Ben Jonson staged a masque at court called The Fortunate Isles which begins with a spirit descending onto the audience, featuring a floating island so elaborately constructed that England’s premiere architectural professional, Inigo Jones, who is the designer behind Whitehall Palace, Banqueting House, and Covent Garden square, was hired to construct an apparatus specifically for this performance. While records do not detail the construction of this magical floating island, we know from various accounts it was impressive in its scope and execution. So, What does this mean about William Shakespeare? We know from Shakespeare’s plays that the bard includes very similar items in his plays as well. From magical floating islands and gods riding on dolphins in plays like Twelfth Night to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, where there is a stage direction that almost mirrors what we know happened in Jonson’s masque, when the text says “Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle” When these fantastic elements are used in the text, does that mean Shakespeare could have had an architectural designer build an elaborate floating island, or a descending eagle befitted with thunder and lighting inside The Globe theater?

Traditional theater research into Elizabethan staging suggests that the set and scenery for this play would have been so sparse that the production relied on the strength of the dialogue to convey the elaborate and fantastic parts of the story, but if that is the case, why did Shakespeare map out Jupiter’s descent in the stage directions with such precision? Could Shakespeare have used elaborate props and circus-like movable scenery? Our guest, Dr. Michael Hirrel believes, the answer is yes.

Modern productions of plays include all manner of music, accompaniment, and we almost consider an orchestra pit to be synonymous with theater today. For William Shakespeare, however, his plays were performed in a variety of locations, all of which were void of any orchestra pit but we do know that Shakespeare’s plays included music with works like Hamlet calling for Ophelia to sing a song, but also flourishes to signal entrances as well as exits, along with popular ballads and even a few songs we believe Shakespeare wrote himself. 

Our guest this week, Catherine Loomis, is here to help us explore the role of music in early modern theater, and the songs that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Catherine Loomis has taught at the University of New Orleans and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (2010) and the editor of William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume (2005) and Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage (2015) as well as essays on Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and theater history. She has lectured on Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at the Folger Institute in Washington, DC, and at several universities. She is currently working on a collection of early modern poems and prose works in which male authors adopt a female narrative voice.

Along the North shore of England lies the Holderness Coast. Over 500 years ago a small town on this coast, named Ravenspurre, went down under the sea and into history as the spot where Henry IV rallied his troops on his way to dethrone Richard II. It is a story repeated by William Shakespeare in his versions of this historical rebellion, with Ravenspurre appearing as “Ravenspurgh” spelled with a gh on the end, in Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, and Henry VI Part 3. Recent research into the exact location of Ravenspurre, and the last spot it was known to be before coastal erosion swallowed the town into the ocean, reveals new information about where Henry IV first landed on his way to defeat Richard II, and shines a historical light on the legendary location of Ravenspurre.

Our guest this week is Dr. Robin Bates, who recently presented on her research investigating the location of Ravenspurre and its relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II, for a presentation at the Blackfriars Conference in Staunton, VA.

No one asks a question better than William Shakespeare. When we explore his plays, they are full of question marks but it turns out that for the 16th century, the concept of what constituted a question was still a new thing for printers who were in charge of selecting the actual marks which would go on the page to indicate a question. Not to mention, since Shakespeare’s plays were written on paper originally, or recounted in letters, often times the text that printers were working with to compile works like the First Folio required the printers to interpret pretty hard to read Elizabethan handwriting. That resulted in what is known as punctuation variations, and as our guest this week presented at the recent Blackfriars Conference, there were even some writers who suggested there be brand new kinds for question marks all together. Our guest, James Loehlin, is here this week to take us back to Shakespeare’s England and explore how we know when Shakespeare was actually intending to ask a question.

For many of the performances we know Shakespeare performed at Whitehall Palace, including staging “Twelfth Night” in 1602, he would have performed at Banqueting House. Unfortunately, the original Banqueting House burned down after Shakespeare died, and while rebuilt in 1622 by the famous Inigo Jones for James I , the structure there today is not the original site where Shakespeare’s company would have performed. Nevertheless, the name Banqueting House reminds us that for Queen Elizabeth the banquet was a large affair, full of all the pomp and circumstance you might expect from the Queen of England. After all, these state occasions were often used to welcome and entertain visiting dignitaries as well as to mark special occasions, such as royal birthdays or the Christmas season. But what was Shakespeare’s role at these banquets? We know he was there, but was he just a performer, there to put on a play, or was he allowed to be a guest at the lavish dinners as well? And what were the standard aspects of a royal banquet in the 16th century that would have been seen and heard in the Palace of  Whitehall or Hampton Court Palace those years that Shakespeare was performing there?

Here to take us back to Shakespeare’s lifetime and help us experience the formal banquet through the eyes of Shakespeare is our guest, Julia Lupton.