Mar 12, 2025
Book Haul!
Two long-standing wishes fulfilled and one hyperfixation fed 🥰
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Book Haul!
Two long-standing wishes fulfilled and one hyperfixation fed 🥰
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Shakespeare’s culture and society made much more space for the articulation of same-sex desire than we might expect.
It’s time to make space for Shakespeare in the queer chorus line of history, a cast we’re still populating as scholars and biographers look back at past lives and ask fresh questions about the way our ancestors understood desire, sexuality and identity. Old dead gays won’t have looked or sounded precisely like the gloriously rich range of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities today, but our shared histories of queer feeling trace a powerful line back into the past. And looking back, we find Shakespeare.
Join Sir Simon Russell Beale CBE, Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall and Dr Will Tosh gather to discuss shaping Shakespeare's words for the 21st cen
Join legendary King Lear Sir Simon Russell Beale CBE and Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall for the first in our series of The Globe Talks in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in conversation with Dr Will Tosh.
May 23.
The 'merry war' between Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare's much loved comedy is waged against the background of a larger conflict.
If nowadays we sometimes glide over the references in the first scene to ‘wars’, ‘killing’, ‘victory’ ‘cost’, ‘trouble’ and ‘soldiers’, Early Modern theatregoers would have had no difficulty seeing the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing for what it is: the requisitioning by a well-equipped victorious army of a civilian’s house and assets – in which category Hero seems unsettlingly to be included. Violently disruptive events underlie both the romantic comedy sub-plot and the near-tragedy of Hero’s unjust accusation. The emphasis on warfare encourages us to think about the disturbing implications of a courtship culture built on the verbal articulation of patriarchal aggression.
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Shakespeare doesn’t trouble to fix on a historical war as the backdrop to Much Ado About Nothing, but the play’s location would have made English audiences in the 1590s think of a major battle within living memory. Messina was the point of embarkation for league of Spanish and Italian forces that engaged the Ottoman Empire at the Battle Lepanto in 1571, when tens of thousands of troops fought hand-to-hand on the decks of some 400 vessels, strung out in formation across a weep of the Ionian Sea. The setting of Messina, and the mix of Spanish and Italian nationalities featured in Much Ado About Nothing (Don Pedro is Aragonian, Benedick is from Padua, Claudio is Florentine), imaginatively lodge the action of the play in the aftermath of one of the 16th century’s most epic battles.
Well, it’s more likely than you think. Despite his marriage to Anne Hathaway, we can’t assume William Shakespeare was exclusively heterosexual. Especially as he wrote over two thirds of his romantic sonnets, including the iconic Sonnet 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, to a guy.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Macbeth is overwhelmingly a play of night-time and the hours just before and after dark. It drew on all the resources of Shakespeare's indoor theatre when it opened its doors in 1609.
We don’t know if the King’s Men ‘clapped down’ the windows and extinguished the candles for the dark scenes in Macbeth, but the play’s likely emendation by dramatist Thomas Middleton in the years after 1616 suggest that the company were minded to keep it up to date with theatrical fashion beyond the playwright’s death, and they may well have experimented with the sort of lighting effects for which the indoor playhouses were well known. Perhaps the King’s Men discovered that Macbeth thrived in the dimly glittering, intimate space of the Blackfriars, where the ‘good things of day’ could be shut outside, for ‘night’s black agents’ to begin their devilish work.
On Midsummer's Day, we take a look at how the Elizabethans celebrated one of the most popular festivals in early modern England.
The June solstice occurs on a day between the 20 and 22 June, but ‘Midsummer Day’ was fixed in the calendar as 24 June (also known as St John’s Day). Midsummer was one of the most popular and keenly-observed festivals throughout the early modern period. Rural communities marked it with Morris dancing, processions, late-night drinking, the blessing of crops and the ritual banishment of devils and other unwelcome sprites – precisely the sort of pagan-originating, Catholic-saint-encompassing mishmash that Protestant reformers despised.
