Our alumni include many of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars, such as Professor Sir Stanley Wells and Professor M J Kidnie, along with actors such as Ian Hughes and Andrew French, and recent PhD graduate Elizabeth Freestone, who in 2023 directed The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Alex Kingston as Prospero. Close associates of the Institute include Sir Kenneth Branagh – who is Honorary President of the Shakespeare Institute’s 75th Birthday Celebrations, and who has worked with the Institute’s Professor Russell Jackson as textual consultant on all of his Shakespeare films; Dame Judi Dench; Sir Simon Russell Beale (co-editor, with the Institute’s Professors Michael Dobson and Abigail Rokison-Woodall, of the Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare); and Dame Harriet Walter, to name a few, some of whom have wished us a happy 75th birthday and are taking part in our celebrations this week.
Beyond its educational mission, Allardyce Nicoll saw the Institute as a powerhouse of research into Elizabethan drama and its historical contexts. One of his first appointees was a young scholar called John Russell Brown, who had been experimenting with authentic candlelit performances of Jacobean tragedies, and who would, during his subsequent time at Birmingham, train the future RSC artistic director Terry Hands. Our current faculty includes Professor Tiffany Stern, a Fellow of the British Academy who is widely recognised as the world’s leading authority on the Shakespearean theatre; her new book Ballad Business explores how Elizabethan playwrights composed narrative pop songs as a means of marketing their work. Tiffany works closely with Dr Simon Smith, whose focus is on the Elizabethan audience: he too has a new book this year, Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres: Playgoing, Pleasure and Judgement in Early Modern England.
Nicoll was also keen that the Institute should study the circumstances of Shakespeare's life, a tradition upheld now by our Associate Professor Chris Laoutaris. Chris has already produced important work on the rows with aristocratic neighbours, which impinged on the activities of Shakespeare’s theatre company, on the printing of the Shakespeare Folio and on Anne Hathaway. Just this past week, he has published new research revealing that Shakespeare may have been more politically provocative than thought by most scholars.
