Wednesday, 22 October 2025
A brand-new exhibition, curated by a University of Nottingham Research Fellow, is now in permanent place at Shakespeare's Schoolroom & Guildhall in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Dr Will Green, a former Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, devised and led the knowledge exchange project in partnership with the independent museum and heritage site.
During Dr Green’s fellowship, he developed the fixed installation for a previously underutilised space within the museum’s Grade I listed building, to showcase the building’s forgotten history as a regional theatre venue in the age of Shakespeare.
He said: “As the town in which he was born and raised, heritage in Stratford-upon-Avon has long been dominated by Shakespeare and his works. This is understandable, but it is another way in which opportunities to speak to the public about the wider culture of theatre of which Shakespeare was just one part have ended up being treated like secondary considerations, or overlooked entirely.
Stratford’s Guildhall is a fascinating space with a rich theatrical history. It was the civic, social, and educational heart of the early modern town, and we know the building’s upstairs council space hosted performances by multiple theatre companies that toured the Midlands during the 16th and 17th centuries, with at least 35 visits to Stratford being recorded. Our new interpretation of the space allows visitors to go beyond Shakespeare, and dive into the town’s rich alternative history of English theatre at a regional level.”
The upper Guildhall’s overlooked history as an early modern theatre venue makes it the only authentic space remaining in Stratford-upon-Avon that, experts agree, hosted theatre during the lifetime of the Bard, and may even have been the very venue at which a young Shakespeare first witnessed professional theatre. But before now, this was told to visitors through a paragraph on a single information board.
With AHRC and University of Nottingham funding, Dr Green has curated and installed a full partition display board which replicates how the original performance space would originally have been partitioned off from the rest of the upstairs Guildhall, and (drawing on the talents of Nottingham-based business Wide Sky Design) produced a new self-guided interactive tablet display, enabling visitors to explore how regional theatre existed alongside the permanent London theatres of Shakespeare’s day, and the experience of being an actor on tour. The display also explores how performances would have worked within the Guildhall space, given that the building was never actually designed as a theatre.
Dr Green, who is now an Associate Tutor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, undertook the project as part of the 2024-5 cohort of AHRC IAA (Impact Acceleration Accounts) postdoctoral fellowships, in the University of Nottingham’s School of English, under the mentorship of Dr Anna Blackwell.
To this day, there is an assumption that everything of note which happens culturally, happens in London. Will’s important and ground-breaking research remind us that this isn’t the case now, nor was it in early modern England.
“Will’s exhibition demonstrates to visitors the exciting local politics involved in touring during this period, alongside the unique creative challenges touring actors faced. In a town like Stratford-upon-Avon which centres on Shakespeare for obvious reasons, his research reveals the bigger picture. Early modern theatre was so much more than just Shakespeare, and just the Globe.”
The museum itself opened in 2016 in the historical building that is best known as the Tudor grammar school for Stratford-upon-Avon, which is where a young William Shakespeare would almost certainly have attended school (based on the evidence of a grammar school education found in his plays). But the building's history as the only authentic space in the town that hosted early regional performance was otherwise underrepresented, a gap Dr Green’s project sought to address.
Dr Lindsey Armstrong, General Manager at Shakespeare’s Schoolroom & Guildhall, said: “The collaboration with Dr Green and the University of Nottingham has added an exciting new dimension to Shakespeare’s Schoolroom & Guildhall’s story, breathing fresh life into a previously underappreciated chapter of our Guildhall’s rich past. This new interpretation of the upper Guildhall space is hugely significant, establishing our site as the only historic building in the region with a permanent exhibition exploring its unique connection to the wider theatrical world in which Shakespeare lived and worked.
The work has successfully unlocked an overlooked aspect of the building’s history, interpreting it for a new generation of visitors at a site of international significance. More information about the building as a theatre venue can be found here.
Notes to editors:
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