Public Research Seminar: Where Actors and Musicians Meet

Public Research Seminar: Simon Smith
Where Actors and Musicians Meet: Creative Communities at the Early Modern Inns of Court

This paper will focus on the early modern Inns of Court – where lawyers trained – as places where musicians and theatre-makers came together during revels evenings and other entertainments as a form of creative community. The Twelfth Night performance in Middle Temple Hall in 1602 is often discussed, as are many of the spectacular masques mounted by the inns. This paper will look at even wider range of archival evidence to offer a new account of how musical and theatrical culture intersected at the inns.

Simon Smith is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. His monograph, Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625 (Cambridge, 2017), won the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award and the University English Book Prize. He has worked as a consultant for Shakespeare’s Globe, the BBC, the Independent and the RSC. He is currently editing Twelfth Night for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, and writing Shakespeare & Music for Oxford Shakespeare Topics.

Seminars are in RBC Workshop 2 and can also be accessed online via Zoom. A link to view the seminar via Zoom will be emailed ahead of the session.

Real and virtual doors will open around 3.25pm, the seminar begins at 3.30pm and discussion will conclude around 4.55pm.