In 2001, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre created a collaborative Shakespeare Studies Master’s degree programme – the first Master’s in Shakespeare Studies to be taught jointly by a university and a theatre – that has run for twenty years and continues to thrive. This chapter is an edited conversation between four of the academics who have taught on the degree programme – two based at King’s, two at the Globe – in which they address the unique nature of the Globe as a combined theatrical/educational organisation, the origins of the collaboration between King’s and the Globe, and the value it has brought to both partners. The conversation turns to the pedagogical value of the degree, the difference it has made not only intellectually but also to the employability of its alumni, and the impact it has had on the cultural sector in London and beyond. The participants also address the difference this collaboration between an experimental theatre and a university has made to the research orientation of the academics involved and, finally, they discuss the question of the reproducibility of the degree and the conditions that need to be in place for an educational collaboration of this kind to be sustained.

This essay revisits the question of playgoing by apprentices in early modern London via analysis of Chapman, Jonson and Marston's 1605 play Eastward Ho! and a newly uncovered set of depositions deriving from a lawsuit over the apprenticeship of the stationer Richard Meighen. Although their origins, purposes and modes differ, these materials represent playgoing through a similar set of conventions, assumptions and clichés. Functioning like a cultural script, such conventions enable playwrights and deponents alike to articulate shared assumptions about apprenticeship and its relationship with playgoing. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal some of the fault-lines within those tropes. In neither case, is it easy to position playgoing as a misdemeanour that must be cast off in order for the apprentice to repent and be re-assimilated into the structures of civic trade and profit. On the contrary, Eastward Ho’s erring apprentice Francis Quicksilver and Richard Meighen present examples of apprentices who are able to turn their interest in theatre to profitable ends.

Economic inequalities are increasingly prominent in public debates – from Thomas Piketty’s seminal Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) and the subsequent creation of the World Inequality Database (Wid.World n.d.), to civil society reports such as that of Oxfam (Oxfam International 2019). In addition, major social movements of the last decade, including Tunisia’s 2011 revolution (Srebernik 2014) and the rise to power of demagogic leaders such as Donald Trump (Shiller 2016), have been attributed, at least in part, to economic inequalities.

Prologue

The interdisciplinary ‘Ages and Stages’ project, funded initially under the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme, has evolved into a continuing collaboration between Keele University and the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme. The first ‘Ages and Stages’ project (2009–12) examined historical representations of ageing within the Vic's ground-breaking documentaries and docudramas (produced between 1964 and 1995), and explored the contemporary recollections and experiences of older people who are, or have been, associated with the theatre in different ways. Archival and interview material was drawn together to create the ‘Ages and Stages’ exhibition and a new, hour-long, documentary drama, ‘Our Age, Our Stage’. Between 2012 and 2013, further funds were secured from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) follow-on scheme to focus on translational work, and we were subsequently awarded two additional grants by the AHRC under their Cultural Value Project. In this chapter we concentrate on the first three-year project; readers interested in following through what we have done subsequently are invited to visit the ‘Ages and Stages’ and ‘Live Age Festival’ websites (www.keele.ac.uk/agesandstages and www.liveagefestival.co.uk).

Act One: Setting the scene

Social and critical gerontologists, as well as literary and cultural scholars, are increasingly interested in the artistic engagement of older people, and in how the arts may construct, perpetuate or challenge stereotypical views of old age and existing models of the ageing process (Gullette, 1997, 2004, 2011; Basting, 1998, 2009; Small, 2007; Lipscomb and Marshall, 2010; Mangan, 2013). While recent reviews (Cutler, 2009; Castora-Binkley et al, 2010; Mental Health Foundation, 2011; Noice et al, 2014) affirm the value of older people's engagement in cultural activities, they also point to a lack of research on theatre and drama more specifically. This is despite the fact that, as Lipscomb (2012) argues, theatre provides us with an untapped potential for interdisciplinary collaborations and investigations; it is a cultural arena in which both ageing and older people are highly visible as audience members, participants, characters and increasingly, as performers (Bernard and Munro, 2015).

In terms of representations, there is a long tradition of theatre drawing heavily on stereotypes of older people and on deficit models of the ageing process, extending back to early Greek tragedies (Charney, 2005; Robson, 2009).

In February 2008 the National Portrait Gallery, London, announced the success of a campaign to raise the money to acquire a portrait of John Fletcher, £2,700 of which was raised by a raffle at Fletcher's House Tea Rooms, in Rye, Sussex, the former vicarage where Fletcher was born (Anon. 2008). While the portrait shows the dramatist at the height of his success in the early 1620s, richly clad and resting his right hand upon a table bearing an inkstand, quill and sheet of paper, the Tea Rooms’ contribution to its purchase recalls his origins. We are used to thinking of Fletcher in terms of ‘– and Fletcher’: ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’; ‘Shakespeare and Fletcher’. The portrait instead reminds us of his independent status and of the distinctive qualities of his family background and upbringing, both important factors if we try to comprehend fully his relationship with Shakespeare.

Fletcher was baptised on 20 December 1579, the fourth child of Richard Fletcher and Elizabeth Holland. Although his background was relatively humble, Richard's eloquence and personal charm helped him to become successively Dean of Peterborough and Bishop of Bristol, Worcester and, in 1594, London. His sons were educated at the Cathedral Grammar School in Peterborough, where John is recorded as one of twenty scholars in 1588 and 1589 (Mellors 1939, pp. xliii–iv). Sir John Harington, no friend of Richard Fletcher, describes him as ‘a comely and courtly prelate’, saying that he ‘could preach well, and would speak boldly, and yet keep decorum … The Queen, as I said, found no fault with his liberal speech’ (Harington 1804: 2, pp. 41, 45). Queen Elizabeth did, however, find fault with his personal life. In 1595, three years after the death of his first wife, Richard married a widow, Mary Baker; the Queen, who disliked married clergymen, suspended him for a brief time, and he had only partially regained her favour by the time of his sudden death in June 1595. Richard's children, and his debts, were left in the hands of his brother Giles, a diplomat with his own court connections.

Little is known of John's life between his father's death and his emergence as a playwright. He had matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1591, and Richard's death does not seem to have prevented his graduating with his MA in 1598.

Introduction

Ageing can be both understood and described as a storied process, part of what Holstein and Gubrium (2011, p 103) have described as ‘the narrative quality of lives’. We hear and tell stories about growing old; we read and watch published and filmed stories about older people; we are surrounded by images of ageing with their implicit narratives. Such stories permeate our social world and shape our expectations about older people and about growing old ourselves. In this chapter we intend to explore this process further, drawing on research that has explored the character of the stories that older people tell about their lives and, in some cases, making the links to more formal narratives found in genres such as fiction and other representational practices, in collaborative artwork, in art galleries and the theatre. We are particularly interested in how dominant social representations of ageing (Moscovici, 2000) can be contested through a process of active narrative work, that is, engaging older people with representational processes at various levels as consumers of such narratives (as readers, as members of group interactions, as theatre goers, as social beings) and as producers of them (discursively, in interviews and groups, using diaries and through various forms of artistic expression). In highlighting such elements, we are interested in ways of challenging negative social representations of ageing through the active participation of older people in different art forms.

Both narrative making and narrative exchange are everyday processes of making sense of a changing world by which we provide a certain meaningful coherence to a series of events. Such narratives have a certain form and structure which can convey not only particular thoughts about those events, but also incorporate gestures, feelings and actions. As such, narratives can become not only descriptions of past events but plots for future actions. Freeman (2011) has described the phenomenon of ‘narrative foreclosure’ or the process by which we come to believe that life is over before it is physically ended. We stop developing initiatives and accept that decline and exclusion are inevitable. Public institutions often reinforce this narrative in their negative representations of ageing and in their exclusion of older people from a range of activities.

Narrative accounts are habitually and constantly exchanged and shared in everyday social interaction.