University of Cambridge - drama

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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Into the woods with Shakespeare

amb206 — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Fear and forests, writes Shakespeare scholar Professor Anne Barton, go hand in hand. Forests are where we get lost and meet wild men, where chaos rules and anything can happen. Shakespeare uses forest settings, sometimes magical, sometimes menacing, in many of his plays. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there. When in Macbeth Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth knows he is doomed.

Barton, who died in 2013, was Professor of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Her many published works included Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994) and Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984), and she was also an influential editor of Shakespeare’s plays. She was vitally interested in performance and staging, and her work has substantially altered and enriched the ways in which Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists have been understood and performed.

Now Cambridge University Press has published The Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton’s final book, based in part on her Clark Lectures in 2003. It has been prepared for publication by Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries, a former research assistant to Barton and now a Shakespeare scholar herself, and a University Lecturer in the Faculty of English. In an editor’s note, Lees-Jeffries describes Barton’s seminars, held in her beautiful rooms at Trinity College, as often intimidating but always with a sense of occasion.

Woods and forests in the English language

The six chapters of The Shakespearean Forest set the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests, as well as exploring the surviving evidence for the ways in which forests might have been staged in the early modern theatre. The opening chapter reminds us how big a part woodland plays in the story of the British Isles. The English language is rich with references to wood and woods. We talk about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’ and ‘not being out of the woods yet’. We ‘touch wood’ to forestall ill fortune.

If Britain is wooded today, it was much more so in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The names of these forests and woods entered the lexicon. The maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother Anne was Arden. His birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was once surrounded by the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden. It was even said that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree right across the county of Warwickshire.

But this forest was already in decline in Shakespeare’s time. Trees provided timber for house and ship building, fuel for cooking and heating. In his Description of England in 1587, William Harrison commented that both England and Wales “have sometimes been very well replenished with great woods and groves, although at this time the said commodity be not a little decayed in both”.

Shakespeare wrote for the ‘wooden O’, as the open-air, timber-framed Globe Theatre is described in the Prologue to Henry V. The origin of many of our current environmental anxieties can be found in the early modern period, and in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; they too were concerned by deforestation and pollution. Like the theatre itself, the forest is a place of transformation, growth and change.

Hunters, poachers and wild men of the woods

Forests were all about hunting – a pastime seen as preparation for warfare. Complex laws gave royalty rights and privileges to hunt deer and boar. Elizabeth I was a keen hunter, as well as being readily associated by poets in her courtly cult with Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt. Her successor James’ passion for the chase, writes Barton, “verged on the pathological”. He even insisted on being lowered into the gaping bellies of dead stags in the belief that the blood would strengthen his ankles.

Poaching was widespread and, though illegal, was not regarded as socially disreputable. The gentry, and even nobility, engaged in poaching – either for fun or to pursue family vendettas. Popular tradition holds that Shakespeare, too, may have been a poacher in his youth. Barton paints a vivid portrait of a group of poachers as a motley crew of unruly thrill-seekers united by blood-thirsty machismo.

“Heavily armed […] accompanied by a remarkably democratic mixture of friends, eager household servants, and people from the local village (sometimes including the vicar), men who had deer parks of their own, regularly broke into those of their neighbours, viciously assaulting keepers and killing more game than they could carry away.”

More benignly, green men and woodwoses (wild men of the woods) are key characters in the dramatis personae encountered in fields, woods and forests. In medieval churches and cathedrals, leaf masks are carved into stonework as decorative motifs, stubborn leftovers from a pagan past. They are, observes Barton, “reminders that forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated”.

While for other dramatists, wild men were “a vogue that peaked and faded”, writes Barton, “Shakespeare’s interest in wild men seems to have extended throughout his writing career, taking in Oliver [As You Like It], Timon [Timon of Athens], the dancers in Bohemia [The Winter’s Tale], Caliban [The Tempest], Cardenio [The History of Cardenio] and (in a sense) Herne the Hunter in The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Elsewhere in the book she explores the various traditions of Robin Hood and Merlin the enchanter, both of whom make appearances in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Ben Jonson.

How did Shakespeare bring the forest to his audiences?

A central question of Barton’s work is how Shakespeare might have brought the physicality of forest and woodland to the stage. There is no documentary evidence to show how early performances of Shakespeare’s plays led audiences deep into the woods. The only clue comes from the Netherlands in form of an engraving, dated 1635, which shows an elaborate indoor stage at a fair. In the background two tall trees are visible, perhaps waiting their moment in the next scene.

To exemplify the effort and expense invested in creating spectacular entertainment, Barton describes in detail the extraordinary artificial forest commissioned by Henry VIII for a pageant performed to celebrate the birth of a son on New Year’s Day 1511. ‘La Forrest Salvigne’ took the form of a rolling stage (requiring 40 men to propel it) complete with a magnificent forest from which the king and three companions appeared, mounted on horseback and fully armed.

According to meticulous accounts kept by an official, this forest comprised 12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 hazels, 10 maples. 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks and 16 furze bushes. Also present were 6 fir trees, holly, ivy, fennel stalks and 2,400 acorns and hazelnuts. Most of these items (including the nuts and acorns) were not gathered from the countryside but man-made. As Barton writes: “The individual shapes and sizes of its myriad leaves, for instance, were delicately cut from fine sarsnet, a fine silk material, and then backed with stiffened paper.”

Barton’s interest in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays reflects the way her own life brought together the worlds of theatre and academia, not least in her marriage to the director John Barton. In an afterword to The Shakespearean Forest, Shakespeare scholar Professor Peter Holland writes that many of Barton’s students became actors and directors and that many of her research students (including Holland himself) wrote dissertations centrally concerned with the questions of performance in early modern drama.

Holland writes: “Performance inflected her approach to plays and nothing in her writing […] allowed plays to be analysed as if their narratives could be divorced from the rhythms of performance.”

The Shakespearean Forest by Anne Barton is published by Cambridge University Press.

Inset image: map of Warwickshire from 'The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine' (1611) (Atlas 2.61.1, Cambridge University Library)

The Shakespearean Forest reimagines the real forests that our greatest playwright evoked in his works. The final book of renowned scholar, Anne Barton, it explores the changeable and sometimes sinister presence of the forest in literature and culture.

Forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated.

Anne Barton

Glasgow University Archive

Henry Peacham, 'Silvius', from Minerva Britanna (1612)

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Opinion: Skinnydipping, spies and shortages: Deutschland 83 brilliantly evokes life in East Germany

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:29:02 +0000

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for early episodes of Deutschland 83

One of the first things that happens in the first episode of Deutschland 83, the riveting German Cold War spy drama on Channel 4, is that Lenora Rauch – the brilliant, manipulative and obviously high-ranking Stasi officer stationed in West Germany – rushes home to East Berlin. After watching Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech on West German television, she is convinced that NATO is preparing for an imminent nuclear attack. She calls her boss, switches off the telly and leaves her apartment.

But why on earth would she take a jar of freeze-dried coffee with her? Here is a bit of realism: many consumer goods, especially “luxury” items such as coffee, chocolate, trainers and VCRs were in desperately short supply in the East, available only at huge expense in the specialised “Intershop”, “Delikat” or “Exquisit” outlets.

This control of supply in turn reflected another desperate shortage: hard currency. The GDR, while well off in the context of the Eastern bloc, was perennially skinned for convertible (Western) currency and resorted to all manner of tricks and blackmail to get its hands on it.

West Germans could purchase gifts, for example, from cassette recorders to prefab houses, for relatives in the East or friends using the Genex catalogue, a state monopoly operating through a Swiss intermediary. In Deutschland 83, it is poignant that Lenora takes the precious coffee not to her boss (as per usual), but to her sister. She needs it to soften the blow of poaching her border guard son Martin for a crucial Stasi mission in the West.

The theme of consumer goods shortage is carried through consistently, with an eye for historical detail and a tongue in cheek. Martin Rauch infiltrates the FRG as an army officer called Moritz Stamm and is overwhelmed by the choice of fresh produce in a West German supermarket and nonplussed in an upmarket restaurant when the waitress asks him what kind of steak he would like – “From the cow”, he replies. So full points for realism on consumer goods and their potential leverage.

Less realistic is the scene in which Martin, working as a border guard prior to his recruitment by the Stasi, accosts two would-be smugglers. Together with a colleague, he taunts them for their individualism, greed, and naivety: did they really think they’d get away with it? So far, so plausible – but then he lets them go, squirrels away the contraband, winks at his colleague and they share a laugh.

In reality, a border guard conscript such as Martin would scarcely have taken such risks. Who is to say that his colleague, for all the playful elbow-jabbing, is not reporting back to their superior, or worse, the Stasi? In a country of 16m people there were over 90,000 permanent Ministry of State Security employees (admittedly including spies in foreign lands, cleaners, clerical staff etc – but still a large number) and a staggering 180,000 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – unofficial collaborators or informants, such as the unfortunate actress wife of the dissident author in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

In any case, the playfulness, complicity and laxity of the two border guards in letting off the two “parasites” is deeply misleading. In reality the smugglers would probably have faced prison, possibly re-education and certainly official ostracism – even though all they carried was an edition of Shakespeare and one of Marx.

Trabants and tatty clothes

In terms of sets and props, production values trump the likely reality of the clothes, fittings, dwellings etc. Sure, the shape of the beer bottles, the cut of clothes and the penchant for skinnydipping are all well researched, but in the TV series, it all looks rather stylish. Clothes fit and interiors are well put together – if occasionally odd or austere. The GDR, however, was a place where everything from nails to shirts, paint to nappies, curtains to cars could be hard to come by.

There was an 18-year waiting list for a Trabant in East Germany. Fsopolonezcaro via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The waiting list for a Trabant, a two-stroke, minuscule car produced virtually unchanged from the 1950s to the 1980s, was 18 years; the price prohibitive. People wore horrible spectacles (there were only a handful of models to choose from), ill-fitting clothes – and many appeared in Christmas and wedding photographs wearing the same outfit year after year.

But if the GDR of Deutschland 83 appears less run-down and shabby than it really was, the same is true of Mad Men’s 1960s Manhattan – and if the Elastoplast glossiness makes us more likely to take in this engrossing Cold War spyfest, who cares? For while the plot takes some liberties, it faithfully sticks to the overall facts, the poetic truth, of GDR life.

That Martin has no idea of his father’s identity or whereabouts is realistic – single parenthood was normal, carried no stigma and could count on comparatively generous state support. That Martin would know the score of the West German football cup final is also realistic – most GDR citizens had access to West German TV and watched it despite official strictures not to do so. The protocol of a regional committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party that we teach as part of our course on the reconstruction of Germany notes that moving the regular meeting slot is all but inevitable, as otherwise members would leave “in order to catch the seven o’clock news on West German television”.

Welcome to Stasiland

Other examples of realism abound. That advanced medication like the immunosuppressant crucial to Martin’s mother’s kidney transplant would be hard to get by (partly because its purchase diminished hard currency reserves)? Realistic. That such treatment was de facto the privilege of the elites in the “state of the workers and peasants”? Realistic. That, partly as a consequence of such perks, the Stasi attracted some of the best and brightest? Realistic. Stasi officers such as Lenora or her boss, the awesomely named Schweppenstette, could well have been razor sharp, flexible, if necessary charming and generally very good at their jobs.

Young East German border guard Martin Rauch is coerced into spying for the Stasi. Channel 4

That they rode roughshod over the private lives of citizens? Realistic, too. In an understated but chilling scene, Lenora, Schweppenstette and a sidekick come to the Rauch family home to interview and recruit Martin. They don’t so much as knock. Martin is not awake, but summoned to the kitchen in his pyjamas. The nonchalance of this invasion and its air of brusque, unquestioning and unquestioned power conveys a GDR reality, just as the fact that Lenora will exploit family ties for her political ends does. Of course the TV series presents a condensed, dramatised account. But ideology did trump family loyalty, in official policy and often enough in the reality of GDR citizens.

Fond memories

It is less paradoxical than it may seem that, nonetheless, most people were happy in the GDR, most of the time. This, too, Deutschland 83 gets right. It was not just the stability and social security, nor the fact that the state provided public goods free of charge that inspired such identification and for some even patriotism.

As long as you heeded the rules, which for the majority of Germans under Communist rule meant no conscious blinkering, more a routine of moving within the parameters set by the state, there was no particular reason not to be happy. In the GDR, people made friends, fell in love, argued with their parents, fretted about wedding arrangements, moved to a different city to study, had favourite movies and songs.

That much of this normalcy was questioned and to an extent invalidated by reunification inspired a good deal of the longing that Germans call “Ostalgie”. And that Westerners frowned upon such regrets – “But … it was a dictatorship!” – only cemented it. Ossis didn’t hanker after the Stasi – how could they? – but they did mourn the loss of the everyday GDR that framed their lives and which reunification had swept away, from the layout of traffic signs to the old brands of chocolate and gherkin.

Even after the decommissioning, to all intents and purposes, of the Sonderweg thesis, the Third Reich remains the reference point of German history, implicitly or explicitly. While that is warranted, it has some problematic side effects, not least that in comparison to the Holocaust and Hitler, almost any other kind of state crime looks relatively benign and explicable.

It is here that Deutschland 83 seems to me particularly successful: it is even-handed and almost sympathetic in suggesting that the GDR’s intrusive and cynical policies, vis-à-vis the West and its own citizens, were motivated by the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation.

At the same time, it makes crystal clear that the operation of a successful secret intelligence network of the kind that places and directs Martin Rauch depends on exploiting precisely the kind of liberties and legal safeguards that the GDR denied its own citizens, or routinely flaunted. There are many lessons in that, not least concerning our own attitudes to the reach of security organisations that we rely on, but whose remit we should not renege on monitoring.

Henning Grunwald, Lecturer in History, 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.

Henning Grunwald (Faculty of History) discusses how accurate the representation of life in Cold War era East Germany is in Channel 4 drama Deutschland 83.

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The Wall behind the Reichstag, (East) Berlin, Germany (1989/312)

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