Reading Early Plays (REP)

“The soliloquies were rather ingeniously achieved by allowing the actor to smoke his pipe silently, while a low voice whispered his thoughts.”
- Julius Caesar in modern dress on British television in 1938.

UPDATED: the trailer for our Playmakers’ newest writing project, now with a title reveal!
(really not #ShakespeareSunday !)

REP’s Playmakers have a new project: a new source, a new story, a new date, a new set of characters to match with a new set of King’s Men actors; eventually, a new play that looks like an old one.

REP’s Playmakers have a new project: a new source, a new story, a new date, a new set of characters to match with a new set of King’s Men actors; eventually, a new play that looks like an old one.

Tonight in REP: an evening of court masques and other incidental King's Men performances (1609-12) with accompanying music & design coming to you via Zoom.

On British television in July 1939, “Fiat Justitia”, an eclectic anthology of literary scenes on the subject of the law, including Much Ado About Nothing & The Merchant of Venice
#Shakespeare

Merry Devil of Edmonton (& 13 other King’s Men plays) performed at Court between Christmas 1612 & 9th April 1613. It’s probable the play was already in their repertoire, in order to mount it and so many others at once. (Wiggins speculates that perhaps it never fell out of their repertoire).

Interesting! I’ll dig around a bit tomorrow.

Heminges moonlighting for his friend the Mayor, and working with Thomas Dekker, not a writer he’d had a great deal of contact with via the King’s Men, though they did revive, & perform at court, his and Webster’s Merry Devil of Edmonton in 1612

A very nice reading of the title character in The Lady of Chabry at #Britgrad2025
Thank you @shakescenery.bsky.social

THE NOBLE LADY Of Chabry PRESENTED BEFORE his Maieste, the Queenes Maiestie, the Prince, Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth their Highnesses, in the Banqueting house at White-hall on Wednesday the twentieth day of lanuarie, 1612. & sundry times Acted, by his Maieties Seruants, at the Globe, on the banke-side. ③麿 LONDON. Printed by T. C. for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Paul Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate. 1613.

At 6.15pm we read a play - if you’re at the Shakespeare Institute for #Britgrad2025 come & read with us.

(* please note: this is not a real Jacobean tragedy, as performed by Shakespeare’s company! We wrote it ourselves, but we do like to think that it’s quite convincing & enjoyable.)

Title page of an old play, in old spelling (but written in the last eighteen months): THE NOBLE LADY Of Chabry PRESENTED BEFORE his Maieste, the Queenes Maiestie, the Prince, Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth their Highnesses, in the Banqueting house at White-hall on Wednesday the twentieth day of lanuarie, 1612. & sundry times Acted, by his Maieties Seruants, at the Globe, on the banke-side. LONDON. Printed by T. C. for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Paul Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate. 1613.

This evening at @britgrad.bsky.social we read a play - if you’re at the Shakespeare Institute for #Britgrad come & read with us.

(* please note: this is not a real Jacobean tragedy, performed by Shakespeare’s company! We wrote it ourselves, but we do like to think that it is quite convincing.)

'Upstart Crow' - who insulted Shakespeare, and why? New research has cast fresh doubt on the origins of one of the most famous insults aimed at William Shakespeare, pointing the finger at a friend of the Bard.

Of interest to #earlymodern folks -- new research shredding light on the insult on Shakespeare as an "upstart crow" www.leeds.ac.uk/main-index/n...

19th June - REP goes to @britgrad.bsky.social
16.15 - Dr Martin Wiggins & Prof Roberta Barker give a plenary lecture on Casting Early Plays.
18.15 - REP’s Playmakers invite conferencers to join them in reading The Lady of Chabry a play newly cast & created for Shakespeare’s King’s Men company.

We have some incredible workshops lined up for BritGrad 2025, starting with Dr Alex Thom who will be speaking on strategies and timelines for the pursuit of funding ✨

detail from: The Assassination and Funeral of Julius Caesar, by Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono Giamberti (15th Century) - in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Tonight in REP we return to Julius Caesar, for its 1613 revival by The King’s Men.

19th June - REP goes to @britgrad.bsky.social
16.15 - Dr Martin Wiggins & Prof Roberta Barker give a plenary lecture on Casting Early Plays.
18.15 - REP’s Playmakers invite conferencers to join them in reading The Lady of Chabry a play newly cast & created for Shakespeare’s King’s Men company.

Old printed text that reads : Bil. And do you serve the good Duke of Norfolke still ?

When reading The Merry Devil of Edmonton for its 1613 revival by The King’s Men this is surely the question one must ask:

Title page of the play Philaster

Cover of a Penguin book, Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin

Cover of a DVD of the film Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

On Wednesday in REP we will read Philaster by Beaumont & Fletcher.
- it is subtitled Love Lies a Bleeding, so we will be investigating any signs of adaptation & influence in later, similarly titled, works (possibly).

Text with some lines blacked out: THE 'ARGEMENT. T he Sicknelle hot, A Malter quit, for feare, H is Houfe in Towne : and left one Seruant there. mow A Cheater, and his Punque; who now brought low, L cauing their narrow practile, were become C os'ners at large: and, onely wanting fome H oufe to fet vp, with him they here contract, Much company they draw, and much abufe S elling of Flyes, flat Bawdry, with the Stone: T ill It, and They, and All in fume are gone.

Tonight in REP we read a slimmed down version of Ben Jonson’s Alchemist (“two short hours” he said) carefully slicing away up to 25% of the play. What could possibly go wrong? #THALCHMST

Lines clipped from the prologues of three plays: The Alchemist, Henry VIII & Henry V. All three claim the play will last “two [short] hours”

“two [short] hours” - maybe they meant it when they said it.
[prologues by Jonson, (probably) Fletcher & Shakespeare].
- on Wednesday in REP we read a version of Jonson’s Alchemist reduced to something like the running time it claims for itself.
#ShakespeareSunday
#TwoHourJonson ?

Mercury and an English Soldier A Pleasant Dialogue by Barnabe Rich from 1574

My online modern spelling edition of A Dialogue Between Mercury and an English Soldier (1574) by Barnabe Rich.
- containing a visit to the court of Venus, a translation of Bandello’s Lady of Chabry, and Rich’s wholesale pilfering from multiple military manuals.
mercurysdialogue.wordpress.com

“Those that come to see
Only a show or two … may see away their shilling / Richly in two short hours.”

Tonight in REP we resume our chronological readings of the King’s Men repertoire with The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth (aka All Is True) by Shakespeare & Fletcher.

Shakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggests Professor says text shows Hathaway lived with playwright in London, upending the established idea of an unhappy marriage

- fascinating research from @matthewsteggle.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

David Garrick’s 1754 version of The Taming of the Shrew performed on British television in 1939:

Let'svs dispatch him, for Gods sake. Svb. 'Twill be long. FAC. I warrant you, take but the QQs I give you, It shall be briefe enough, 'Slight, here are more. Abel, and I thinke, the angry Boy, the Heyre, That faine would quarrell.Svb. And the Widdow? FAc. No, Not that I see, Away. O Sir, you are welcome, ACT. 3. SCENE.4

- ‘Twill be long.
- I warrant you, take but the cues* I give you, it shall be brief enough.

- the reduction, contrition, cribation & comminution (which is to say cutting) of The Alchemist in preparation for it’s fulmination in next season’s REP revival reading

[* in Q “cues” is rendered “QQs”]

Sarah Siddons, in reality, portrayed as the Muse of Tragedy. The lines quoted are from The Lady of Chabry, a newly written play, in the style of early 17th century English drama, by the REP Playmakers group.

“Drink then, and hear a fatal knell,
Drink then a purgative of Hell.”

Sarah Siddons in Act 5 of The Lady of Chabry
(painted on porcelain by Thomas Baxter in 1814, after an original by Joshua Reynolds, as seen at the Museum of Royal Worcester.)

//parts of this post may be fictional

… as I once did see In my young travels through Armenia, An angry Unicorn in his full carrier Charge with too quick an eye a jeweller, That watched him for the treasure of his brow ; And ere he could get shelter of a tree, Nail him with his rich Antler to the Earth.

An angry Armenian unicorn in George Chapman’s 1603 play Bussy D’Ambois for #NationalUnicornDay
(see ALT for a modernised version of the text)

“This England” (Richard II, Act 2 Scene 1): Leslie Howard & The Council For The Preservation Of Rural England on #ShakespeareSunday

REP resumes after Easter with new plays & revivals performed by The King’s Men in 1613, including All is True, Cardenio, The Alchemist, Philaster, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Julius Caesar & The Winter's Tale
(plus we’ll be taking a trip to @britgrad.bsky.social in June).