Theatre historian and Shakespeare scholar Laurie Johnson will explain how the spatial logic of early playing spaces flipped during the uneven evolution of the Elizabethan playhouses. From Mankind (c. 1470) to Macbeth (1606), playwrights reversed the way their play texts referred to going in or going out. The shifting shapes of Tudor era playing spaces explain this reversal.

The Society looks forward to welcoming Fellows, Affiliates and guests to our annual summer miscellany, with a Pimms reception afterwards.

The English seaside resort led the development of a worldwide leisure revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries– this lecture argues that this should be marked by UNESCO and celebrated.

This lecture will survey the history of early modern embroidered tabletop boxes, focusing on the variety of extant boxes, their compositions, and how they served as instruments of ownership, privacy, and agency for their makers and owners.