCA respite Hut for Anzac troops on leave, was built on the land acquired for the building of a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre. In its purpose-built performance space, this Hut continued the gala commemorations for the rest of the war and into 1919. Its annual ‘Shakespeare Day’ gala performances configured Shakespearean fragments into a performance to build morale, showcase the war support of theatrical superstars (such as Ellen Terry, Johnston Forbes Robertson and Gertrude Elliott) and revive, each year, the Tercentenary ‘spirit’ that the Hut was built to represent. While the Drury Lane gala brought together a range of theatrical luminaries to produce an extravaganza to mark Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, the performance was also itself commemorated via a sumptuous ‘souvenir’ book, a newly-discovered copy of which, annotated by the event’s literary advisor, provides a unique insight into this performance and its relationship to the War. Programmes for the Hut galas were considerably more modest, but copies still survive and this article examines these alongside previously undiscovered private letters and autobiographical accounts from some of those working and living at the Hut. Hitherto neglected manuscript sources revealing the involvement of performers who appeared there are also re-examined in the context of the Hut performances, which have, until now, remained largely forgotten. This range of sources provides a means by which to scrutinize the de- and re-construction of Shakespearean texts into new wartime shows. While the Drury Lane production was primarily for the (predominantly English) general public, the Hut performances were, almost exclusively, for (predominantly Australian and New Zealander) servicemen. The re-constitution of de-contextualised fragments into a single ‘Shakespeare’ performance to suit wartime sensibilities contributed to the development of a wartime national and Allied identity. The relationship between the ‘civilian’ (Drury Lane) versus ‘service’ (Shakespeare Hut) performances offers a uniquely relevant comparative case via which to examine this phenomenon. This article analyses how such a difference in audience may influence – or be influenced by – the construction of ‘Shakespeare’ in the performances and how, in turn, these case studies can elucidate our notions of commemoration via performance on a broader level. The article presents the significance of these performances in relation to the changing nature of public commemoration during the Great War and the problem, specifically, of commemorating a long-dead civilian in a time of mass grief and unrelenting loss. Overall, the article considers how we can theorise the commemorative function of performance in wartime, specifically in terms of the unique case of how England ‘remembered’ Shakespeare during the Great War
‘ Tis now the very witching time of night’: Halloween horror and the memento mori in Hamlet (2000)
No full textHamlet (2000) removes Hamlet’s discourse with the gravedigger and therefore his confrontation with death through Yorick’s skull. This scene in Shakespeare’s text represents the memento mori, and its removal disrupts the concept of mortality central to Hamlet. This article focuses on its dis- and replacement in Hamlet (2000). The amputated death’s head memento mori is revealed as having been replaced by Halloween imagery, emblematic mise-en-scène manipulations and horror signifiers throughout the adapted text. Appropriations and subversions of Shakespearean, early modern and postmodern emblems of mortality are examined. Late postmodern anxieties over disconnectedness, technological dehumanization and consumerism are explored in relation to the recoding of the memento mori via Halloween in this text
Remembering Dorothy Leigh’s Mother’s Blessing (1616): A 400th Anniversary for Shakespeare’s ‘sisters’ in 2016
No full text‘A dumme thynge’:The Posthumous Voice as Rhetoric in the Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin
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