All of our lectures are live streamed and are open to anyone to join us online, Fellows and Non-Fellows.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Lunchtime Lecture
The Flipped Playhouse: Tracing an Early Shift in Tudor Era Playing Spaces by Professor Laurie Johnson FSA FRHistS
Sometime between the earliest surviving English plays of the fifteenth century and the “golden age” of Elizabethan theatre in the sixteenth century, playwrights and performers seem to have flipped the way they thought about space. In medieval morality plays up to around The Play of the Wether (John Heywood, 1533), playwrights instructed players to go “in” to exit the stage and to go “out” to enter the stage. Yet only a few decades later, we find players instructed in play texts to go “out” to exit and to go “in” to enter. Still later, by the 1590s, the language of stage directions shifts to accommodate the “inner” and “outer” two-door logic explained by Tim Fitzpatrick, but the nature of the earlier shift has not been explored. This lecture will use evidence from archaeological investigations of multiple playhouse sites, recent theatre history work on court performance, public playing, and provincial touring, as well as close readings of play texts from Mankind to Macbeth to explore how plays and playing spaces evolved hand in glove to produce the flipped playhouse of Shakespeare’s age.
Laurie Johnson is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland and Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Historical Society. He is an academic adviser to the Museum of Shakespeare in Shoreditch, a research dramaturg for the Oxford Marlowe Project, and a contributor to the Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age, 1500-1700 database. His most recent major book has been Leicester’s Men and Their Plays: An Early Elizabethan Playing Company and its Legacy (2023), and he has published four other books, two edited books, and more than sixty book chapters and journal articles in related areas.
Laurie was elected a Fellow in May 2023 and we are pleased to welcome them to Burlington House for their inaugural lecture.
This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.
Attendance at Burlington House:
Open to anyone to attend.
The event begins at 1pm in the Meeting Room, please arrive with enough time beforehand.
Attendance online:
The event will be live-streamed on Zoom (if you register) and recorded on our YouTube channel.
The event will begin at 1pm.
You will receive an email reminder with the link to join the day of the lecture.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].
