November 08, 2023

New Thinking: The Box Office Bears project

31 minutes

Goldilocks, Robin Hood, Little Bess of Bromley, Moll Frith were star performers on the bear baiting circuit in Elizabethan England. New evidence of bear bones uncovered in archaeological digs and over 1,100 accounts in letters and documents from the period, are being studied in a research project called Box Office Bears. Andy Kesson delves into bears’ impact on the literary culture of the time and asks if bear baiting was not so much a sporting contest as a staged spectacles akin to contemporary wrestling. Hannah O’Regan explains how bear bones found in archaeological digs in Southwark’s theatre land reveal the animals’ stressful lives and she suggests that the scary, fighting bears of our cultural imaginary are strikingly different from the playful, conflict defusing bear of real life. Were they unfairly typecast?

Hannah O'Regan is Professor of Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the University of Nottingham and Principal Investigator in the BOB Project. She has excavated on sites in the UK, Israel and South Africa. Her current research interests include human-non-human animal interactions (particularly bears).

Andy Kesson is a Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton and Co-Investigator in the BOB project. He was the principal investigator for Before Shakespeare, and is working with the theatre maker Emma Frankland on a production of John Lyly’s Galatea which he discussed in an episode of Free Thinking called Galatea and Shakespeare https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kvpk. He has recently explored a multitude of bears in early modern plays.

Box Office Bears: Animal baiting in early modern England, is a project bringing together researchers from the Universities of Nottingham, Roehampton and Oxford and project partner Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) https://boxofficebears.com/about/

Dr Emma Whipday is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University and an expert in Shakespeare, early modern literature, women's history, theatre history, and the history of the home and family . Her current book project, Subordinate Roles, explores the cultural importance of the brother-sister relationship and the place of the unmarried woman in early modern society. She’s a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker on the scheme which promotes research on the radio.

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find more in a collection of the website of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme and all available on BBC Sounds.

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