In 2001, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre created a collaborative Shakespeare Studies Master’s degree programme – the first Master’s in Shakespeare Studies to be taught jointly by a university and a theatre – that has run for twenty years and continues to thrive. This chapter is an edited conversation between four of the academics who have taught on the degree programme – two based at King’s, two at the Globe – in which they address the unique nature of the Globe as a combined theatrical/educational organisation, the origins of the collaboration between King’s and the Globe, and the value it has brought to both partners. The conversation turns to the pedagogical value of the degree, the difference it has made not only intellectually but also to the employability of its alumni, and the impact it has had on the cultural sector in London and beyond. The participants also address the difference this collaboration between an experimental theatre and a university has made to the research orientation of the academics involved and, finally, they discuss the question of the reproducibility of the degree and the conditions that need to be in place for an educational collaboration of this kind to be sustained.

This chapter examines how early modern plays, if viewed as kinetic maps, articulate how an actor’s body reflects emotion through a range of gestural utterances that can perhaps be felt kinetically by audiences; it does so through the lens of race and performance. Taking Burbage’s performance of Othello as a case study and Imtiaz Habib’s documentary evidence of black lives in Tudor and Stuart England, Karim-Cooper speculates about black presence in the audience. As such theorizing about the relationship between movement, racial impersonation and audience response can unearth a reciprocal dynamic that forms the basis of early modern theatrical performance.

This essay examines the meanings of black and white within the early modern lexicon while considering how these meanings translate in performance. It addresses the relationship between the audience perception of race and the performance of blackness on the early modern stage while explaining the various materials and technologies available to early modern actors to create a range of racial identities, such as black and white cosmetic paints, textiles, clothing, and music. Finally, this essay draws upon available evidence about black presence in early modern England to suggest the plausibility of a more diverse audience than theatre scholars have been willing to admit. This diversity therefore would have influenced not only the reception of racial performances but also the development of staged representations of racial otherness over time.

In his essay ‘The Presidigitator: A Manual’, Christof Migone suggests that ‘touch has become synonymous with the genuine, the real, the human’ (2004: 1). Merleau-Ponty asserted that the ‘intimate relation between sight and touch allows a sense of immersion in the world’ (cited in Paterson, 2007: 88). More recently, Juhani Pallasmaa observed that ‘Touch is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with that of ourselves’ (2005: 11). This chapter is interested in how the iPad or mobile tablet creates the perception of the ‘genuine’, ‘real’ and the ‘human’ while it enables an immersive relationship for scholars with early modern texts and images through the sense of touch. As I begin writing this chapter on my iPad during my train journey to work, I think about the convenience of mobile tablets and their materialisation of the notion that everything can be found ‘at our fingertips’. As a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern cultural history, my research practice has never been one characterised by convenience and it has often been the case that I did not have all the resources I needed at my fingertips. In this chapter, I will explore how the iPad has the potential to intervene into research practices, specifically here for scholars of early modern literature or history. Thinking this through with sensory theory or haptics (relating to the manipulation of objects using the sense of touch) and discussing the importance of tactility to researching historical texts, this chapter will argue that touching and manipulating the early modern canon is a scholarly practice that the iPad simultaneously promises and denies.