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.

Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1600), one of the most influential writers of the English Renaissance, has not been edited for over 100 years. 'The Thomas Nashe Project' is an ambitious project of scholarly editing: six volumes of all of Nashe's known writings and dubia, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021 in print and also online, as part of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, with detailed annotation that takes account of advances in our understanding of the 16th century; a new glossary that makes use of the e-search tools at our disposal; and extensive analysis and commentary. The edition will be edited to the highest standards, taking account of developments in approaches to scholarly editing and new research. R. B. McKerrow's revered scholarly edition (1904-10) is based on his collation of the copies of texts available to him in London and Oxford, although we now know that many more copies survive on both sides of the Atlantic (270+). His textual notes, accurate as they are, can be confusing as he collated his copy texts with 19th-century works that have no textual authority. His explanatory notes reflect the state of knowledge about Elizabethan society in the early 20th century. They are out of date on social history, urban history and the history of London; the relationship between individual writers; the conditions of early modern writing; the nature of patronage and the social order; rhetoric and literary culture; and religion. All of these features of McKerrow's edition and many more are in need of modernisation. By working with Partners of national and international standing, we also aim to both advance and disseminate the knowledge we will gain of this writer and his contribution to English literature and the English language. Our partners and collaborators include, in the UK, Globe Education, Edward's Boys, the Old Palace School (Croydon), where Nashe's play 'Summers Last Will and Testament' was first performed, The Oxford English Dictionary, Norfolk Museums Service (with Great Yarmouth Museums), and in the US, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, which holds one of the finest collections of Nashe's writings in the world, and the Mellon Trust Foundation-funded 'The Visualizing English Print Project' team based at Madison University, Wisconsin. By collaborating we aim: (1) to resituate Nashe in his national and regional contexts (London, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth), (2) to explore Nashe's lasting legacy on the development of English literature and on the language, and (3) to reach a much wider general readership who have an interest in Tudor / Renaissance literature. A unique feature of this project is the importance we attach to the orality and performance potential of Nashe's writing, both his prose fiction and his sole-authored play 'Summers Last Will and Testament', and thus of the relationship between prose and drama in this period. We will have video-recordings of the Edward's Boys performances of this play at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford upon Avon, the new Globe Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the Great Hall at The Old Palace School in Croydon, and of a 'Read not Dead' reading of 'Terrors of the Night' by candlelight at the Globe's SWP. We will commission a film exploring Nashe's links to East Anglia, as well as the writing of 'Lenten Stuffe' in Great Yarmouth at the end of his life, with readings of this text. With Testbed Audio (a maker of radio programmes for the BBC) we will also record and publish an actor experimenting with reading styles and make a 'feature' about the research that underlies this experiment.

Archives and Writing Lives considers how we access and analyse handwritten historical documents in the digital age and the next steps for the future. The way we use archival sources - which include letters, inventories, legal documents, receipts, wage lists and financial accounts - has undergone profound change in recent decades as a result of the web and digitisation. Yet many challenges remain. Vast areas of the archive, in fact most historical documents, remain unread and unanalysed. Furthermore, in certain respects, the web could be said simply to replicate certain older research paradigms, rather than transform them. This project asks where should our priorities lie next? How do we bring to life lesser-known and never-read archival materials and shed light on their traces of past lives? Archives and Writing Lives focuses its spotlight on Early Modern handwritten archival sources, which are an especially challenging category of archival material, being both voluminous in quantity and notoriously difficult to decipher and interpret. This project will argue forcefully for and will illustrate the benefits of: (1) collaborative and inter-disciplinary models of working in order to progress knowledge; (2) the potential of digital scholarship to transform research and to communicate research findings widely; (3) the particular gains to be made through analysis of sources for women's lives, which include fresh insights and more accurate versions of the broader historical narrative. The findings of this project will have the potential to shape the agenda for how archives are used and interpreted in the future. The project will develop a suite of open-access research publications alongside and linked to innovative digital outputs, which will stand as reference points within the field for many years to come. Archives and Writing Lives is organised around three Research Themes that address the question that runs as a thread throughout: how does digital scholarship change archival research? For Research Theme 1, Bess of Hardwick's Financial Accounts, 1548-1601, the PI will publish an interactive web-edition, freely and openly available online, of previously unpublished Chatsworth House and Hardwick Hall financial accounts that present in spectacular and compelling detail the everyday comings and goings of a grand Elizabethan household. The core data from the web-edition will simultaneously be shared with and hosted by the EMMO Project (Folger Shakespeare Library) and MEDEA Project to develop methods for digital editing of historical financial accounts across international research projects. For Research Theme 2, The Letters and Documents of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1550-87, the PI will publish, freely and opening online, a catalogue of c.800 letters and documents to and from Mary, Queen of Scots. Unedited since 1844, the Scottish Queen's letters offer one of the most powerful cases for shifting the focus of analysis back to the archival materials in order to produce more realistic and accurate portrayals of the historical and political situation. The PI will collaborate with and share data with the WEMLO and EMLO Projects (Bodleian Library, Oxford) to host the letter catalogue and develop methods for modelling and sharing metadata. For Research Theme 3, Early Modern Archives and Digital Transformations, the PI will lead a series of events, workshops and seminars, and edit a distinct section of a major co-edited book on Archives, that will bring together academic researchers, archive and library professionals, digital developers, institutional policy-makers, third sector personnel, performers and the public. Through these events, the PI will create opportunities for a range of potential archive users to engage with questions about the practical challenges, as well as the interests and opportunities, presented today by early modern archival sources.