Category Archives: Culture, Text and History

Black History Month 2021: Shakespeare, Race and Performance

Black History Month 2021

As part of the series Black History Month, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper will be speaking on Shakespeare, Race and Performance at the Museum of London.

TUESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2021, 6:00PM – 7:00PM (also live-streaming).

How do Shakespeare’s familiar plays Othello and Romeo and Juliet reflect the early modern preoccupation with race and emerging concepts of colour-based racism? How do these ideas play out in early modern as well as in contemporary performance?

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Shakespeare in the Royal Collection. Shakespeare’s Second Folio.

Sally Barnden, in conversation with Emma Stuart, explores Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which was in possession of Charles I during his imprisonment.

One of the most prized objects in the Royal Collection is a ‘Second Folio’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays, first published in 1632. It contains handwritten annotations made by the deposed King Charles I in the final days before his execution on the orders of Parliament, during the English Civil War.

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Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (22 Kingsway) … the English Department … Mental Health Awareness …

By Graham Fifoot (editor)

At 22 Kingsway, a life-sized Virginia Woolf wax work is exhibited inside a room of her own in the foyer of the Virginia Woolf King’s College London building. Eleanor Crook’s wax work creation is dressed in clothing modelled after the dress, shawl and hat that Woolf famously wore in a 1923 photograph taken by Lady Ottoline Morell.

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Reform, Rejection, and Renewal: Findings from the Shakespeare in the Royal Collection

By Kirsten Tambling and Sally Barnden

Dr Kirsten Tambling and Dr Sally Barnden, postdoctoral research associates on the AHRC-funded project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’, discuss their work and findings ahead of the launch of their online database and exhibition on the 15th of July.

Kirsten: In 2018, Cole Moreton wrote a piece for the ‘i’ on the ‘transformation’ of Prince Harry. Arguing that ‘Prince Harry’s transformation from wild child to hero is uncannily like that of Shakespeare’s warrior Hal’, Moreton traces the trajectory of the Prince of Wales’s second son from tearaway teenager – sent to rehab for smoking cannabis – to one of the royal family’s most popular members, alongside that of Prince Hal of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.

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