Our Research
Shakespeare’s Globe was founded on the principle that creative practice and scholarly research are made most powerful when they inform and enrich each other. Alongside our work as a theatre and education charity, the Globe is a leading centre for the study of Shakespeare, performance, and early modern culture.
Our in-house scholars and collections specialists support theatre productions, education programmes, guided tours, exhibitions, and a range of other public events. Through original scholarship, we contribute to the field of Shakespeare studies while helping to shape broader conversations about Shakespeare’s works and their legacy today.
Our research informs the ongoing development and conservation of our historically informed buildings and supports theatre productions through research dramaturgy. We preserve performances for future generations through digital recording and archiving, while expanding access to advanced study with initiatives like the One Globe First Book Fellowship, which supports a scholar of colour to complete their first monograph; and the Early Modern Scholars of Colour (EMSOC) mentoring scheme, delivered in partnership with the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Our major partnership with King’s College London through the Shakespeare Centre London enables collaboration in research, teaching, and public engagement, extending the reach and impact of our work.
Our research activity is guided by a Higher Education and Research Strategy that identifies four Priority Themes and three Strands of Activity.
We recognise the enduring influence of Shakespeare’s works as both a symbol and instrument of British cultural identity, in its myriad and contested forms. Social justice lies at the heart of our work as researchers and educators, as we strive to tell more inclusive and meaningful stories about the historical past, present, and future.
Priority Theme 1: Performance
Our two reconstructed early modern venues – the Globe Theatre and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – provide unparalleled opportunities to study performance and spectatorship. These unique architectural spaces continue to produce new insights into theatre history and contemporary stagecraft. Their immersive performance conditions enable fresh discoveries about the effects of live drama on audiences, including its impact on thought, emotion, mental health, and wellbeing.
Our research activities and workshops develop methodologies that bring together theatre history, performance studies, archival research, and practice-based inquiry.
Priority Theme 2: Race
Premodern critical race studies have provided new frameworks for understanding the development of race and racialised identities in early modern England. These approaches have opened up new ways to perform and study Shakespeare, as well as new insights into its power in shaping social attitudes over time. The historical use of Shakespeare as a tool of cultural imperialism continues to influence debates about his place in contemporary Britain.
Our research seeks to challenge the appropriation of Shakespeare in support of nationalism and white supremacy, while fostering more inclusive and historically grounded understandings of his works and legacy.
Priority Theme 3: Climate
Shakespeare wrote during a period of environmental uncertainty and turbulence. Ecocritical scholarship has illuminated the rich awareness of and concern for the environment in early modern drama and culture, which highlights the active response of earlier generations to ecological disruption.
As home to a thatched open-air amphitheatre and a timber-framed indoor playhouse lit by beeswax candles, Shakespeare’s Globe is a standard-bearer for sustainable theatre-making. Our research supports the development of climate-conscious dramaturgy and recovers stories of environmental resilience from the early modern past, as well supports new climate stories for the future.
Priority Theme 4: Creative Access
The Globe’s work in creative access – BSL performances, creative captioning, and audio description – is informed by research in early modern disability studies. This scholarship helps us understand how ideas about the body, dis/ability, and difference were shaped by the period’s drama, while also revealing how archival practices have historically obscured non-normative bodies and lived experience.
As researchers, archivists, and practitioners, we aim to deepen knowledge of the past and widen access to critical scholarship, particularly by those who have been historically under-represented in the arts and academia.
Strands
We initiate and support research through three interconnected strands, which may operate independently or in combination with each other:
Strand 1: Page
Literary and historical research into early modern drama, culture, and society helps us understand Shakespeare and his contemporaries in their historical time.
Strand 2: Stage
Research into performance, creative-critical methodologies, practice-as-research, and audience studies generates knowledge about Shakespeare’s significance and impact in the present day.
Strand 3: Knowledge Transfer
Research into pedagogy, information management, archival and library science, and collections care gives us the tools to strengthen the way new knowledge is made and shared.
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Lifelong Learning
In this blog, Dr Hanh Bui explores how Shakespeare’s plays reveal the value – and power – of returning to study later in life.
Lifelong Learning
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Shakespeare and Race
Shakespeare and Race: The Future We Make celebrates the creativity and innovation of artists, researchers and young people of the global majority.
Shakespeare and Race
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Reading Rooms access
Our newly-opened Research and Collections Centre welcomes you to consult our library and archive collections onsite at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Reading Rooms access
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Searching Guides
We are committed to making our scholarship public through a range of online resources, including our Archive and Library searching guides.
Searching Guides
Discover MoreYou may also wish to consult some of the following book publications associated with Shakespeare’s Globe:
- Will Tosh, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury, 2019)
- Will Tosh, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare (Sceptre, 2024)
- Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (Oneworld, 2023)
- Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Bloomsbury, 2016)
- Andrew Gurr & Farah Karim-Cooper (ed.), Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
- Farah Karim-Cooper & Tiffany Stern (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (Bloomsbury, 2013)
- Christie Carson (ed.), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
- Fiona Banks, Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013)