Ceremony in Macbeth

In November 2012 Findlay led a workshop with the actors Andrew Jarvis (Royal

Shakespeare Company, English Shakespeare Company) and James Evans (Bell Shakespeare Company) at the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association’s conference ‘Shakespeare and the Emotions’ [insert link to video footage]. A paper on ‘Tragedy and the State of Ceremony: Macbeth at the Department’s symposium with Simon Critchley (July 2013) and a plenary lecture at Aarhus University (May 2014) continue this work.

Capturing Witches

Rituals and ceremonies associated with witchcraft were considered in the ‘Capturing Witches’ conference of 2012 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first Pendle Witch trial in Lancaster in 1612.  Read more on the Centre for Transcultural Writing website.

The conference included a rehearsed reading of Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s play The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) in Lancaster Castle. Papers from the conference are published in a special issue of the journal Preternature.

Re-opening Ceremony and Ritual

A series of interdisciplinary seminars using theoretical models developed in social anthropology, and through practical work. Read more

Ceremony, Performance and Practice in Shakespearean Drama

A practical workshop on the power of ceremony presented by Findlay and Oakley-Brown at the British Shakespeare Association ‘Global Shakespeares’ conference at King’s College, London (2009) Read more

Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700

From 1994 to 2000 Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Gweno Williams co-directed a research project designed to stage drama by ‘Shakespeare’s sisters’, early modern female playwrights whose work was deemed ‘unperformed, not designed for performance’ and therefore ‘unperformable’. Read more