Shakespeare in the Restoration: A Conversation with Stephen Watkins

you you Welcome to the History of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 171, Shakespeare in the Restoration, a conversation with Stephen Watkins. For today's guest episode, it's a warm welcome to Stephen Watkins, who is going to take us a little way forward in the timeline to the world of Restoration England, where after 14 years of closures, theatres were again legally opened.

As we shall hear, performance of Shakespeare plays formed a significant part of the repertoire. And this discussion does focus very much on Shakespeare in the Restoration. We will, of course, get to look at the other playwrights and players of that period. all in good time. Stephen Watkins is a writer and researcher working mainly on Shakespeare and early modern literature, with a particular focus on how writers and theatre makers recycle

adapt and remediate source texts to both register and resist historical and cultural change. He's published widely on restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and the important figure of that time, William Davenant. His book, Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory, as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Shakespeare performance series, was published in February 2025.

In it, Stephen demonstrates how Davenant's adaptations of Shakespeare were shaped as much by the transformed commercial and repertorial logics that came to govern the patent companies in the 1660s as they were by shifting aesthetic and... political concerns in the period. Stephen has taught English at the Universities of Oxford, Nottingham and Derby and is currently based at the University of Greenwich. I spoke to Stephen over a Zoom call.

And so really my first question to you is that I was hoping you could give us an overview of the Restoration Theatre as things picked up in 1660 after the return of Charles II. Yeah, of course. First of all, just thanks for having me on the podcast. So I think the beginnings of the Restoration Theatre in 1660 is a phenomenon that we are a little bit overly familiar with. I think this is something...

that we just talk about as though it's a kind of natural thing. But actually, I think we should just pause for a moment to recognise that it's so unprecedented to have an 18 year hiatus in a performing. theatrical culture like this. England is the only country practically in the history of Western theatre that has this kind of hiatus imposed upon it. And I think that's something we don't appreciate because on the one hand, it's something...

that has been tied into the longer history of English theatre quite naturally, but it's also something that we're still grappling with that still is uncomfortable. But to set the scene, the Restoration Theatre... begins in 1660 following a period as i say of hiatus The theatres are closed in 1642, back in the 1640s at the beginning of the Civil War. As a precautionary measure, that's simply because London is in on a war footing.

And the theatres are, it's inappropriate for them to operate. So the actual order closing the theatres in 1642... is about recognising the war. There's no sense, however, in that prohibition that this is going to be something that continues beyond. It's always considered a temporary move. The real prohibition comes in 1648.

when the parliamentarian party get in, the kind of Puritans get in, who decide that actually they don't want to see the theatre return. So that's the kind of more firm prohibition that outlaws the theatre. So during the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell's protectorate come into the power, the theatre is banned. So with the restoration of King Charles II in May 1660, there's an opportunity for theatre professionals who had been stopped from performing during the Civil War and Protectorate to restart.

and relaunch the theatre as a viable profession. A number of early modern, pre-modern, pre-1642 theatre practitioners, people like John Rhodes, Michael Mohan, who was an old Kingsman, and others like William Beeston, who owned the theatre at Salisbury Court, start to arrange troops of actors and start putting on illicit performances in 1659. early 1660 in anticipation of the return of Charles and what they assume will be the return of the theatre.

Very quickly, however, it's very clear that Charles and his court are not going to support a return to the pre 1642 theatre industry as it looked. with the outdoor playhouses and the many different theatre troops that were operating in London. What they wanted to do was... reduce the theatre industry and control it so that it became a more elite and more court-adjacent phenomenon.

Partly that's to do with him wanting to reward, through a kind of series of monopolies, courtiers who had been loyal to him in the 1650 exile. One of the courtiers that he rewards is a guy called Thomas Killer Group, who is associated with the theatre in the pre-1642 theatre world. And he gets a patent to open a theatre and operate a company under the name of the King. This is the King's company. And he opens a theatre in the West End of London.

in a theatre called Veer Street, which is in fact a converted tennis court called Gibbons. And the other is Sir William Davenant, who is another courtier from the earlier period, from operating in the 1630s and 1640s, loyal to Charles. who was given a patent under his brother James, the Duke of York. So that company becomes known as the Duke's Company.

And he opens a theatre at Lincoln's in Fields, which is another converted tennis court. So what we have in this period are two indoor theatres converted from tennis courts.

operating as a kind of duopoly in London. And these are the only two theatres that are licensed in the period to put on plays. Yeah, that's interesting there because there are some parallels with what had gone before in that the Jacobean theatre was already moving towards indoor theatre and away from the open-air playhouses somewhat. That carries on, but probably for the reasons of...

rather than anything else, as you were suggesting. And not the first time that we've had tennis courts converted into playhouses either. That was happening back in France and other places during the early Renaissance. Yeah. And indeed, that's something that the two theatre managers, when they're casting around for venues to look scouting out places in the West End of London, what they're looking for are those kinds of real tennis courts, because particularly Davenant.

has been in exile with Charles in France during the 1650s and he's observed the kind of indoor theatre that's going on there and wants to kind of bring that back to London. And I think you're right that that move to the indoor theatres, the more kind of bespoke, jewel-like theatres with a smaller clientele, a more elite audience, is something that's beginning. in the in the late Caroline period and in fact Davenant is involved with that in 1639.

Charles I grants Davenant a license to stage certain kinds of what are called presentments and entertainments with movable painted scenery. with lights and and other kinds of special effects and it's that Partly it's that license that is Davenant's kind of ticket into the restoration that enables him to kind of continue that project. So that this very particular setup with the two patent theatres, the fact we're getting.

indoor theatres and more scenic effects. And it's really the start of the rise of stage scenery, I think I'm correct in saying. So quite a different picture from what we're used to thinking about as Shakespeare period. And then, of course, we can't not mention the fact that ladies were allowed on stage for the first time. Absolutely, yes. So there are a number of changes. The two big distinct changes from the pre-6042 theatre, even the indoor theatres, is the use of movable scenery.

so that the scenery would be set into grooves on a series of flats that could be pulled open to reveal new scenes behind them. And this is something that became a kind of phenomenon of the restoration stage in a real... selling point for those theatres. It's the thing everybody always mentions, particularly somebody like Samuel Peets, the famous diarist who goes frequently to the theatre during the 1660s. He's always commenting on the amazing scene changes that are happening.

in these plays and the second thing is that actresses for the first time are introduced into the London stage so we have professionals and that's again that's partly a reflection of what Charles and other royalists have experienced on the continent during their exile. They've seen women on stage in France and elsewhere.

And they like that. And that's something that they want to bring back. And it's also obviously it has a kind of moral valency where it seems to be suddenly inappropriate for young boys to be impersonating women so that you have actually actresses playing female parts. and that's something that the plays of the restoration build into their dramaturgy because a lot of the plays are interested in often gender dynamics and the interactions between men and women.

in a way that's I think slightly shifted from what goes on in the pre-16 war period although of course they're still interested in gender there as well.

And as you've already mentioned, we've had this hiatus period in which many of the players of the previous eras must have passed away. And many, I believe, went to the continent as well to practice their art there where they could, some of them with the court in exile. Absolutely, yeah. So we've got... The hangover generation or the generation that are left at the end of the 1630s and the 1640s, many of those have retired or died. Some of them do go on into this period.

company is made up in its very early seasons of the kind of almost the rump troupe. of the old king's men, old players like Michael Moen, Charles Hart, these kinds of players who would have been boy actors in the 1640s. or in the late 1630s, early 1640s, they're now coming back as the kind of mature leaders of that troop. And that's important that there's a kind of continuity with Killigrew's company, I think, the King's company.

does claim a kind of kinship with the old king's men, particularly with Shakespeare and the other playwrights associated with the king's men. Davenant's troupe, on the other hand, is a more or less completely new assemblage of untried actors and actresses. His key acquisition at this time is the young Thomas Betterton. who has not acted before but is going on to become the greatest actor on the restoration stage, and a whole series of young women that he trains up.

like Anne Gibbs and others as well. We have two different kinds of troupe. We have a kind of... An older generation killer group claiming to be restoring what was going on in the pre-1642 period and continuing that somehow. And then Davenant kind of announcing a completely new, fresh, young, but inexperienced company.

What I really wanted to get to today, because I'm talking about Shakespeare at the minute on the podcast, is how Shakespeare was received in this period and what happened to the plays. It's no spoiler to say that they became heavily adapted. and improved in their own terms, let's say. So can you tell us something about how Shakespeare's plays reappeared on the stage at the beginning of the Restoration? Yeah.

So as we've set the scene there, we've got two companies who are beginning to revive the theatre in England, in London, but they need a repertory. right they need a repertory of scripts that they can produce um and

We actually don't have in the early 1660s any active playwrights surviving, except for the two theatre managers, Killigrew and Davenant. Both are playwrights, both were Caroline playwrights. The other surviving playwrights from the pre-1642... period is James Shirley who is no longer writing plays, he's no longer active in that industry and indeed will die by 1666.

So there are no active playwrights. So what their companies have to do is divvy up. the existing scripts from the pre-42 period and in fact what they end up doing is turning more or less exclusively to the plays that were owned or understood to be owned by the old king's men. And so Killegrew lays claim to that repertory because he claims that his king's company is a direct descendant of that company and therefore the repertory is by rights his. But Davenant, the problem with that is...

that Davenant himself had in the 1630s written for the king's men. And so his plays are... being claimed by killigrew so davenant's actually not even able to perform his own plays let alone any other plays wow he actually has to go to the lord chamberlain in order to resolve this issue. And the Lord Chamberlain essentially says, OK, you can have these plays, but you have to divvy them up. So Davenant can have his own access to his own.

plays that he wrote and he can have access to nine of Shakespeare's plays. I can list them. Hamlet, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet. The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Everything else goes to Killegrew. Now, I think that Davin gets quite a good deal there, actually. Yeah, that doesn't sound too bad at all, does it? With some of those titles. So he does get a good deal.

And what happens is the two companies begin producing those plays along with other Kingsmen staples like the Duchess of Malfi, a couple of Ben Johnson's plays, other things like the Bondman as well is another play, lots of Fletcher plays get performed as well. But in terms of Shakespeare,

Killegrew doesn't really do much with the plays that he inherits from Shakespeare. He does one-off productions of things. He does in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which doesn't go down very well with Pepys. He says it's an insipid play. He does other things as well, but he doesn't really do very much with it.

It's Davenant who performs the bulk of the Shakespeare in the 1660s. But he does so in... adaptive forms one of the conditions of his patent of his license to perform is that he is to reform and make fit that is the expression in the in the license Shakespeare's plays. So the idea is to update them with any language that might seem to be archaic or crude or indecorous.

And he also has to change them because the needs of his company are different. He has a number of many more main actors that he needs to find characters for that Shakespeare's plays don't. accommodate and he also needs to give the women actors opportunities to really showcase their talents so one of the things that he does immediately from the get-go is to start to adapt the plays in order to accommodate his actors and offer them vehicles to show off their talents.

So there was no sense of a reverence for Shakespeare's work, certainly not in the way that we might have it, but do you think there was appreciation of the poetry? I definitely think that that is true. I think it's a difficult... balance that they're they're having to manage because on the one hand Shakespeare in terms of being read as a poet I think is being valued by people in the early restoration it's clear that the folio is

Although the folio is a kind of very elite text, it is something that's valued and revered. Killegrew has a portrait painted of him holding a copy of the folio. So it's something that they do value. At the same time, Davenant, I think... who does absolutely venerate Shakespeare. He's Shakespeare's godson. That's something I maybe should have said earlier on. But actually, there's a family connection there that Davenant was born in Oxford.

And his parents ran an inn in Oxford that Shakespeare reputedly stayed at on his journeys between Stratford and London. And indeed, they became... good friends such that William Davenant is named for Shakespeare, he's actually his godson, and there are kind of accounts of Davenant. as a young boy falling over his godfather and celebrating his poetry and all the rest of it and wanting to be like him when he grew up. And indeed, there's a kind of spurious anecdote.

kind of history around Davenant sometimes claiming when he gets too drunk when he gets in his cups is the phrase that he claims to actually be Shakespeare's illegitimate son. And there's absolutely no evidence for that. But nevertheless, he does seem to make that kind of claim. Convenient claim to make in his position, I guess. Although, of course, the difference between son and son.

And God's son was probably a lot less than we might think of it in today's terms. Absolutely. So the connection is a very sincere one, I think. Yes, sincere and genuine. Yes. Whichever. So I think Davenant does really revere Shakespeare and his poetry in this in the adaptation of The Tempest, which we might talk about in a moment.

And Davenant's collaborator, John Dryden, the famous poet and playwright, writes a preface where he says that it was Davenant who first taught Dryden to revere Shakespeare and venerate Shakespeare. And that it was Davenant who kind of really sees the value. of these plays, but recognises, I think, the really transformed circumstances of the restoration that means that they simply wouldn't work in their unaltered state. They don't provide...

As I say, they don't provide enough characters for the actors in the company. They don't have enough female parts to satisfy the group of four or five actresses that are in the company and who are being paid and who need to have... opportunities to be on stage. So I think Davenant does reverence the poetry but recognises that he needs to update and he needs to provide his company with meaningful roles.

Yeah. So you mentioned the Tempest there. So perhaps could you tell us something about how that was adapted? Yeah, of course. So the Tempest is probably Davenant's most famous adaptation, along with the Macbeth, which comes a couple of years earlier. So The Tempest comes in 1667. That's the first performance record that we have for it. And Pete sees it in November 1667. And it's adapted.

by Davenant alongside John Dryden. And Dryden in his preface to that text tells us very clearly that they kind of divvied up the adaptation. Davenant asked Dryden to write new scenes for the lovers, the young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda. and to add a couple of characters which I'll talk about in a moment to that and Davenant himself was responsible for the comic parts with the sailors and he kind of added new scenes for the sailors.

What's interesting about The Tempest, on the one hand, there are two things. One is the amount of music and spectacle that is added to that text. Now, of course, The Tempest is already in Shakespeare's period.

a text interested and invested in stage spectacle right with the mask kind of culture all of the mask culture that's surrounding that and this is something that i think these adapters readily make that they see as a kind of opportunity for them to increase that even more with with the movable scenery that's available at Lincoln's and Fields with the light lighting effects that they can create and also with the addition of music which is a really important element of

restoration theatre. On the other, they see opportunities to increase roles for their actresses. So Davenant and Dryden's adaptation of the addition of new characters. Dorinda, Miranda's younger sister, who has never seen a man before, like Miranda, neither of them have ever seen a man. And then there's another character added to the production called Hippolyto.

who is a young man who is also on the island. He's a young Duke of Mantua who has been usurped, not unlike Prospero himself, and has been taken by Prospero. for safekeeping onto the island and he's isolated on this island and he has never seen a woman before and we can see where this is going i think we have a kind of conceit where we've got A doubling of Miranda and Dorinda with Ferdinand and Hippolyto.

And we've also got two young women who have never seen men before and a young man who's never seen women before. And of course, the play centers on that kind of clash and the introduction of them to each other. So that's the kind of main conceit. The other thing to know about Hippolyto particularly is that he's what we call a breeches part. So he's actually a male character who is male. There's no kind of.

Twelfth Night revelation that it's actually a woman in disguise. He's gendered male within the context of the play but he's played by a young actress and this is something again that the play is interested in thinking and playing with the idea of gender and sexuality.

in this play so that is one major kind of element to that adaptation uh and the other is i think um a more overtly comic use of the sailors particularly in relation to questions of regicide and usurpation and kind of political resistance political subversion That's obviously something that is inherent in the original, but it's something that takes on a kind of really important valence in the restoration period.

speaking as it does to a period post the regicide of 1649 and the restoration of Charles II. This is a moment that I think feels very fraught to audiences in LIF. And to make a kind of... comic moment of a series of usurpers who are trying to overthrow the rightful heir to the throne is something that I think would have tickled a lot of royalists in the audience. Yes. Yes, certainly I can see there's some sensitivities there that would have been skillfully taken out where necessary. Absolutely.

You mentioned the prevalence of music there and dancing, I think, as well. Is that true across all of the adaptations of the plays? We can see it fits in The Tempest quite well, which actually sounds like it was a... a fairly sympathetic adaptation, putting aside our loathing of changing Shakespeare at all. Yes.

Yeah, I think so. I think that's a play that actually stands up. It has had a few modern productions in recent memory, particularly at university level drama. It's had a couple of quite well, very well received. performances and I think it is a text that stands up. But music in Macbeth, I'm sort of struggling to see that. Yeah, Macbeth is a funny one, isn't it? I mean, there is music in the folio edition of Macbeth. Of course, we do have the witches' songs in the Middleton revision.

what we suspect might be the Middleton revision of Macbeth. And again, I think that's something that Davenant is thinking about when he goes about adapting Macbeth in 1664. And it's the witches that offer him the opportunity for these kinds of inset mask moments, these kinds of musical moments in the text. So in the restoration period. Music is often associated with supernaturalism, characters of a supernatural bent, witches, wizards, spirits.

We can see that in The Tempest, I think, with Ariel as a good example who sings in The Tempest. And it's the witches in Macbeth that offer that opportunity. In the play... there are a number of alterations to do with again the witches being about propounding regicide encouraging this kind of unlawful usurpation and music being somehow the seductive medium through which to encourage Macbeth to commit the regicide it's the music that is somehow

enabling that or opening that up. And so are there some examples of truly terrible adaptations? Yeah, I think both of the ones that I've just described are actually the two best adaptations and stand up on their own two feet. The other thing to say about Macbeth, I think, is that it's building on the witches in order to respond to new plays that are entering the repertory at the other house.

So one of the things that Davenant is doing with Macbeth is responding to a new play by Dryden called The Indian Queen, which is also a play about a usurping... in this case a female usurper who kills the king of Mexico and takes over his throne and in that play she also goes to a magician's house to ask him

for advice about how to get out of this predicament that she's usurped the throne, what's going to happen to her. And I think what Davenant is doing is using Macbeth in order to respond to that. So you can see that that is a play that is... engaged in the wider repertory of the Restoration.

In terms of bad alterations, I mean, I have a penchant for them all, but I think we might think that the law against lovers, which is Davenant's very first adaptation, isn't very good. It's a mashup. of Much Ado About Nothing with Measure for Measure, in which the Benedict and Beatrice subplot gets kind of grafted onto the Angelo Isabella plot from Measure for Measure. Again, this is... This is partly due to Davenant wanting to find more roles in the Shakespeare text for his female actors.

So, you know, by doubling the number of women immediately, he's achieved that. He also adds in new characters like Viola, who's the younger sister for Beatrice, who actually, again, sings a song. She actually is also a kind of musical figure.

in that but the the adaptation itself really doesn't work it just doesn't kind of the grafting is so awkward angelo becomes this kind of character who right at the very end reveals that he actually was never really going to kind of seduce isabella it was all a test he really just loved her and married her but there's no sense of kind of emotional realism there

kind of psychological veracity at all and the Beatrice and Benedict stuff although you still get the kind of repartee between them as you do in the original It becomes really stilted because actually you've got this other character, Viola, who's played by a young girl, we're told. And we know that she was played by an actress called Mole Davis, who was famous for her voice and for dancing.

but this was her debut role, I suspect, and she was very young. She's kind of always coming in and interrupting them. So actually the kind of... rhythm of those exchanges becomes really disrupted and I'm not sure that it's actually very successful and it never gets revived after its initial set of performances in 1662. So clearly Davenant felt it didn't really do the job.

And unlike Macbeth and the Tempest, which are frequently revived throughout the period, that one is sort of laid to rest very early on. And how about the history plays? I'm guessing Richard II probably didn't get much treatment given the nature of that play. Richard II never gets performed in its Shakespearean guise. There is an adaptation which...

is produced later on in the 1670s. It's called the Sicilian Usurper. So it's actually transposed to Sicily in a kind of vain attempt to make it less obviously... political and less obviously English. But that becomes a problem for the censor later on. But in the 1660s, when Davenant's in the management of the Lincoln's Enfield,

that those plays aren't done. The history play that is performed is Henry VIII. And again, I think you can see why if you think about that as a play that offers opportunity for scenic spectacle, tableau pageants. There's great opportunities for music. And that play isn't actually adapted by Davinant in the same way as The Tempest or Macbeth. He doesn't go about rewriting it. But what he does do is he stages it in a very particular way. So he stages that.

in a historically, I suppose they would think of as a historically accurate way. There's a great deal of attention paid to the kinds of costume in that production. to the kinds of scenic painting that they do to recreate the particular royal halls and apartments in which the play takes place. And there's a great deal of investment in the music and the pageantry.

and the moving of those big set pieces and things like the trial scene as well. These are big moments. And one of the things I think Davenant's doing with that play is offering his three most important actors in the company, Thomas Betterton, an actor called Henry Harris, and Betterton's wife, Mary Betterton, the opportunity to have a kind of, I was going to say a sort of...

but it's not really because they're not really in love in the play but what you do get is a series of plays in this period in which the three of them are sort of playing off of each other so there's a whole series of plays where betterton and harris are fighting over or in love both in love with mary betterton's character and there's a kind of struggle with that and i think the henry wolsey catherine

relationship is not dissimilar to that in some ways. It's an opportunity for the three of them to really be the centre of the play. The other play that I have in mind when I'm talking about that is Davenant's adaptation of The Two Noble Kinsmen. which comes in the same season, called The Rivals, in which Betterton's Palamon character, renamed Philander in The Rivals, and Harris's Arcite, renamed Theocles in this.

production are both vying for the Amelia character played by Mary Betterton, who's renamed Heraclea. And I think that's something that Davenant is really playing with, with these Shakespeare adaptations. He can see he's got these star actors that are really good together and he's trying to find plays to suit them and offer them an opportunity to work.

in concert with each other so i think henry the eighth is the only history play that's produced in the 1660s under davenant precisely because of that casting opportunity rather than because of any political statement that he might wish to make right and did they between them work their way through the entire canon

Or were there plays that they, apart from Richard II, we've already mentioned that they never got to play? Yeah, so as I said, Davenant only has access to nine of Shakespeare's plays. He only has the right to perform nine of them. And within... the eight years of his management of the Lincoln Sinfield Theatre, he dies in 1668, they perform all of those plays. Some only receive one-off productions, so Twelfth Night, I think surprisingly.

Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, and Law Against Lovers, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure, they're only performed once. All of the others are revived multiple times. across that period. So they are getting a kind of education as it were, or the actors are able to perform in each of the Shakespeare plays that they're entitled to act in.

and that becomes a real staple of their repertory. Right. Does Johnson get revived as well, or is he already faded by then? Yep. Johnson is a really interesting figure in this period because along with Shakespeare and the other playwright that is important here is John Fletcher, as you can imagine, the three of them really are in this period recognised as the triumvirate of wit.

that phrase that you may be familiar with from John Denham. And they really are the three lodestars of this period. They're the three playwrights that are venerated and revered more than any others. And they... each generate different styles of plays that get taken up as this decade progresses.

So Johnson is definitely known about and respected, but he's actually not revived all that much. Early on, the play that's... first revived and this is at Killigrew's company not at Davenant but the play that's first revived is Episcene which I think is a really interesting one when you think about that as a play about a woman in disguise

And this is obviously a play that's speaking directly to this idea of women suddenly being allowed on stage and that the kind of dynamics of that play change immediately if a woman is playing that part rather than a young boy actor. But clearly that's something that spoke to that moment. The other play that was put on, and again, I think this might say something about the cultural moment, is Bartholomew Fair.

which of all of Johnson's plays, I think is the most surprising one to be staged. But I think that might also be something to do with a kind of nostalgia for a pre-war past and also maybe something. uh of a dig towards the kind of puritans who who closed the theatre down there might be something going on there with zeal of the land busy and that kind of thing um in that play

And then the other play that is also done is The Alchemist, which I don't think is surprising at all. Right. Yes, that's the one I would have guessed. Absolutely. So those are the three plays. The only adaptation of Johnson that I am aware of, I'm sure there are others, but the only one that I'm aware of is a play by John Wilson called The Cheats, which is a sort of adaptation of or a riff on.

Bartholomew Fair that's kind of the only time that Johnson and that's also in the early 1660s so quite early on but Johnson really isn't doesn't have the performance history that Shakespeare does and he's not taken up in the same way as a source for adaptation.

And to conclude, I asked Stephen for a word about his book, Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory, which is published as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Shakespeare performance series. Yeah, so the Cambridge Elements series is a series, a really interesting, I think, and exciting series intended to be accessible. but also kind of innovative. I think it's designed to be kind of cutting edge. And these are a series of short books.

between 20,000 and 30,000 words, so a kind of small monograph, between a long journal article and a full-length scholarly monograph on particular issues within Shakespeare performance. The series is edited by a great Shakespearean, Bill Worthen, at Barna College in the US. And each volume in the series takes a particular angle on performance of Shakespeare.

either a historical performance and mine sort of falls within that I think it's thinking about the performance of Shakespeare in in the 1660s but others are more theoretical or more contemporary and thinking about things like eco-criticism and Shakespearean performance or Shakespearean performance and neurodiversity and various things like that. So it's a really exciting series to be in. My thanks to Stephen for taking the time to talk to us today.

His book, Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory, is available from wherever you buy your books, and I've put links to some online options in the show notes for this episode. Next time, it's back to Shakespeare in his own time as we take a look at the sophisticated verbal comedy that is Love's Labour's Lost.

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