University of Cambridge - theatre

Unseen Peter Shaffer play revealed at Trinity

ta385 — Fri, 01 May 2026 12:41:14 +0000

Trinity College is celebrating the centenary of the birth of twin brothers Peter Shaffer (1926-2016) and Anthony Shaffer (1926-2001) who both studied at Trinity and went on to become award-winning playwrights. Peter bequeathed his substantial archive of playscripts, correspondence and photographs to Trinity College.

PhD student James Critchley came across the unstaged play Our Lady of the Volcano in the archive, while studying Shaffer’s first play, Five Finger Exercise. The play had been catalogued by archivists, but has remained completely unknown. Our Lady of the Volcano reflects the importance of Italy in Shaffer’s creative life. Set on the sultry Amalfi Coast, the plot swirls around two British travellers staying in a villa and their interactions – for better or worse – with other residents.

James Critchley says: "It's about competing kinds of romance narratives, primarily relating to the Brando-esque Jim Suckling, and his various encounters in relation to a religious festival near Sorrento. And in this kind of steamy, tempestuous sensuality, you can see the growing influence of writers such as Tennessee Williams, who Shaffer admired."

For Critchley, the play is intriguing for its cinematic influences, at a time when Hollywood films set in Italy – among them Roman Holiday, Three Coins in the Fountain, Boy on a Dolphin – proved highly popular.

"It emerges from a real immersion in the cinematic world of the early 1960s - these films made in Italian studios fed into Shaffer’s thinking. It was quite unusual at the time to see a play set outdoors, in an Italian villa, so the play is an example of him thinking across different media."

Our Lady of the Volcano marks a transition in the playwright’s early work, Critchley argues.

"Shaffer longed to leave behind the world of slammed doors and actual breakfasts being consumed in an atmosphere of domestic tension. He wanted to reinvent theatre. Of course, in later plays like Royal Hunt or Amadeus, he can be seen confidently working towards what he called ‘Total Theatre’: a mode of performance in which music, mime, movement might all play a role as important as scripted text.

"Even though the play never made it to stage, it is fascinating to see a writer developing his craft: to peek, as it were, behind the curtain. We can see in Our Lady ideas and scenarios that he would go on to flesh out more fully in the mature works of his later career."

James, who began exploring the Shaffer Archive as an undergraduate, said his PhD offered an amazing opportunity to understand Shaffer’s evolution, as well as the ups and downs charted in his correspondence.

"It's really exciting to be up close and personal so to speak with the projects that didn't necessarily make it to publication, but which still have all of the kind of thrilling imprints of a writer whose legacy continues to flourish today."

Shaffer at Cambridge

Peter and Anthony Shaffer were conscripted to the coal mines in Kent as ‘Bevin Boys’ during the Second World War. After that, in 1947, aged 21, they arrived at Trinity, Anthony to study Law and Peter, history.

Peter Shaffer described student life as ‘heaven’ and Cambridge ‘an astonishing place for many reasons.’ He attended lectures of all kinds, including by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and he met EM Forster at King’s College, where the novelist was an Honorary Fellow.

Peter entered a short story competition set by Forster and although he did not win, he did receive an invitation to tea. He recalled: "I said I would love to have tea with him and I went round in some awe of the great man. And he served me tea and he was very shy. … it was tremendously encouraging … the fact that he liked the story and it had merits and he had a way of conveying its demerits … that was very, very graceful."

Enduring legacy

Peter Shaffer’s breakthrough came in 1958 with Five Finger Exercise. He would go on write acclaimed plays that continue to be staged today: a production of Equus opens in London this month and a major new production of Amadeus has been announced for 2027 in UK. Only last December Trinity alumnus Will Sharpe directed Amadeus for television, playing the title role himself.

Anthony Shaffer trained as a barrister but devoted his life to stage and film following the success of Sleuth in 1970. His film credits include Hitchcock’s Frenzy and the cult classic The Wicker Man.

In the centenary year, Trinity will announce the fifth Shaffer Playwright-in-Residence, a studentship established with funding from the Sir Peter Shaffer Charitable Foundation for early-career playwrights.

More information

A catalogue of the Sir Peter Shaffer Archive at Trinity College is available online. Researchers are welcome to consult items in the archive by appointment with the Wren Library.

James Critchley has written an essay, 'An unpublished play by Peter Shaffer', for The Times Literary Supplement.

His research is funded by the Alice and James Penney Studentship in English Literature.

This story was originally published by Trinity College.

A PhD student at Trinity College has unearthed a complete, unpublished play 65 years after Peter Shaffer wrote it - and before he reignited the world of theatre with the acclaimed plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus.

He wanted to reinvent theatre

James Critchley

Trinity College Cambridge

Title page of Peter Shaffer's Our Lady.

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Cambridge scholar helps bring Ukraine’s pain and power to the stage in critically acclaimed creative collaboration

ta385 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:40:13 +0000

The Guardian calls it ‘shattering’. The Stage heralds it as a ‘challenging, artfully constructed indictment of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.’

Written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton, and directed by Burton, The Reckoning channels voices of Ukrainians across the country – a priest, a volunteer, a dentist, a security guard, a journalist – who are forced to confront the sudden horrors of invasion and occupation and to repair bonds of trust amid violence and fear. These voices are real, drawn from witness statements collected and conserved by the journalists and lawyers behind The Reckoning Project.

Rory Finnin, Professor of Ukrainian Studies and a Fellow of Robinson College at Cambridge, collaborated with Burton to help shape the play. His decades of research into Ukraine’s culture and society formed the basis for a grant in support of The Reckoning from the University of Cambridge’s AHRC Impact Starter Fund account.

“Our collaboration with Rory Finnin has been invaluable throughout the making of The Reckoning,” said Burton, who is also Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Dash Arts. “Rory’s insights into Ukraine’s past and present gave me deeper grounding as a director and co-writer and helped sharpen the questions the play asks of its audience.”

The Reckoning blends dynamic storytelling with movement, music, and food to forge new routes of solidarity and understanding with the audience. As Everything Theatre notes in a glowing review, “We leave not as passive spectators but as an active part of the struggle.”

Attendees share in a summer salad made over the course of the play by the Ukrainian and British cast – Tom Godwin, Simeon Kyslyi, Marianne Oldham, and Olga Safronova – who bring empathy, humour, and integrity to each scene. The conclusion of each performance features an invited speaker from the audience who comes to the stage to reckon with their own experience of the play from different ethical and intellectual perspectives.

Professor Finnin spoke on the play’s first night at the Arcola Theatre.

“Over three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, we are too often tempted to turn our eyes away from Ukraine,” said Finnin. “But The Reckoning empowers us to look closely and to see with new purpose. It has been an incredible privilege to support a dynamic work of art that brings Ukrainian voices to the fore and challenges us to listen and respond to them, with urgency and moral clarity.”

The Reckoning runs through 28 June at London’s Arcola Theatre.

The Reckoning is an intimate work of documentary theatre composed from a verified archive of witness testimonies chronicling Russia’s war of aggression. It is now playing at London’s Arcola Theatre to universal acclaim.

We are too often tempted to turn our eyes away from Ukraine

Rory Finnin

Dash Arts

The Reckoning being performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2025

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Cambridge University at the Edinburgh Fringe

jek67 — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 06:26:14 +0000

Read about the Cambridge University students captivating audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe this August.

Opinion: How a comic character sparked our very modern privacy fears – 200 years ago

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 14:17:46 +0000

We live in a time where there is no longer any privacy. Everything is recorded and shared, permanently available to those who pry or, as they may think of it, research.

While AS Byatt wrote this just recently, the debate about privacy is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1825, the theatrical sensation of the year was a comedy entitled Paul Pry which played to packed houses in London, throughout the provinces, and by the following year as far away as New York. The drama became a matter of public debate through its central character’s catchphrase, “I hope I don’t intrude”, which appeared not just in the rhetoric of politicians and commentators, but also printed onto various objects in an early example of merchandising.

In the play, the eponymous hero was constantly prying into the domestic affairs of his neighbours, either by eavesdropping or by intercepting their letters. At every turn he misunderstood the secrets he had acquired, generating an escalating confusion in relations between lovers and between parents and children.

The phrase expressed the increasing ambivalence of popular attitudes towards privacy. It conveyed the new enthusiasm for inquiry, the sense that advances in education and the expansion of the media were creating a new era of transparency and informed debate. The state began to sponsor elementary schools in 1833 and three years later lifted what was described as the “tax on knowledge” – a stamp imposed on newspapers to put them out of reach of working-class readers. In 1840 it sought to widen access to communication by introducing the flat-rate, pre-paid Penny Black stamp, which cost a penny irrespective of distance.

At the same time, there was an anxiety that the realm of private communication was under threat from new forms of surveillance. As the family was increasingly thrust to the foreground as the core of morality and discipline, it seemed that its capacity to keep its own secrets was coming under attack.

Matters came to a head in 1844 when the recently launched satirical magazine, Punch, published a cartoon depicting the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, dressed as Paul Pry, standing in the new Post Office Headquarters eagerly opening the mail that was passing through the system in ever-increasing volumes. The government had been accused of intercepting the correspondence of suspected Italian republicans at the behest of the Austrian government. Coming just four years after the costly decision to democratise the post, it stood charged of exploiting new opportunities for invading the private realm. The Lord Chief Justice depicted the Home Secretary “opening a private letter, becoming the depository of the secrets of a private family … meeting an individual in society and knowing that he was in possession of secrets dearer to him than his life.”

The Home Secretary’s career never recovered from the controversy. The event, wrote his biographer was:

like a match struck for a moment amid profound darkness, revealing to the startled crowd vague forms of terror, of which they had never previously had a glimpse … and about which they forthwith began to talk at random, until a gigantic system of espionage had been conjured up which no mere general assurance of its unreality could dispel.

The affair marked the beginning of the inclination to cast the privacy debate in magnified terms: from a handful of Italian exiles to all those who sent a letter. The postal network exposed the privacy of every citizen, and surveillance embraced not just their political views, but every aspect of their domestic lives committed to paper.

Adding a very modern twist was the government’s refusal to confirm or deny the charge made against it, inventing the doctrine – which has been followed in the centuries up to Edward Snowden’s revelations – of refusing to comment on its use of surveillance technologies. This had the advantage of keeping the press and readers at bay, leaving successive governments free to extend their operations in response to unforeseeable threats to the security of the state. On the other hand, it prevented the government from denying what it had not done, leaving the field open to conspiracy theorists.

Today, despite belated attempts to enshrine the powers of the security services in law through the Investigatory Powers Bill, the structures of surveillance remain wilfully opaque. David Anderson QC, reviewer of the government’s counter-terrorism legislation, wrote that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is “obscure since its inception, has been patched up so many times as to make it incomprehensible to all but a tiny band of initiates”. The current draft of the Investigatory Powers Bill claims to initiate a new regime of clarity, yet ensures that that the grounds for steaming open electronic letters are written in terms that allow the broadest interpretation.

For 19th century families, as for those of today, maintaining control over personal communication was a matter of constant adjustment and compromise, of small victories and passing defeats. But today, privacy has become a controversy played out in public – fuelled by revolutions in our means of communication, and conditioned by governments forever inclined to keep secrecy secret.

David Vincent, Visiting Fellow in Technology and Democracy, CRASSH, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

David Vincent (CRASSH) discusses the nineteenth century theatrical sensation that inspired public debate about privacy.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC (Julie Ainsworth, photographer)

English actor John Liston as the title character in John Poole's 1825 farce, "Paul Pry"

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New season of ADC shows begins early January

sj387 — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 16:21:11 +0000

The renowned ADC theatre, known for alumni such as John Cleese, Sir Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson, will continue to build its reputation with a formidable term of amateur-run shows.

From one-man stand up, to Broadway classics, to a dark reimagining of classic children’s tales, the ADC offers a wide range of shows in its upcoming programme of events.

In mid-January, audiences can watch as the cunning and unscrupulous anti-hero Richard III rises to power before losing the throne less than three years later. Other Machiavellian leaders can be seen in George Orwell’s 1984, a depiction of a dystopian future where opposition is futile, dissent is a crime, and defiance means death.

For a lighter evening’s entertainment, stand-up comes in the form of Pierre Novellie’s Mighty Peter, Ben Pope’s Cheese (And Other Things That There Are), and the self-titled act Phil Wang and Jonny Lennard. There is also this term’s comedic highlight, the Footlights Spring Revue, this year called The History of Everything. Running at the beginning of March, it promises viewers a chronological odyssey through the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the invention of the iPhone and everything in-between.

Musicals are well represented this term, with regular events such as the 24-hour musical and the Musical Theatre Bar Night being held alongside the Broadway favourites Guys and Dolls and Anything Goes. Another musical, of a different nature, is Into the Woods, a darkly enchanting journey woven out of the tales of Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel.

Other top shows include Pornography, described as ‘a portrait of our own England seen through a kaleidoscope’, The Other Line, an ‘undomestic drama’ examining female choice, and Blue Stockings, Jessica Swale's debut play following the 1896 female attendees of Girton college, fighting for their right to education and graduation. Ted Hughes’ 21st century translation of Euripides’ Alcestis will also be performed, reflecting on timeless questions about morality, selfishness and politics.

Visit http://www.adctheatre.com/whats-on.aspx for more information, and to book tickets.

From Richard III to Guys and Dolls, the ADC theatre will play host to an eclectic mix of shows in the coming months

James Bowe

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The lost library of Eleonora Duse

hps25 — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:09:25 +0000

A book launched tomorrow (24 January) at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge shines new light on the extraordinary life of the legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) whose extensive library of books was bequeathed to New Hall (now Murray Edwards) in the 1960s as part of a bigger collection. Many of them contain her personal bookplates and handwritten notes, and when some of the volumes were opened the college librarian found pressed flowers between the pages as bookmarks for significant passages.

With her beauty and talent, Duse captivated the imagination of many of the writers of her time, including the Irish novelist James Joyce. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection by Anna Sica and Alison Wilson sets her library within the wider context of her life and looks at her career through the prism of the many books she acquired to develop her own understanding of the parts she played and enable her to engage intellectually with her peers in the world of art and literature.

The books that once belonged to Duse were donated to New Hall in 1962 by the actress’s grandchildren, Father Sebastian Bullough and Sister Mary Mark. They were children of Duse’s only daughter, Enrichetta, and her husband, Edward Bullough, professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge. When they gave their mother’s books, the Mrs Edward Bullough Bequest, to the newly-emerging college, they did not reveal that the bequest included their grandmother’s books.

As Miss Sarah Newman, New Hall’s first librarian, began to record the entire bequest, she realised that several books it contained had belonged to the famous Italian actress. But for decades the volumes once owned by Duse were overlooked. Duse’s biographers and scholars have invariably mentioned Duse’s personal library but have usually concluded that it was lost after the dismantlement, in 1914, of the library of her women’s cultural club, The Actresses House in Rome.

Only recently was it revealed that the Bullough Bequest contained much of Duse’s personal library of the books she described famously as her “artistic wardrobe” and most treasured possessions. The provenance of these books came fully to light in 2007 when Dr Sica, historian of theatre at the University of Palermo, began to research the origins of the books in the Bullough Collection with the help of librarian Alison Wilson and others at the University of Cambridge.

It is thought that the Bulloughs may have deliberately concealed the provenance of some of the books in the bequest and it was recorded that Enrichetta burnt many of the letters from her mother’s lover, the Italian poet, Gabriele d’Annunzio, who made Duse the heroine of one of his novels. Duse had a series of famous lovers and was considered a muse by some of the most celebrated artists and writers of her time – including Rainer Maria Rilke and James Joyce.

Duse’s fascinating journey as the daughter of impoverished travelling actors who rose to international fame has been the subject of several biographies which have concentrated on her interaction with some of best-known names in the arts world of her era – including her passionate affair with d’Annuzio, her professional rivalry with Sarah Bernhardt, and her close friendship with Isadora Duncan and other iconic figures of an age that continues to capture public imagination as a time of high romance.

The Murray Edwards Duse Collection focuses instead on Duse’s intellectual life and thirst for knowledge as seen through her collection of books, which range from histories of theatre to books on the cubism movement in art, from criticisms of French literature to guides of European cities. Despite her lack of formal education, and her irregular income as an actress, she acquired both newly-published literature and antiquarian volumes.

Together Duse’s books reveal her passion for the arts, her interest in the classics, and her impressive grasp of several European languages. Above all they speak of her commitment to researching in almost scholarly depth the roles she played. Indeed, it is thought that Duse’s approach of immersing herself in the parts that she played laid the foundations for what became known as method acting.

“The first time I set eyes on Eleonora Duse’s books in the library of Murray Edwards I realised I had struck gold,” said Dr Sica. “This remarkable resource enables us to understand Duse’s intellectual evolution, the erudition that she displayed throughout her acting career, and her artistic and intellectual profile which inspired come of the major artists of her time.”

The Murray Edwards College Duse Collection (published by Mimesis) will be launched at Heffers, Trinity Street, Cambridge at 6.30pm on Thursday 24 January 2013. The event is open to all.

How her personal library informed the phenomenal talent of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse is revealed in a newly-published book that catalogues the Duse Collection owned by Murray Edwards College.

The first time I set eyes on Eleonora Duse’s books in the library of Murray Edwards I realised I had struck gold.

Dr Anna Sica, University of Palermo

Murray Edwards College

Books in the Murray Edwards Duse Collection

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No shortage of storylines to unravel at the ADC Theatre this summer

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:18:22 +0000

The Combined Actors of Cambridge, which has aimed to provide the opportunity to demonstrate local talent for the past 45 years, undertakes the task of realising the work of the prolific comic playwright.

The light and entertaining narrative follows the creative block of the Pendon writer’s circle as they search for inspiration. Throughout the piece the audience is led to explore the unleashed imagination of a writer. When Arnold, chairman of the circle, is left alone we are shown the full potential of the artistic mind as creative juices begin to flow. A series of varying fictional narratives become confused and interwoven to great comic effect. There is no shortage of storylines to unravel here.

Ayckbourn’s witty observations give a reminder that life is full of absurdities. The ADC theatre will be a place of improbable but entertaining fiction this summer.

Continuing the summer program is Anton Chekhov’s tragic comedy The Cherry Orchard. Bawds, a leading Cambridge amateur theatre company of restoration plays, produced their version of Tom Stoppard’s adaptation on their 30^th anniversary.

In a piece which explores the futility of trying to hold onto the past, Chekhov’s last play draws stark contrasts between old and new Russia as Mme Ranevskaya fights to pay back debts in order save her family estate from auction. The piece holds prominence today as it echoes the modern fragile economy and the decisions that have to be made by those who risk losing everything.

Given the choice, will Ranevskaya save her home or save the cherry orchard and the integrity it holds? A comedy laced with dark, tragic elements reaches the ADC theatre from the 12^th – 16^th July.

The wit of Alan Ayckbourn returns to Cambridge at the ADC theatre this July (5th – 9th), with the first local amateur production of Improbable Fiction.

ADC Theatre

The Cherry Orchard

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Shakespeare's medieval world

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of universities have chairs in early modern literature, a few in Middle English; Cambridge is unusual in combining the two, in the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English originally set up for C.S. Lewis. His example of working across the periods has been followed by many of its later occupants, even though most scholars are cautious about crossing the invisible boundary between them. As the current holder of the Chair, I was delighted to be commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare and the Medieval World. Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Subtle glimpses of a changing time

Research is most often a process of discovering what’s there. That may be achieved by new technology, from Galileo’s telescope to the electron microscope, or simply by looking at things from a new angle or seeing them differently. Shakespeare’s medieval world is of the second kind.

We have, for instance, a number of early 17th-century engravings of London that are regularly reproduced in histories of the early modern city or books on Elizabethan drama. Apart from the newly-built theatres on the south bank, however, almost everything in the pictures is medieval: the great hulk of old St Paul’s towering over the city, the serrated skyline of the towers and spires of the parish churches, the bridge (completed in 1209) with its display of traitors’ heads, William the Conqueror’s Tower. They show, in fact, not so much ‘Shakespeare’s London’ as ‘Medieval London in the age of Shakespeare’.

Staging the world

The same principles apply to drama. Many of the great cycles of Biblical mystery plays, which we think of as medieval, continued to be performed until half-way through Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a couple of them (both now lost) into the reign of King James I. Coventry, not far from Stratford, had one of the best known; it was last performed in 1579, when Shakespeare was 14 years old. His plays contain a number of allusions to the cycle plays – ‘out-Heroding Herod’ is the most famous of them – and most of them bear a particularly close relationship to what is known of the Coventry cycle. It can’t be proved that he saw it, but of the many unknowns in his life, that he did so is one of the safer conjectures.

The cycle plays, furthermore, offered a model of theatre that was at the opposite extreme from the Classical Latin drama that was taught in the schools and imitated by humanist playwrights. It was insistently inclusive. The motto traditionally ascribed to the Globe, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (something between ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘everyone acts a part’), declared that the theatre was as large as the world: the maxim first appears in the 12th-century writer John of Salisbury, whose works were regularly reprinted in the Renaissance and were known, among others, to Ben Jonson.

The theorists might insist that kings and clowns should never share a stage, but it was the very point of the Biblical plays that both kings and shepherds came to the newborn Christ. They did not separate out comedy and tragedy, both newly-imported terms: they offered an all-embracing play, in which black humour and deep grief could mix in the Passion sequences. They had no qualms about presenting a vast range of time and space on stage, from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgement, in ways that can make Shakespeare’s embrace of Rome and Egypt within a single play, or a time span that allows for babies to grow to adulthood, seem quite modest. And above all, they acted their action. Classical and humanist drama relied on messengers to report what was happening outside the single location it allowed itself, and especially any kind of violence. Medieval and Shakespearean drama performed it, blood and all.

Those ideas are so familiar now – so much part of what plays do – that it is easy to forget how much they needed to be asserted. Some, such as the mixing of tragedy and comedy, incited bitter hostility among Elizabethan theorists and have continued to cause unease for much longer (hence the notion of ‘comic relief’: it’s more complicated, and more profound, than that). The dramatists for the public theatres, like their medieval forebears, assumed that the stage had the same freedom of representation that we now accord to the cinema screen. No one expects the screen to obey the Aristotelean principles for the stage rediscovered around 1500 – that it should show only one place, or that the action shown on it should approximate to real time; both are possible, but exceptional. Medieval principles of theatre gave Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights the freedom that the neo-Classicists wanted to forbid.

What Shakespeare read

‘Medieval Shakespeare’ extends not just to his theatre, but to his reading, and to what he wrote about. Not only his plays on English history, but Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear draw on history or legendary history as it was carried forward from the Middle Ages.

The story of Hamlet was first written down around 1200, and was in oral tradition before that. Lear was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain(c. 1136), and Holinshed’s great Chronicles, the Elizabethans’ encylopaedic history of their real and supposed past, took the story from there. Lear’s Tom o’ Bedlam quotes from a folktale, and from one of the medieval verse romances that in cheap print provided the 16th century with much of its pulp fiction. The Trojan Troilus and Cressida draws on Chaucer and Caxton much more than on Homer; Chaucer is the sole source for The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher, and is the major inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose tomb faces the grave of Shakespeare’s brother in what was once the parish church for the Globe and is now Southwark Cathedral, is both the source for the story of Pericles and appears on stage as its presenter. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and they are a minor presence in many more.

None of this means that Shakespeare was a medieval writer: he changed everything he touched, whether inherited or new. But it is only possible to measure what he achieved, or even to see it clearly, when we recognise how much the Middle Ages gave the world’s greatest playwright to work on.

For more information, contact Professor Helen Cooper (ehc31@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or Magdalene College.

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work. Professor Helen Cooper examines its influence on the work of the world's greatest playwright.

Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Professor Helen Cooper

ell brown from Flickr

Statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London

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