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This project created a new space for public debate surrounding the World Shakespeare Festival, which was a key strand in the UK's 2012 Cultural Olympiad. By creating a collaborative online forum that invited cultural conversation, the project facilitated discussion about the role of Shakespeare and the arts in twenty-first century culture as well as generating the only complete, critical, and publicly-accessible account of the largest intercultural celebration of Shakespeare ever staged. The project is an examplar of interdependent research and impact.
Academics at King's have long been involved in the editing of Shakespeare. Their editions have benefited school students and teachers, general readers, and theatre practitioners. Here we describe the impact which two King's-edited plays have had on theatrical performances and cultural life. Both were published in the Arden Shakespeare series, the general editorship of which has been located at King's for nearly 30 years. Hamlet and King Henry the Eighth, edited by Ann Thompson (co-editor, with Neil Taylor) and Gordon McMullan respectively, were used in major theatrical productions by the RSC in 2009 and Shakespeare's Globe in 2010. Impact is demonstrable in sales figures, directors' statements, viewing figures, and in related media appearances by Thompson and McMullan.
The 19th century essayist William Hazlitt is a great, but neglected, master of English prose. Uttara Natarajan's research into his writings is a major factor in the revival of public interest of his multi-faceted achievement. She has led public discussions of his works and life at the Hazlitt Society and Hazlitt Day School, both of which she co-founded. In 2008, she launched the annual Hazlitt Review which reaches a wide general readership and academics. Her study has led to a range of invited public engagements, such as speaking on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time-William Hazlitt programme and delivering various public lectures.
Performance brings Shakespeare alive and each performance reveals new contexts for, and meanings to his plays. Research on Shakespeare in Performance is a core departmental activity that encompasses complementary themes and leads to impacts across a wide range of strands and fields. Warwick's Shakespeare scholars have explored the relationship between text and performance to bring a new understanding of Shakespeare to professional theatre companies and a renewed enjoyment to public audiences. In particular, their research has impacted on theatre productions, exhibitions, and public understanding through screenings, workshops, talks, young people's theatre and schools.
Professor Tiffany Stern's research into 16-18th Century theatre performance has restored a significant element of the cultural heritage to public understanding and has led to the creation of new cultural capital through her influence on present-day theatrical interpretations of Early Modern texts in England and America. She has also influenced the construction and use of theatrical spaces in both countries through her work as a historical advisor to theatre companies and cultural organisations. These direct influences have been supported by educational work with the general public and schools, in the form of lectures, podcasts, and interviews with newspapers and journals.
As a result of his research using new techniques in the digital analysis and visualisation of Shakespeare's language Professor Jonathan Hope was invited to work with the company of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hope's findings highlighted unusual interaction patterns between characters, a focus on objects (props), and very frequent references to space and movement in the language of the play. Actors used Hope's research findings to inform rehearsal and performance of the play which was performed to 14,509 teachers and pupils from more than 100 London schools over a two-week period in February and March 2012. Hope's engagement with the Globe Theatre has generated impact through its effect on the actors and their performances, through the pupils' engagement with the play, and in its contribution to the Globe Theatre's status as a national leading arts educational organisation. The impact has been extended to the 2013 schools production of Romeo and Juliet, playing to 16,325 school teachers and pupils from 128 schools.
While Shakespeare's plays enjoy a strong presence in popular culture (including through film adaptations), the Sonnets have remained relatively less accessible. Practice-led research in the School, conducted by Don Paterson, twice winner of the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry, and informed partly by the historical research of Renaissance colleague Neil Rhodes led to Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, a full-length popular commentary written from the perspective of a practising sonneteer. Subsequently Paterson's research benefitted World Book Night 2012 and involved him in work as consultant and contributor for Faber/Touch Press on their highly successful Shakespeare's Sonnets iPad application. The impact of this research has been that (1) an historically remote and formally challenging body of poetic work has been reinterpreted for a wide non-academic audience; (2) contribution has been made to innovative, entrepreneurial activity in the digital publishing sector, while cultural heritage has simultaneously been `curated'; (3) economic prosperity in the publishing and software industries has been stimulated. The users of research in this case study are the reading public; a major charitable trust; a relatively new digital publishing company; the print publishing industry.
Professor Brean Hammond's scholarly attribution of Double Falsehood as containing what remains of the `lost' Shakespeare/Fletcher Cardenio (1612/13) and his edition of the play for the prestigious Arden Shakespeare series contributed to the preservation and presentation of an element of literary cultural heritage that had previously been marginalised. Hammond's research has:
Dr Nicoleta Cinpoeş's research played an instrumental role in opening up a `cultural space' in Romania for revised public understanding of, and engagement with, Shakespeare's plays, through: (i) dismantling formerly entrenched distinctions, in Romania, between academic scholars' engagement with Shakespeare and the engagement of professional theatre makers and critics; (ii) seeding discussion and consideration amongst theatre makers, young people in formal education and the general public, of recuperation of Shakespeare in Romania through achievement of an uncensored history of appropriation and, within that project, of new, `clean' translations of the plays; (iii) supporting new translations of Shakespeare's plays directly, by providing rigorous, non- specialist, reader-friendly introductions that trace individual plays' stage and textual histories, as well as provide an up-to-date survey of their reception in criticism, stage practice and film adaptation.
The impact of the research has two elements:
Romeo & Juliet in Performance: collaboration with the organisation Film Education on the production of a DVD-based interactive teaching resource for GCSE English (2013).
Jacobean City Comedy. The editing/adaptation, rehearsing, public performances, and filming of Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters and John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (2011 and 2013). The first project has proved a significant teaching resource with more than 1700 schools nationwide already using it in their teaching. The second project entails significant public engagement through performances, workshops and talks, and educational outreach events, while a website further facilitates and tracks on-going discussion between scholars, theatre professionals and the wider public.