In Winter 2014, Professor Holly Pickett will incorporate a new research assignment, Mapping Early Modern London Theater, into English 320, Shakespearean Genres. This project will allow students to research and visualize the locations of early modern London theatres, as well as sites associated with Shakespeare’s life in London, and any references to London sites in the plays on the course syllabus. The project will allow students to enrich their own understandings of the “place of the stage” in early modern London and to create walking itineraries of London theater-related locations to be used by students in English 386, Supervised Study in Great Britain: Shakespeare in Performance, during Spring 2014.
Students in the Spring Term Abroad course, English 386, will complete the project that they or their peers began the previous term by adding to each entry on the map a photograph of that location in May 2014, taken on location during their walking tour of that area. In this way, the map will mark not only the vestiges of Shakespeare’s London still visible today, but will also mark the erasure or effacement of that past over time. The passage of time and the locations of theatrically significant sites will become only more palpable and relevant by using the map to guide several physical walks through London.