Blog

'Titus Andronicus' is notable for being the subject of the only contemporary illustration of a Shakespeare play.  Known as the Peacham drawing, and currently in the Library at Longleat House in Wiltshire, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, the dr…

Featured in episode 123: The History of New Place Here are three images to help you visualize Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, New Place. The first is a view of the site as it stands today. The side of the house you can see i…

Featured in episode 61: For the Money: The Medieval Commercial Theatre Ever wondered what a medieval play script looks like? This image is a page from the script for ‘Mystere des Trois Doms’. This play was produced in 1509 at Roma…

Featured in episode 58: The Castle of Perseverance The first thing to note is that this image is orientated with north towards the bottom of the page, the reverse of how the cardinal points of the compass are usually shown in Northern Hemisphere so…

Featured in episode 58: The Castle of Perseverance The first image features ideas about how ‘The Castle of Perseverance might have been presented. As I discussed in the Podcast episode there are plenty of ideas about how this might have worke…

The South Theatre in the town of Jerash was built between 81 and 96 CE. The theatre, which is in a relatively good state of preservation, could seat up to five thousand spectators. The stage is in the classic Roman design with the three doors. The t…

No trip to Jordan is complete without a visit to Petra. Beyond the tourist hotspot of the Treasury Building is a long valley surrounded on either side by funerary monuments and other buildings. Tucked into the side of the valley, about half a kilome…

Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, was the summer capital of the British Raj in India. The Gaiety theatre, designed by Henry Irwin, opened in May 1887. Originally the theatre was part of a complex of new buildings, but when subsidence was di…

The partial ruins of the Greek period theatre in Taormina, are from an expansion undertaken in the 2nd Century and is the second largest of its kind in Sicily (after the theatre of Syracuse). Most of the original seating has been lost, but the wall …

The Greek theatre on the hills above Syracuse could date from as early as the 5th Century BCE. Sicily appears to have been a centre for dramatic productions, perhaps only being behind the Athenian festivals in order of importance. Better records evi…