Renaissance Drama in Performance

Abstract

A key objective of the core first-year Renaissance Drama module (EN1050), which was taken in 2010 by over 290 students in the School of English, is to encourage the consideration of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays both as written scripts and as theatrical performances. The 'Renaissance Drama in Performance' project will enhance the current teaching provision on EN1050, to get students really engaging with contemporary performance contexts and investigating the history of Renaissance plays on the stage from the sixteenth up until the twenty-first century. Through collaboration with academic staff and working actors and directors from locally- and nationally-based dramatic companies, this project delivered a series of seminars and practical workshops designed to develop the students' knowledge of the particular challenges of staging and participating in Renaissance plays. These additions to the EN1050 teaching provision will encourage students to think of these plays in the three dimensions (visual and spatial as well as verbal) for which they were originally written over four hundred years ago.