Staging the Henrician Court

Project start date: 2008-04

Project end date: 2010-10

The Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace is the only great hall built by Henry VIII. It is also the only existing Renaissance building in England for which there is unambiguous evidence of its being used for performances throughout the period c.1525 - 1658. In particular, the Great Hall at Hampton Court is largely the same space today as it was when William Shakespeare staged his A Midsummer Night's Dream before James I and VI. Staging the Henrician Court is an interdisciplinary research project into John Heywood's drama, the Play of the Wether. It will be based on historical research and textual analysis and will use dramatic performances and workshops in the Great Hall at Hampton Court to research the Henrician court. The two central research questions addressed by the project are: In what ways does staging John Heywood’s Play of the Wether utilise and/or transform the space of the Great Hall? To what extent did Henrician court drama create courtly space? The project approaches these questions from two mutually supportive angles. A staged production of John Heywood’s Play of the Wether in 2009 in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, and an ongoing discussion of the insights generated by that production through this open-access website and academic publications. Streaming Quicktime files from AVI for web delivery