This project will examine what transformations in research occur as communities of practice (CoPs) from different spheres interact around digital content created from primary source material in the collection of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Through a series of observed workshops, the project will generate data which will show shifts in research attitudes, approaches, and methods. This data will be analysed by the CoPs concerned to promote self-reflection and to scope future research and projects.

'Shakespeare's global communities' examines the current role Shakespeare plays in global theatrical and literary culture, taking the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival (WSF) as a core case study. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), developed by major institutional partners such as Shakespeare's Globe and the British Museum, and funded through public and private initiatives related to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the WSF announces itself as 'a celebration of Shakespeare as the world's playwright' and brings together work from over 50 arts organizations from across the globe (http://www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk/). 'Shakespeare's global communities' intends to both document and critically evaluate the creative performances and public initiatives that will be part of the WSF, questioning the way in which these activities influence or even reshape current understandings of Shakespeare as a shared cultural touchstone. While other academic projects have sought to analyse the ways in which different cultures interpret Shakespeare, the question of audience reception and interpretation of intercultural performances has received less attention. 'Shakespeare's global communities' will redress this balance by analysing the wider conversation that emerges from the WSF, analysing how the viewpoints of different communities of performers, translators, readers, and audience members all shape the significance and value Shakespeare holds for intercultural communities today. In order to achieve these ends, 'Shakespeare's global communities' includes three parts. First, it includes a research review of existing work on intercultural Shakespeare, paying particular attention to how the ideas of 'global culture' and 'community engagement' are being framed within the discourse of the Cultural Olympiad and the way in which Shakespeare fits into this picture. An important focus of the review will be on the ways in which new communications technologies have influenced the creation of different global communities related to Shakespeare. The second part of the project will build on this emphasis, creating a new online platform in partnership with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) (http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/home.html) and Misfit, Inc. (http://misfit-inc.com/) that will allow for reviews of and reactions to WSF performances to be posted by a variety of community stakeholders, including theatre practitioners, academics, audience members, and representatives of cultural institutions. The primary source material generated from the platform will form part of the permanent archive of the WSF that will be hosted by The SBT, and it will also inform the directions the scoping study takes in suggesting areas for further research. Thirdly, the project will include two one-day workshops in which members of the core collaborative team will meet in person to discuss WSF performances. Because of the size and scope of the initiatives it is necessary to assemble a networked team of 16 researchers to attend WSF performances, post 'provocations' on the online platform for these performances, and facilitate the broader conversations that will take place. At the workshops members of the team will share findings and reflections from different parts of the WSF, and audio podcasts of this work in progress will be linked to the central online platform so as to continue informing the debate. The end result of 'Shakespeare's global communities' will be a thorough review of where academic work is now on the question of Shakespeare as catalyst for global community building, particularly in a digital age, as well as the way in which the primary material collected from the unique event of the WSF furthers our understanding of how different members of such communities understand the value of public-sector community engagement.

Performing Restoration Shakespeare is an international research project bringing together scholars and artists over 36 months to explore how Restoration versions of Shakespeare were first performed (1660-1714) and how they can be performed today. Given that Restoration productions of Shakespeare integrated drama and music, the project will be jointly led by a theatre scholar specializing in the history of Shakespeare on the stage and a musicologist specializing in theatre music from the 17th and 18th centuries. Research and public engagement will be run in partnership with The Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC), Shakespeare's Globe (London) and The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (Stratford), the world's leading institutions dedicated to academic and public understanding of Shakespeare. Context. When London theatres reopened in 1660 upon the restoration of the monarchy, few new plays were available. Logically, the patent companies staged works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But they did not perform Shakespeare's plays the way that the dramatist's company had done. Women played women's roles in the Restoration. The new indoor theatres were equipped with moveable scenery. Song, music and dance featured more prominently. With few exceptions, the plays were rewritten: King Lear survived; the witches in Macbeth sang and danced; Miranda in The Tempest had a sister. Most scholarship in this area focuses narrowly on textual adaptation, ignoring the fact that Restoration Shakespeare was a complex theatrical experience that integrated song, music, dance and acting. We will correct this imbalance in knowledge by focusing on the performance dimensions of Restoration Shakespeare. We will sustain that focus by creating a community of scholars and artists, who together will undertake archival study, run studio-based workshops and create public performances of Restoration Shakespeare. In so doing, we will build upon the results of the Folger pilot project we recently led. Objectives and Public Benefit. Our project seeks to enhance academic, artistic and public understanding of Restoration Shakespeare. Academics and artists will collaborate in research-led creative practice that results in scholarly publication and public performances. Academics will create new methods for investigating historical performances. Artists and arts organizations will expand their repertoires by performing Restoration Shakespeare. The general public will gain a better understanding of how Shakespeare's plays have been staged in different ways at different times. We will achieve these wide-ranging objectives through our research and public engagement events: 2017: Workshop on 'The Tempest' at the Globe, involving scholars, artists and the public. 2018: Scholar-artist workshop on 'Macbeth' at the Folger, culminating in a professional production. The production will be recorded and the creative process will be documented in videos, all accessible to the public. The Folger will strongly invest in the project, making a direct contribution of £258,000 and an indirect contribution of £26,000. 2019: Restoration Shakespeare summer school at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, with participants from UK theatre and music organizations. Parallel outreach will be conducted in the USA with the Folger and Early Music America. Performing Restoration Shakespeare offers a compelling opportunity to build upon distinctive research in theatre history and musicology to generate new insights into Shakespeare's theatrical afterlife. The project promises to set a new agenda in performing arts research by creative innovative practice-based methods for studying historical performances. More widely, we will engage audiences and build capacity in arts organizations internationally by creating public events and documentary resources. Performing Restoration Shakespeare will make transformative and lasting contributions to knowledge within and beyond academia.

'The Stuart Successions: fresh approaches to the understanding of seventeenth-century history and literature' has been developed out of, and would immediately follow, the AHRC-funded 'Stuart Successions Project'. In this project we explored a category of writing which has long been recognized but never well understood. Each of the six Stuart successions (James I in 1603, Charles I in 1625, Charles II in 1660, James II in 1688, William III and Mary II in 1688-89, Anne in 1702) generated a wealth of publications. So did the accession to the role of Lord Protector by Oliver Cromwell in 1653, and that of his son Richard in 1658. Succession literature includes a range of elegies on the old monarch and panegyrics on the new; indeed most of the greatest poets of the day felt the need to participate in this activity, some on successive moments of transition. Other kinds of succession literature include histories, genealogies, sermons, satires, news-reports and political tracts. Through surveying and analyzing this material we have been able to throw fresh light on particular moments of transition and also on processes of change across this turbulent period of British history. Our outputs include a database of succession writing, a major volume of essays, and an anthology of primary texts. As this research has demonstrated to us, however, Stuart succession literature holds more than merely academic interest. The Stuart era is widely recognized as a pivotal one in the development of British political and cultural life; it has an established place in the media and the cultural sector (e.g. museums), and recent reforms to school curricula, in History and English Literature, are according it increasing prominence. This is hardly surprising given the achievements and events of the period: Shakespeare was a Stuart for half of his working life; others to shape this century include Milton, Hobbes and Behn. The Stuart era included the greatest British civil war, an unprecedented experiment with republicanism, and eventually the founding of Great Britain itself. The topic of succession, meanwhile, is today pressing itself increasingly upon the public consciousness, as journalists and playwrights, among others, are already speculating about the impact of a third Caroline reign. In this context, we identify four user-communities with which our follow-on project will engage: secondary schoolchildren and their teachers; our partner organizations, united by their commitment to education about the past; media programme-makers; and the general public. We propose a focused and collaborative project involving all three members of the current project team and four major partners: the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Historical Association and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. It will be supported by Historyworks, a company committed to bringing academic research into the public domain in professional, creative and effective ways. We will select items drawn from the collections of partners, and work collaboratively to develop for each one a range of original interpretative materials. Among other outputs, we will produce: a bespoke website; learning materials (including lesson plans); a series of c.20 vodcasts (short documentary-style audio talks illustrated with still photographic images, suitable for publication via a website as well as for use by our partners); a one-day 'Shakespeare and the Stuarts' workshop for A-Level English and International Baccalaureate students; a 'Stuart Successions and Seventeenth-Century History' study day for secondary teachers; and treatments for radio and television programmes. The project is designed to combine quality impact directed at specified audiences with a commitment also to reach a much wider range of potentially interested parties. It also balances a focus on particular events with an interest in providing resources that will be of use across a longer period.

This project aims to transform our sense of the way reading and writing fitted into the everyday cultural lives of a very important but under-researched group in early modern England - the middling sort - the literate urban households whose members often wrote for a living. We currently know very little about the cultural lives of these households, partly because they have been of little scholarly interest, and partly because the evidence we need to explore them is cared for by unconnected institutions - libraries, archives, online repositories, and museums - which makes it impossible to see together the textual, visual and material work they authored and created, and that which they bought as entertainment, possessions or decoration. Unlike their elite counterparts, therefore, we have no coherent view of middling aesthetic practices which would allow us to understand their creativity fully. This is even more remarkable as some of the most popular writers in English, among them William Shakespeare, were members of this group. Understanding how their literary, artistic and material production and consumption related to one another lets us examine fully the creative environment in which the writers grew up and participated. But it also allows us to reach beyond these well-known figures, to explore the impact of those environments on their wives, mothers, sisters, apprentices and servants - individuals for whom a classical grammar school education was not a possibility, but who nevertheless experienced its impact in the domestic and urban environments in which they lived and worked - for example as books in the household, sayings or images painted on the walls. And through understanding the environments and practices of creativity for these families, this project aims, with its partner the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in particular, to encourage debate about how the arts might help in overcoming barriers to social mobility today. It will provide historical evidence that speaks to and allows us to interrogate our contemporary tendency to dissociate economic entrepreneurship from the rich aesthetic and cultural contexts that encourage it and benefit from it. Seeing clearly how this group influenced their cultural environments to create social and political change will offer new ways of looking at the relationships between social status, creativity and the arts in the present. The project will analyse five case-study communities - Banbury, Bristol, Chesterfield, Ipswich and Stratford-upon-Avon - and a range of specific households within them (ones engaged in different types of writing that also left evidence of their material choices and investments), drawn from the families of provincial administrators, clerics, professional writers and individuals from the medical, theatrical and print trades, active in the century 1560-1660. We will work with two mutually-dependent strands of evidence: literary production and consumption such as the household, personal and urban administrative archives to which these groups contributed; and material production and consumption - the domestic and urban buildings (their architecture, decoration and furniture), clothing and personal objects (including those for reading and writing) with which they were associated. Analysed together, this information will allow us to reconstruct the full range of middling aesthetic and scribal culture, and the levels of skill and expertise involved in its production, and to share these materials and their implications with a wide audience. In addition to creating educational resources for schools and museums, our work will allow us to recreate a specific example of a middling lifestyle, by digitally modelling a period room, complete with the sounds, lighting and objects of the time. This digital model will give another way to think 'inside' the material and textual lives of the middling sort, and to engage others in this work.