I travelled to London to speak to the cast about the historical background of the play and about why (and how) people might have performed Shakespeare during a long voyage in addition, I helped the actors playing English sailors to rehearse the scenes from Shakespeare that Rex had incorporated into his play. With support from several funding bodies, including Arts Council England, the University of Bristol’s Participatory Research Fund and its Impact Acceleration Fund, and the Fenton Arts Trust, The Hamlet Voyage-as the play was titled-went into rehearsal in London in the early summer of 2022. We trialled the first draft of Rex’s script at the University of Bristol’s Department of Theatre over the summer of 2021, working with student volunteers, and then ran a second series of workshops that autumn at the Trinity Centre in Easton, where Ben invited members of Bristol’s West African and South Asian communities to watch rehearsals and ask questions. With the help of Jiamiao Chen, who worked as a research assistant, my role in the project was to locate and help interpret primary and secondary literature concerning the third voyage of the East India Company-and in addition, to help Rex and Ben think about shipboard theatricals and about the texts of Hamlet with which the English sailors might have been working. With staggering energy and imagination, he then realised this vision over the following eighteen months, commissioning a script from the British-Nigerian playwright Rex Obano (who had written previously on Africa and early modern England, and who had also, before becoming a playwright, been an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and involving a team of academics and creative practitioners with expertise relating to the story. (Shakespeare’s tragedy was written and first performed around 1600, and versions of it were published in 1603 and then 1604-5, but there are no surviving records of specific performances before 1607.) To make things even more intriguing, the voyage on which this performance may or may not have taken place involved the first English ship to reach mainland India-a region that the EIC, at this point a fledging enterprise, would later rule.Īll this interests me not only because I work on Shakespeare, but also because, in recent years, I have become interested in what people read, write, and perform on board ships in fact, before Ben and I made contact, I had alluded to the episode off the coast of Sierra Leone in the introduction to a volume of essays on this topic.īen didn’t simply want to talk to a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast he wanted my help in developing a play about the possible performance of Hamlet. If this performance did take place-and its reality continues to be the subject of debate-then it is not only the first recorded performance of Shakespeare outside Europe it is the first recorded performance, anywhere, of Hamlet. For some years, it turned out, both of us had been intrigued by the enigmatic evidence surrounding a specific performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: one supposed to have taken place aboard an East India Company (EIC) ship off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607. In January 2021, I held a video conference call with a Bristol-based American theatre director named Ben Prusiner. The Hamlet Voyage performed aboard The Matthew in Bristol. The project received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account Award and underlines the positive social influence arts and humanities research can effect. By Dr Laurence Publicover, Senior Lecturer in English, School of Humanitiesĭr Laurence Publicover discusses his contribution to a new play, The Hamlet Voyage, performed at the Bristol Harbour Festival in 2022.
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