Dr Emma Whipday will give an introduction to her practice as research on narrating physical responses on the early modern stage. She will then lead a workshop on blushing, using extracts from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well that Ends Well performed by student actors. The workshop will be interactive, calling upon audience members to make suggestions to the actors and discuss the effect of differing performance choices. This is a rare opportunity to see performance practice as research in action, and to blur the boundaries between theatre making and research.
Dr Emma Whipday is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at UCL, and a Globe Education Lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe. Emma is interested in family, gender, and power on stage and in popular culture in early modern England. She has published on early modern 'true crime' news pamphlets, staging the home in domestic tragedy, household work in Macbeth and Othello, contemporary productions of early modern plays, and performance practice as research. Her monograph, Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Emma is currently working on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage. Emma is also a playwright; her play Shakespeare’s Sister has been published by Samuel French and received its international premiere at the American Shakespeare Center in Spring 2016.