‘More like a tavern than a school house’: Family strife, religious change, and the founding of Oundle Grammar School, 1556–1578

The convoluted and contested foundation of the Grammar School at Oundle, Northamptonshire, in 1573 illustrated the complexities involved in giving concrete shape to pious wishes in 16th-century post-mortem bequests. Although the founder was Sir William Laxton (d. 1556), the key figure was his widow, the assertive matriarch Dame Joan Kirkeby-Luddington-Laxton, the richest woman of early Elizabethan London. This paper analyses the politics, religious context, and family strife of this dispute, and in so doing illuminates the contours of early Elizabethan London.

‘Of counsel with [m]y mistress’: The mistress–servant alliance in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622)

Analyses of service in The Changeling have focused on De Flores as an embodiment of contemporary fears about servants, neglecting his mistress's agency and the play's engagement with anxieties about women's authority, especially their power over servants. They also ignore two other servants, Diaphanta and Lollio, whose relationships with their mistresses are equally revealing of those anxieties. This article argues that The Changeling stages alliances between mistresses and servants as threatening to patriarchal authority. It revises the dominant critical reading of the play, showing that while the castle plot dissolves the mistress–servant alliance, the hospital plot is less straightforward.

Shylocks’s ghosts

Compagnia de’ Colombari, directed by Karin Coonrod, fashioned The Merchant in Venice from the stones of the Venetian Ghetto: Shylock's haunting ghost corporealised under moonlight. This 2016 production followed Max Reinhardt's Venetian Merchant in 1934: another lingering ghost of Shylock. These productions intersected in a vision to create bonds between strangers. Looking back on them in the Covid-19 pandemic context of isolation and intolerance, they remind us of the restorative hope in a globalised theatre. This essay engages with the way the Ghetto, Venice and Shylock speak back, inverting the perspective of the ‘other’, framed by personal reflections of the author-actor playing Nerissa.

Macbeth apropos to Rupert Goold's and Gregory Doran's Stagecraft: Equivocation, violence, and vulnerability

If Macbeth is Shakespeare's play of equivocation and doubleness, Rupert Goold's and Gregory Doran's productions were informed by like concerns, even having double performance lives on stage and on film. Doran's production followed along the lines of Trevor Nunn's 1976 staging, which highlighted the interiority of the Macbeths in the intimate space of The Other Place. Besides creating a sense of intimacy on the Swan's stage, Doran underscored the play's political relevance. Goold's mise-en-scène, also performed in an intimate space, pushed further Doran's militaristic staging. Jan Kott's reading of Macbeth as a ‘nightmare’ also offers a yardstick for production choices.