Going to the Playhouse with Shakespeare

This lecture imagines a trip to a Shakespearean playhouse, accompanied by Shakespeare himself, in three parts: arriving at the theatre, where ballad sellers shape expectations through song; entering the playhouse, with its visual cues of genre, place, and meaning; and the play’s opening, focusing on actors’ gestures, movement, and costume. Throughout, it asks what is gained and lost when we study Shakespeare only as words on a page rather than performance.