Macbeth (an undoing)

FACTS AND PERSPECTIVES ON THE PLAY, PLAYWRIGHT, AND PRODUCTION DIGITAL PROGRAM AND 360 ° VIEWFINDER SERIES

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE

Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Jeffrey Horowitz FOUNDING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Robert E. Buckholz BOARD CHAIR

in association with

ROSE THEATRE

Present

Dorothy Ryan MANAGING DIRECTOR

THE ROYAL LYCEUM EDINBURGH PRODUCTION

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

written and directed by ZINNIE HARRIS, after William Shakespeare

On the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage

Featuring

ADAM BEST, EMMANUELLA COLE, NICOLE COOPER, LIZ KETTLE, THIERRY MABONGA, MARC MACKINNON, TAQI NAZEER, STAR PENDERS, JAMES ROBINSON, LAURIE SCOTT

Scenic Designer

TOM PIPER

Movement Director

EJ BOYLE

Costume Designer

ALEX BERRY

Lighting Designer

LIZZIE POWELL

Resident Voice Director ANDREW WADE

Production Manager

NIALL BLACK

Press Representative

Sound Designer PIPPA MURPHY

Production Dramaturg FRANCES POET

Casting

Composer

OĞUZ KAPLANGI

Fight/Intimacy Director

KAITLIN HOWARD

SIMONE PEREIRA HIND CDG AND ANNA DAWSON

BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES

Producer

HANNAH ROBERTS

First preview April 5, 2024

Opening night April 11, 2024

General Manager

JEREMY BLUNT

Support for Macbeth (an undoing) is provided by Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.

2023-2024 Season Sponsors.

Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation.

Major season support is provided by The Arnow Family Fund, The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Sally Brody, Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine, Constance Christensen, The Hearst Corporation, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, The George Link Jr. Foundation, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, Stockel Family Foundation, Anne and William Tatlock, Kimbrough Towles and George Loening, Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein, and The White Cedar Fund.

Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Open captioning is provided, in part, by a grant from NYSCA/TDF TAP Plus.

CAST

(in alphabetical order)

Adam Best....................................................................................................................................................................Macbeth

Emmanuella Cole........................................................................................................................................ Lady Macduff/Mae

Nicole Cooper.....................................................................................................................................................Lady Macbeth

Liz Kettle.........................................................................................................................................................................Carlin

Thierry Mabonga............................................................................................................................................. Macduff/Doctor

Marc Mackinnon....................................................................................................................................... Duncan/Murderer 2

Taqi Nazeer........................................................................................................................................... Bloody Soldier/Lennox

Star Penders...................................................................................................................................................... Missy/Malcolm

James Robinson............................................................................................................................................................ Banquo

Laurie Scott.................................................................................................................................................... Ross/Murderer 1

Company Stage Manager............................................................................................................................... Claire Williamson

Stage Manager............................................................................................................................................... Shane Schnetzler*

Deputy Stage Manager........................................................................................................................................... Jessica Ward

Assistant Stage Manager........................................................................................................................................... Katy Steele

*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.

THERE WILL BE ONE 15-MINUTE INTERMISSION

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh gratefully acknowledges

Reid Hoffman

Kathy and Ned Hoyt

Michael and Tammy Thorson

Nancy Hale Hoyt

Inventure Capital LLC

Stephen W Dunn Theatre Fund

Sir Ian Rankin, OBE DL FRSE FRSL FRIAS

David and Judith Halkerston

Margaret Duffy and Peter Williamson

For their generous support of this production’s tour.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Support for Macbeth (an undoing) is provided by Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.

Notes

Front Cover: Design by Paul Davis Studio / Mo Hinojosa

This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated April 18, 2024.

Credits

Macbeth (an undoing) 360° | Edited by Nadiya L. Atkinson

Resident Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Tanya Pollard | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc.

Publisher: Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director

Macbeth (an undoing) 360° Copyright 2024 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserve d.

With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any

DIALOGUES FEMALE FURY IN MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

BY TANYA POLLARD

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, like his Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, centers on the portrait of a complicated and dangerous man. Yet although the play introduces him as “brave Macbeth,” a powerful warrior famed for his ability to kill, its first two acts depict him as oddly passive, a hesitant puppet steered by forceful female figures. Just as his first words echo those of the witches who precede him onstage, his defining action – the murder of King Duncan – responds to the urging of his wife, whose fiery incitement invokes the supernatural figures who open the play. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts,” she exhorts, “unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!” Conspiring with the Weird Sisters, Lady Macbeth initiates the play’s violence through an uncanny transmutation. Like the similarly superhuman Cleopatra, who insists in her final moments, “I have nothing / Of woman in me,” she leaves her sex behind as she enters a new world of unsettling possibility.

As Zinnie Harris has observed, what follows is a surprising reversal. While Macbeth’s uncertainty hardens into a steely core of violence, Lady Macbeth’s fire flickers into a dim shadow of its initial fury. Her speech

diminishes from terrifying eloquence to broken fragments as she succumbs to madness, nightmares, and increasing passivity. What might the play look like, Harris invites us to wonder, if its initial glimpse of female fury were allowed to linger, and even to grow?

Shakespeare rarely allowed female roles to take over the heart of his tragedies. With female characters relegated to apprentice boy actors, his most starry tragic leads went to the male protagonists who showcased his best-known company members. Cleopatra, the most prolix of his tragic women, speaks far less than her male counterpart, 693 lines to Mark Antony’s 839; the eloquent Juliet also lags behind her Romeo, speaking 572 lines to his 615. For all her verbal incandescence, Lady Macbeth fares even worse. Alongside Macbeth’s 725 lines, she speaks only 263, most of them in the play’s first two acts.

But twenty-first century stages, unencumbered by the limitations of early modern London’s gendered casting practices, have the freedom to reimagine this division of theatrical labor. In Macbeth: An Undoing, Lady Macbeth’s lightning-like flare not only continues but escalates. As her

Emmanuella Cole (Lady Macduff), Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth) in MACBETH (AN UNDOING) at Theatre for a New Audience. Photo by Hollis King.

FEMALE FURY IN MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

husband becomes increasingly paralyzed, the two of them gradually exchange roles. He dissolves into the sleepwalking nightmares that his wife experiences in Shakespeare’s version, while she steps into his shoes, becoming Scotland’s real monarch.

Not only does Lady Macbeth maintain her fury in this play, but she gains an ambivalent quasi-sisterhood. Lady Macduff, to whom Shakespeare allocates only one scene and 45 lines, enters this play early on and becomes one of its most major characfters, adding new dimensions to Lady Macbeth’s crisis. Consistently addressed as “sister” by Lady Macbeth–though the two are eventually revealed to be cousins, like As You Like It’s similarly intimate Rosalind and Celia – she serves as confidante, foil, and competitor.

Lady Macduff’s most conspicuous contribution to this play is her pregnancy and its aftermath, new elements that underscore the original play’s preoccupation with fertility and succession. “I have given suck,” Lady Macbeth famously proclaims in one of Shakespeare’s most disturbing passages,

and know

TANYA POLLARD

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.

As an aristocrat, Lady Macbeth would not have served as a wet-nurse; having given suck means having given birth. Yet the Macbeths have no living offspring. On hearing of his family’s terrible demise at Macbeth’s orders, Macduff observes, “He has no children.”

Scholars and theater-practitioners alike have long reflected on the implications of Lady Macbeth’s passing reference to maternal experience. In a 1933 lecture titled, “How many children had Lady Macbeth?,” the critic L. C. Knights mocked what he saw as a trivial fixation on this hypothetical question. Yet Shakespeare makes clear that the problem of offspring looms large for the Macbeths, both personally and politically.

Adam Best (Macbeth), Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

FEMALE FURY IN MACBETH (AN UNDOING )

TANYA POLLARD

Lady Macbeth’s unsettling image of infanticide might be the most startling sign that the couple has descendants on their minds, but it’s far from the only one. “Bring forth men-children only,” Macbeth exhorts his wife when praising her forceful directives on murdering Duncan, adding, “For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males.” Later, reflecting on the threat posed by Banquo, he recalls with concern the witches’ early prediction to Banquo: “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.” This prophesy, which prompted little discussion at the time, comes back to Macbeth in full force after he has achieved his own promised status. “They hail’d him father to a line of kings,” he recalls:

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding.

Macbeth realizes, too late, that winning the kingship means nothing without heirs to extend his reign into the future; in their absence, his line will be extinguished with his death. “If ’t be so,” he realizes, “For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind; / For them the gracious Duncan have I murder’d/... Only for them.” His terrible act proves literally fruitless; it will lead nowhere.

Shakespeare’s portrait of Lady Macbeth omits direct access to any feelings she might have about her childless state, but Macbeth (an undoing) moves this lack to the fore of the play, entangling Lady Macbeth with not only Lady Macduff but also the Weird Sisters in a web of grief, longing, and desperation. As a looking-glass version of Macbeth, this female-focused story shifts its lens inwards from forests and battlefields to the more private spaces of marriage, friendship, and female bodies, and in doing so offers a new story about Shakespeare’s supernaturally charged violence..

TANYA POLLARD (Chair, Council of Scholars) is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017), Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (2003), and four co-edited collections of essays on early modern drama, emotions, bodies, and responses to Greek plays. She appeared in Shakespeare Uncovered: Macbeth (PBS, 2013) with Ethan Hawke and in Shakespeare Uncovered: King Lear (PBS, 2015) with Christopher Plummer. Beyond her involvement with TFANA, she has worked with artists and audiences at theaters including the Red Bull, the Public, the Classic Stage Company, and the Roundabout. A former Rhodes Scholar, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, NEH, Whiting, and Mellon foundations.

Liz Kettle (Carlin). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

INTERVIEW “ADAPTATION AND TRANSLATION: THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS”

MODERATED BY AYANNA THOMPSON IN CONVERSATION WITH ZINNIE HARRIS

The following is an edited version of a conversation between Zinnie Harris (Writer and Director) and Ayanna Thompson (TFANA Council of Scholars) that took place on March 28, 2024.

AYANNA THOMPSON So, Zinnie, I'm wondering if you can tell us how you first encountered Shakespeare, and then how your relationship has developed.

ZiNNIE HARRIS So, I think, like a lot of young people I first encountered Shakespeare at school. I did Macbeth for my GCSE. I'm trying to think if I'd seen Shakespeare before then.

My mum was really good at taking me to the theatre, and I remember going to see King Lear at 12, 13, maybe, and being blown away by it. I remember coming out in the interval, kind of thinking, what on earth can happen next? So, I think I was lucky about the number of Shakespeare I encountered first in performance rather than on the page.

I don't know if you know my background. But I didn't go on with English literature. I went on to science and did biology at university. I never really formally studied

Shakespeare, so my experience of it is really as a kind of either theatergoer or theatermaker and dramatist.

AYANNA THOMPSON It's interesting that you say that you think your first experience was probably in the theater because that was the same for me. And I have often joked that if I were Jeff Bezos, I wouldn't try to send myself into space. I'd be making sure that every eight-year-old got to see a live performance.

ZiNNIE HARRIS That's right. And I think sadly, in the UK, drama is being squeezed out as a classroom activity. And the only way that you're likely to encounter Shakespeare is through an English class, where it becomes about the words on the page and the rhythm. And what you don't experience is this is actually about two people in a relationship with each other and the space between them and what they want. Shakespeare is, like any drama, a three-dimensional living, breathing art form that you have to see on its feet.

AYANNA THOMPSON Yeah. And also, as you described with King Lear, you can enter into the interval and not know where it's going.

Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth), Emmanuella Cole (Mae), Star Penders (Missy), Liz Kettle (Carlin). Photo by Hollis King.

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS” AYANNA THOMPSON

ZiNNIE HARRIS Yeah, it's a story that happens to you.

AYANNA THOMPSON What made you transition into wanting to rewrite it in some way or to revisit it? And was this something that you had thought of over a long span of time? What was your inspiration?

ZiNNIE HARRIS Well, I didn't just hop straight to Macbeth. I, as a dramatist, have been for a long time interested in taking canonical dramatic texts and working particularly with the female roles. You know, taking one of the main female characters and doing a revision to ask questions of treating this character as a modern character, approaching them with a more sympathetic understanding, and seeing the story from their perspective. What would that journey look like?

So, I first worked on a play in this way–although now I look at the adaptation and I think it was very faithful–with Miss Julie in 2009. My approach is to have two things in play when doing an adaptation. One, you should really love the original and feel an affinity for it, so there's enthusiasm for the story. But the second thing is you have to feel that there's something that you can bring and that it's going to engage your skills as a dramatist. And you're triangulating between the original text, you, and the world. Right now, you know that there's a reason it should be done and you approach it that way.

And with Miss Julie, it's this story of privilege and there's a character that we are encouraged to loathe throughout the piece. We see her as an overprivileged sort of brat and when we witness her destruction at the end, in the productions I'd seen, I'd always gone off thinking, “Thank God, I never really liked you anyways.” I just kind of thought, hang on. This is a young woman here. Yes, she's privileged, but if you really look into the text, she's pretty controlled by her father. She hasn't got many options, and she hasn't been given a language or a way of being in the world that would mean that she can operate in any other way.

So I went into that with a “what if?” What if she's not actually the bad guy here? And I found that quite interesting. And it started a kind of confidence to approach those texts. I think the next one was I did a version of A Doll's House. In a way, I was talking about marriages in public life. I made them a political couple who just moved

into a sort of Downing Street, and the sense that scrutiny they were under, and what that did to the pressure between them and the ability to be kind to each other. And the big one that I really am very proud of is This Restless House of The Oresteia. I felt that Clytemnestra, a bit like Lady Macbeth, is this kind of received evil woman. He's the hero, and what does she do? She kills him in the bath.

But let's think about this differently. He has gone off. He's been away for ten years for a war that she never thought was a good idea, with the implication that he was doing it for vanity. Before he goes, he sacrifices their much-loved daughter. He abandons her for ten years to fight a war. She's left to run the country. Who knows how that's gone for her? And he expects to walk straight back into not just shared power with her, but her bed, and has an enslaved girl in tow that he's had on the side. And you go, with a more sympathetic view, there could be a totally different way of looking at this.

And maybe she isn't someone who is born knowing that she is capable of murder, but someone who is compelled to murder out of love for her child, and that sense of justice. And The Oresteia is all about justice and vengeance. So then the first play became about her internal resistance and the fact that the ghost of her child haunts her. We see her turn into someone who is against all odds, capable of killing him, and gives him many opportunities to show himself, to be remorseful, and he doesn't take them.

And then, of course, when you've done the first play, it's a trilogy, and I wanted to keep working with the female line. The whole trilogy is called The Oresteia after Orestes. But Orestes isn't even present in the first play, whereas Electra clearly lives in the castle or house. And so I chose to work with Electra rather than Orestes.

After that, I worked on a version of The Dutchess of Malfi: in a way, The Dutchess of Malfi is a proto-feminist play. I think his [John Webster’s] purpose in writing that piece is to say, at our peril, we destroy women. Look what happens when we do this: we see the destruction of the perpetrators, the male characters, and the family, by the end. But I felt that it was saying to the audience, “Look, not only has there always been violence against women, but this confusion of love and control has always been a

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS”

problem as well.” And here was Webster writing about it in the seventeenth century. That was part of my intent.

But I thought there was also something else. And, in a way, this relates to Macbeth about how we see female victims. One of the things that happens in Duchess is once the Duchess dies, she's gone. And then we are left with this male play of how it all unravels for them. I wanted to keep her agency even after death and suggest that she retains her power and is able to send a message out to the audience at the end to say things need to change.

Part of the mechanism with which I was able to do this, is that Ferdinand is her twin and the person who ultimately destroys her. And he starts to go mad. He believes he's a wolf, but he talks about being chased by this shadow. I was thinking, “What is Webster getting at here?” When you've killed your twin, then surely the shadow is their ghost. So, I suggested that the victims continue to have agency as ghosts after their deaths. Which, clearly, it's not much good to have agency if you're dead, but I say that's not the end of the story. Actually, things can happen beyond as a result of your story and change can happen.

And you know that is one of the things that I have tried to do particularly with Lady Macduff in Macbeth (an undoing). In the original, we meet Lady Macduff at the moment of her destruction. She's there just as a victim. And it's the same image that we've seen in TV dramas for years, of the dead woman that we don't know anything about. We only see her as a victim. And we get in Shakespeare this image of a maternal kind of femininity being destroyed. And I just think, for a contemporary audience, we want a bit more in the dialogue about the portrayal of women and violence against women. If life is going to be taken away, we want to be invested in it. We want to see the character as a whole person.

AYANNA THOMPSON And it's interesting that you mentioned that, because I've worked on a bunch of productions of Macbeth and the audience is always confused by Lady Macduff, because she just pops up. And then, you have to work really hard to make sense of that scene if you have an audience that hasn't read the play.

ZiNNIE HARRIS Yeah, and lots of directors do it in different ways. So, you often have her sort of appear in an earlier moment. But she's not there.

AYANNA THOMPSON

AYANNA THOMPSON She’s underwritten.

ZiNNIE HARRIS She's underwritten. She's massively underwritten, yeah.

AYANNA THOMPSON Clearly, Macbeth (an undoing) is part of this amazing feminist adaptation trajectory that you've been on—working through these foundational texts that, as we've just agreed on, have underwritten women. So what attracted you to Macbeth?

ZiNNIE HARRIS Well, having sort of worked on Clytemnestra, I thought, who's next? And then there's Lady Macbeth and she's not only fascinating because of the scenes that we have with her, but also because of the place that she takes in our collective consciousness. She must be one of, if not the most, well-known female characters in the Western canon of dramatic works. I know that she has a dictionary entry of her own. How many other fictional characters get that?

And yet there is this total contradiction in the middle of her story that doesn't make sense, so why is it that she has become iconic? We all know that there is this flaw. She's almost an assemblage of two different moments: we get two different versions of femininity that sit alongside each other but with no explanation of how we get from one to another. So, we get the dastardly, ambitious cold-hearted woman, who cajoles her husband into murder and then we get the broken, mad woman who can't cope with her own guilt. And could it be that the reason she's become so iconic is that we're fascinated by the first version, and we're comforted that if you are that sort of person, your downfall is part of your story?

So what the hell happened between the two? I teach playwriting to students at the University of St. Andrews, and we talk all the time about writing in the gaps when you're playwrighting. You set a scene, but maybe your play is over the scale of six months or two weeks. You can't get your audience to sit there for two weeks, right? So, a lot of the story telling is in gaps between your scenes.

One of the skills is to set a trajectory of a character within a scene, and then leave them not only in a position, but with a sort of forward arrow to where they're headed, and then you can pick them up a day later, or two weeks later, and the audience will fill in

what's happened to them. And Shakespeare knows this better than anybody. We see it all the time. Trajectories.

What's curious about Lady Macbeth is between the first half and the second half, the trajectory is all wrong. Lady Macbeth from the beginning is going, “Come on, we can do this.” He's faffing around, saying, “Is this dagger I see before me?” Can I get my head around it? And she's going, “Come on, be a man!” He then does it, but slightly mucks it up by bringing the daggers in, and she goes, “Good grief. That was the one thing you weren't supposed to do.” She's managing him, as she tells us right at the beginning, “I know his nature, he's too full of the milk of human kindness.”

So she sorts out the daggers. Then they've got a problem with Banquo. He arranges for Banquo to be murdered, and then he starts to be haunted by the ghost! And she's pulling him aside, saying, “For God's sake, get a grip. We're going to look guilty.” That's the trajectory. She's on the up in terms of her power, and he's starting to deteriorate. Not only that, but as soon as he kills Duncan, he becomes preoccupied by sleep. He says, “Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.’” And if you look in detail at the sleep quotes, Macbeth is always obsessed with sleep. So he's going down into madness. She's going up, and then when we we meet them in the second half of the play, they've crossed again. He’s up and she’s down with none of the dots joined up inbetween.

AYANNA THOMPSON The chiasmus, right.

ZiNNIE HARRIS Yeah. And you know, and one of the things I did when I first pitched this to David Greig, who runs the Lyceum, my initial thought was not to change the text, but just to have whoever played Lady Macbeth take Macbeth’s track after this kind of hinge point. But when I got into it, because of reasons to do with Lady Macduff and the witches, I felt that if I was doing a feminist revision and I wanted to do more than that.

When I was doing my early research, I spoke to some academics. There is a school of thought that there's missing material from Macbeth. It's a much shorter play than the other tragedies. There are also references in it to things that haven't happened as if the audience has seen it, like Lady Macbeth saying to Macbeth, “Had I so

sworn,” when we haven't seen the scene where he swore to kill Duncan. So that gave me a license to imagine that Shakespeare didn't plan to have this odd thing with trajectories, which he as a dramatist clearly wouldn't leave us with. What if there was missing material and what might that look like? That was quite a good invite to myself as a dramatist to go, “I'm going to get her to a point of madness at some point. But she doesn't have to go straight there.”

AYANNA THOMPSON I'm glad that you raised teaching playwriting at St. Andrews, because I wondered, what is your approach with your students and how many classical plays do you make them read? What's your approach there in terms of getting them to think about these trajectories?

ZiNNIE HARRIS First of all, I teach playwriting as a craft. I think you have to get quite into the technique in some ways. And what I say is we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are really good playwrights out there that can show us how these skills are done. And I can give you a specific example from Macbeth. Every class will start with a text, sometimes a very contemporary play. Sometimes it might be a scene from Shakespeare. Let's look at how the writer uses visual storytelling. What's the dialogue doing? How are they describing the interrelational space?

Sometimes I'm asked by students, “how do you work with time across a play?” One of the things I think we have to do as playwrights is know how to compress time and give the illusion that a whole day has past, but only ten minutes might be in sort of stage time. And I think the Porter scene in Macbeth is a wonderful example of the concertina of time. So what does he do? Well, you look at it on the page, and there's this knock, knock, knock! He gives us a rhythm almost like a metronome knock, knock, knock! He sets up this meter. I love the Porter scene for so many things, particularly the idea of portals and hell, and coming in and out just at that moment when we know that the ultimate transgression has happened, and Duncan has been killed.

So you get a chunk of time with the Porter on his own, and then he brings in Macduff who is coming for the king. So let's say, that's a page, and then he brings the next character in. But it's not a full page. It's like two-

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS” AYANNA THOMPSON

thirds of the page. And then he brings the next character in, but it's only half a page, and then he only brings the next character in, and it's a quarter page. And so, he's speeding up the entrances and the amount of time. Then everybody's in, they discover the murder, and then they all leave in the same way–after a quarter page, a half page, and a page. So what he's literally done is concertina with this metronome at the beginning.

The scene starts in the middle of the night, and by the end it's morning. It's only four or five minutes of playing time. But he's given us a kind of experience of time, which is totally different. So I suppose that’s what I do with my students. I go, “Okay, here's a little example. Yes, it's a play that's 400 years old, but everything about it still stands because your audience is still experiencing stage time different from real-time, and you've got to change the metronome.”

AYANNA THOMPSON Oh, I love that. And you know, as often as I've worked with Macbeth, I've never noticed that. You know, you feel that galloping feeling, but I've never thought of it in terms of how they leave or enter.

ZiNNIE HARRIS Yeah. I'm a director as well, but I primarily approach the text as a dramatist and all the time I'm going with my dramatist's head, “What's he doing here? What's he trying to do?” Obviously, we haven't talked about Lady Macbeth yet, and we will. But one of the things that I feel is that she's misunderstood a little bit.

AYANNA THOMPSON Totally.

ZiNNIE HARRIS Even in the beginning she's misunderstood, but the speech that is given as an example of her most evil is that “I have given suck” speech. This woman is grasping for an example of, “If I said I'd do something, I blooming well would do it.” But the example that she grasps for is, “If I said I would dash my baby's head out, I would blooming well do it.” Okay, pretty bad example. But in the context of that scene, they're talking about being a host. What she's saying is, “I've been the ultimate host. I've been so much a host that I've taken a baby to my breast, and I've fed it just like you're feeding Duncan. But we are providing for Duncan, and even in that host guest circumstance, I would go on to kill if I had said so.” The ways that we've misunderstood her are actually about not understanding the context of what she's saying and doing.

AYANNA THOMPSON I think the amazing thing about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, in particular, is that there is a cultural narrative about them as symbols that actually bears very little relationship to the play. The idea that she's the engine of murder is so weird, because the first moment when Macbeth encounters the witches, he's like, “Oh, I'm already thinking about killing.”

ZiNNIE HARRIS That's right, with “my seated heart knock at my ribs.” Absolutely, absolutely. And I've got a line in my play when she says, “Did it not occur to you first?” And what she's sort of saying when she talks to us about her husband is, “I know he'll want to do it, but I know he won't. He won't have the guts. He has too much kindness within him, and I know what I need to do to get him there.” But he's well ahead, and he's talking about the fact that he's got a step over Malcolm to get there.

AYANNA THOMPSON He's already planning the murder before we've encountered Lady Macbeth. And that's what makes them a perfect couple, as you know, the oldest joke. The perfect match is that you hear the opportunity, and you both jump to the same way through.

So tell us about your Lady Macbeth, and how you worked to get her a new story. And you know, as you say, you have to end up in madness because you're keeping with the structure. But what did you feel like you could change?

ZiNNIE HARRIS I kept much of the structure at least initially. One of the things I'm trying to talk about is the narratives that we have about women. So Lady Macbeth, in my version, is pretty faithful to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth in the first half. I have put in contemporary material because I wanted to give her a relationship with Lady Macduff. But she's there in essence. The bones are the same. Then he [Macbeth] starts to fragment, and she, as a lot of women have to when they are with men that can't stand up to what they've done, goes, “Okay. I'm going to solve this. I'm going to look after you and the mess that we're in.”

But one of the constructs that I put in Macbeth (an undoing) is the sense that Shakespeare's Macbeth is this superstructure that sits over what she might be feeling or doing. So, it becomes a dialogue between Lady

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS” AYANNA THOMPSON

Macbeth and my Lady Macbeth, and the necessity to bring her to the sleepwalking scene. That there is a kind of preordained heaviness, and she's fighting it all the time. One of the witches starts the play inviting the audience in. So there's a sense of playmaking, and ultimately Lady Macbeth and the play are in dialogue where she's saying, “I know I don't kill myself. I know this isn't right for me, and yet somehow, I'm ending up here in this scene with a knife. How can this be?” But still, she's managing to sort of subvert it. I think this is an experience a lot of women have.

AYANNA THOMPSON I was just about to say. I feel I know exactly what this is like as a Black woman, when you're going into something and you're like, “I know, I'm going to have to fight for this, and I already know that they're going to say that I'm an angry Black woman.” So you're constantly having that dialogue with the perception of what you are as a woman.

ZiNNIE HARRIS That's right, that there is a preordained shape you've got to take and narrative that you've got to fill, and she's going, “But this isn't right.” And that's what the kind of contemporary offer is like, the kind of discussion with other stories, and who gets to define your story. That is also true of the witches, and they say at the end, “You know you always got us wrong.” These kinds of women are marginalized, economically marginalized, don't have a kind of agency of their own, and therefore are feared and pushed out.

AYANNA THOMPSON Yes.

ZiNNIE HARRIS You know, we know throughout all the witch trials, which were contemporary with Shakespeare, these awful, awful stories of these women who probably knew a little bit of midwifery, and therefore, if the baby happened to die, that was their fault.

AYANNA THOMPSON But yeah, also they were Scottish. And this was written by an English author

Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth), Adam Best (Macbeth). Photo by Hollis King.

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS” AYANNA THOMPSON

who clearly had some sort of weird bias. So talk about working with and against Shakespeare's language.

ZiNNIE HARRIS And I think that was probably the trickiest part. So, in a way, the task of this project was partly narrative. As we've talked about, constructing something that offers an alternative to the sort of orthodox version. I always knew I would be writing contemporary material, so I had to find a way that I could work with Shakespeare's language that wouldn’t feel jarring for the audience. And that was, I think, the thing that took quite a lot of time and I'd been working up to it. Working with Webster's language was useful because Webster's language is a little like Shakespeare's. One of the things is the imagery. You could work with imagery. Drop the language slightly. I slightly raised my own into a more poetic kind of tone and there I found a kind of universe where they could meet.

What I found with Shakespeare is I went in it blithely, thinking, “Oh, that's fine! I've done it with Webster. I'll do it with Shakespeare.” Of course, you can't do that because the language is exquisite, so structured, and so well-known that you can't just go, “I'm going to slightly lower it and raise my own,” because you get this awful, cod Shakespeare that nobody's going to want to listen to. And what's the point? But not only that, but with Macbeth, you know that the audience knows enough to know the top 10 speeches. So, I realized pretty quickly that if it was Shakespeare, it had to be Shakespeare. Therefore, I had to find a way to have contemporary language that sits alongside it, that the audience is going to be able to move in and out of so seamlessly that they're not going to be sitting going, “Somebody's just changed gears.”

One of the mechanisms was to create a way of taking them around the first corner that wasn't going to feel jarring. So, we start with a piece of kind of contemporary language. Carlin, who is a kind of amalgam of the Porter and a witch, starts with, “Knock Knock. Who's there?” And that brings us in.

I suppose that says straight away there are going to be bits of contemporary. But also in the first Lady Macbeth scene, the majority is pretty much Shakespeare's short scene. And then, just as they're going off to get ready for the dinner that night, Lady Macbeth tends to Macbeth and says,

“Hang on! What's that on your sleeve?” And it's a ladybird. There's something about that the sort of symbolism, that it's too early in the year for ladybirds. It’s almost like the witches have brought in the supernatural and it allows a glitch in the world for us to move between the two.

And once you've established that with the audience, they go with you. It isn't just the poetry. It's the way that language is used in imagery that, you can pick up the baton. We don't do that so much in contemporary plays. But why not? So Lady Macbeth, in a scene that is entirely written by me, sits alongside that within their relationship. It's talking about people and describing them in a way that uses imagery, that allows an audience to bridge. So it's not that the contemporary is domestic and plain, and the Shakespeare is poetic and full of imagery, but actually that you can blend the two.

When I'm talking about the difficulty of the language or the challenge of the language, I'm blessed in having, across the whole company, particularly in Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, actors that are classically trained and have that fluency with Shakespeare. It doesn't feel like a foreign language so they can seamlessly go into the contemporary.

AYANNA THOMPSON

That’s so interesting because the historical linguist, Jonathan Hope wrote an article about how the language in Macbeth is very unusual, and he says, it all comes down to the word “the.” This is a play that uses “the” more than any other play. So, for example, there's the owl, right? “It was the owl that hooted” which suggests that this is an owl that you already know. So he says that at the linguistic level, you can hear that this is a play that's interested in saying there are things that the audience will never know, because they happened before, and the characters have some familiarity with it which is weird, right?

ZiNNIE HARRIS

One of the lines I love is, “How is the night at odds with morning,” and this sense that everything always has an opposite. But, however you encounter it, we're kind of talking in black and white terms all the way through, and you can pick that up as a writer. You can pick up the button of that and go, “I can take that ingredient into my writing.”

AYANNA THOMPSON

Yes, but it does take an extraordinary writer like you, who has such a finely

“THE REINVENTION OF FEMALE ANTAGONISTS” AYANNA THOMPSON

tuned ear to be able to do that. A lesser playwright wouldn't be able to do that. And I just think it's an extraordinary piece. Is there something that you'd like the audience to know either going in or what you want them to think about coming out of the production?

ZiNNIE HARRIS I'd like them to think about stories and the sort of orthodoxies we've been given, and what the alternative view might be. And how you can change a story so much by changing the point of view or lens.

I think it's also something about… we can be playful with these old texts. Macbeth in the original is going to survive me, right? We can be quite robust with them, and interrogate them. And you know, I think that's part of the gift of all these Shakespeare plays: all of them at their core are an exploration of what it means to be human, what humanity is really. And that's as relevant now as it was then. Some people, I think, feel like we have to revere it. And I think, no, it's a story that speaks to now as much as anything else.

AYANNA THOMPSON No, totally, and I think you're right. Although I'm always suspicious of people saying that Shakespeare would love it, because who cares, but I think in some ways Shakespeare would love what you're doing. Because, of course, he created very few plots on his own, and Macbeth was not one of them. He was interested in showing different points of view and telling tales from a different perspective. So, I think there's something about what you're doing that is very Shakespearean in and of itself.

ZiNNIE HARRIS That's nice to hear. I say to my students that every piece of creation is, in a way, an adaptation. We're always drawing from sources, whether we know the sources or not. And even if you're life-writing, you are adapting in some ways. So I agree with you. I think that Shakespeare was very much saying, “Here's the bare bones of a story. And this is what I want to use it to talk about.”

AYANNA THOMPSON One last question, what are you working on now?

ZiNNIE HARRIS It’s sort of hard to say since things haven't been announced, but I am working on a new play.

AYANNA THOMPSON Is it an adaptation, or is it a new play?

ZiNNIE HARRIS Well, there are two things. One is, I'm working on a new musical, that has sort of stretched me in so many kinds of good ways, because in working on the book, you're not the only author. Half of the job, maybe even two-thirds, is being done by somebody else. So, you have to be there with your skills and drive the process because you're being asked to make the superstructure, but conceding a lot of the moments to someone else. Thank God, I'm working with an absolutely brilliant writer and librettist. That’s happening next year, and then an original play, which I'm sort of just starting to doodle with at the moment.

AYANNA THOMPSON It's wonderful. Thank you so much for your time..

AYANNA THOMPSON (Chair, Council of Scholars) is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). She is the author of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach , co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010), and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus. In 2020 Thompson became a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York. In 2021, she joined the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. Previously, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America, one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholars, a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars, and a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre board.

DIALOGUES RENAISSANCE WOMEN: A NEW BOOK CELEBRATES—AND SELLS SHORT—SHAKESPEARE'S SISTERS

BY CATHERINE NICHOLSON

This essay originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of The Yale Review.

THE GREAT PROBLEM” of women and literature, as Virginia Woolf defined it in A Room of One’s Own (1929), is a problem in two senses of the word. There is the practical question of how women with the ability and the desire to write might succeed in doing so, and then there is the historical question of why so very few women have. Woolf’s answer to the first question takes the form of an aphorism: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Her answer to the second is a story: “Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.”

The brief and tragic life of Judith Shakespeare unfolds over a single vividly plotted paragraph. Born in Stratford-uponAvon, she possesses every ounce of her older brother’s talent and ambition but has none of the privileges or protections of his sex: “She was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.” To avoid an unwanted marriage, she runs off to London, tries and fails to find work, gets pregnant out of wedlock, and dies by suicide before her twentieth

birthday. It must have been thus: a woman in Shakespeare’s day with Shakespeare’s genius could only have squandered it, but, Woolf adds, “it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius.”

Unthinkable because, although genius is ineffable, the conditions for its realization, what it needs to get “itself onto paper,” are concrete: time and quiet, access to books and freedom from interruption, a full belly and a reasonably comfortable chair. As Woolf puts it, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things . . . Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor.” Therefore, the woman “who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century” was necessarily and irredeemably stymied: “All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.”

Conjuring that state of mind leads Woolf to Shakespeare, placid, discreet, and chameleonic, rich in invention and devoid of self-interest:

His grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some “revelation” which

Liz Kettle (Carlin). Photo by Ellie Kurttz.

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded.

As the portrait of a poet who wrote with the primary aim of making a living and—if titles like As You Like It and What You Will are anything to go by—some fleeting irritation at having to do so, Woolf’s tribute to Shakespeare is idealized at best. More troublingly, as a template of poetic sensibility, it is at stark odds with the circumstances of early modern women’s lives as Woolf herself imagined them. Indeed, Woolf’s paean to Shakespeare’s “free and unimpeded” art seems designed not simply to explain but to guarantee the exclusion of women writers from the literary canon. Stunted by hardship and maddened by constraint, by her lights, they could only have written badly or not at all.

“Woolf had good reasons for her pessimism,” says Ramie Targoff in her new book, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, rehearsing the list of forces that conspired to “drastically reduce” the scope and possibilities of early modern women’s lives. They were almost universally denied formal education, legally and economically subordinated to first their fathers and then their husbands, and barred from any form of political participation and most professions—including, famously, the stage. Given their programmatic exclusion from nearly every sphere of learning, law, wealth, politics, art, entertainment, exploration, experimentation, and civic engagement in which the culture of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England was forged, it makes sense to wonder, as Joan Kelly does in the title of a classic essay from 1977, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Drawing on the intervening decades of rich research by historians and literary scholars, Targoff answers confidently that they did.

Running through the whole, behind and beyond the pyrotechnics of form, is a voice of complaint, the psalmist’s ceaseless song of pleading and rebuke.

Shakespeare’s Sisters tells the occasionally interlocking life stories of four women writers born in the latter half of the sixteenth century: Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford. Each married and bore

children. None went to school, though three were raised in homes with private tutors. Indeed, Sidney, Cary, and Clifford were not simply well-off but wealthy, daughters of the English aristocracy or heiresses who married into it. In this respect, Woolf’s instincts about the material requirements for artistic creation were perfectly sound. Only Lanyer, the daughter of a musician, offers any resistance to her dictum about the need for money and a room—better yet, a country house—of one’s own. But the stories of all four women testify, often in startling ways, to the limits of Woolf’s assumptions about early modern women’s eagerness and capacity to create literature. Among them they produced translations of scripture and Seneca, masques and tragedies, history and autobiography, sonnets, verse epistles, psalms, and a book-length poem on the Crucifixion as seen through the eyes of women. Targoff’s protagonists did not simply write poetry and prose; they identified themselves as writers. “Their writing largely defined who they were and how they wanted to be remembered,” she declares. “Writing was their life force.”

In every case, however, writing was tangled up with frustration and loss: with death, disinheritance, marital disputes, legal troubles, religious anxieties, financial disappointments, loneliness, and humiliation. Their circumstances inarguably constrained them. Targoff’s subjects are superbly gifted, but their gifts flourished in what Woolf would have seen as lesser forms like translation and diary-keeping, devotional verse and closet dramas. Worse yet, just as Woolf suspected and feared, their subordination as women left legible imprints on their work, marks of haste, distraction, insecurity, anxiety, and rage. The recuperative impulse and celebratory ethos of Shakespeare’s Sisters does not allow for much lingering on these imprints—for noticing, pondering, interpreting, and even cherishing them—but doing so is one of the chief rewards of reading early modern women writers. Spend enough time in their company, and you realize that the great problem of women and literature has a third dimension, one that implicates us: how to reckon with genius that is impeded and unfree.

STRIKINGLY OFTEN in Targoff’s account, writing follows on disaster. For Mary Sidney, 1586 was an annus horribilis: the loss of her three-year-old daughter was followed by the death of her father, Sir Henry Sidney, and then—horribly, from a gangrenous wound—of her beloved

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

elder brother Philip, who had written his prose romance Arcadia specially for her. Grief seems to have catalyzed Mary’s creativity, turning her from a passionate reader to an increasingly bold and experimental writer who sought to salvage wisdom from the wreckage of faith. She began, in 1590, with a pair of translations from French, one a treatise on Christian stoicism and the other a tragedy about the death of Marc Anthony. In 1592, in an unprecedented choice for the wife of a nobleman (Mary had been wed at fifteen to Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke), she published them with her name attached.

Next she turned—or perhaps returned—to a legacy of her lost brother, an unfinished translation of the Hebrew Psalms into English verse. Philip had drafted forty-three poems, which Mary revised, and to which she added the remaining 107. The resulting collection of 150 poems is not simply a full and astonishingly deft rendering of the biblical song cycle into the vernacular; it is also a virtuosic test of the formal capacities of English poetry. Targoff observes that, unlike the earlier, collaboratively authored version known as the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, “the Sidney Psalter bears no relation to liturgy: it’s a work of literature.” Like the pastoral eclogues Philip wrote to adorn the Arcadia, Mary’s translation of the Psalms is a dazzling compendium of prosodic possibilities.

There are ballad stanzas and sonnets; hexameters, tetrameters, and ottava rima; triple rhymes and internal rhymes; long lines and short lines; rhyme schemes that repeat and rhyme schemes that reverse palindromically. Psalms 111 and 119 are both alphabet poems; Psalm 117 is an acrostic spelling out PRAISE THE LORD. Running through the whole, behind and beyond the pyrotechnics of form, is a voice of complaint, the psalmist’s ceaseless song of pleading and rebuke, whose theme is abandonment and whose audience is God himself.

The finished Sidney Psalter circulated in manuscript, first among Mary’s family and friends and then more widely, eliciting admiration and acclaim. However, not everyone credited Mary with the achievement. Several surviving copies of the psalter attribute the poems solely to Philip Sidney, while Sir John Harington speculated that the bulk of the work had been done by Mary’s chaplain. “It was,” Harington avowed, “more than a woman’s skill to express the sense so right as she hath done.” Mary herself seems to have hesitated to claim the position of author. In a lavish folio manuscript prepared as a presentation copy, perhaps for Queen Elizabeth, a prefatory poem by Mary dedicates the psalter “To The Angel Spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” ascribing its “divine” aspects to his pen and apologizing for her “presumption” in adding to them. In

Portrait of Mary Sidney (1614-1616). Arist unknown.

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

the years that followed, she began to devote her literary energies to patronage, but though she was hardly left destitute when her husband died in 1601, she lost her sway as a potential benefactor. She also seems to have stopped writing. “Her accomplishments were by no means erased,” Targoff hedges, but her star had unmistakably faded.

And yet. A series of letters sent between 1614 and 1616 from Spa—where Mary enjoyed a surprisingly lively retirement, shooting pistols, smoking tobacco, taking a lover (or so it was rumored), and palling around the Belgian resort town with the wife of a European count—hints at a late-life resurgence of creative power. Writing to her friend Sir Tobie Matthew, she promises to send a copy of “my translation,” which Targoff speculates may have been of the poems of Petrarch. A later letter makes tantalizing reference to “this Nothing, which yet is all that I have been able to get,” and assures him that more work will follow soon (nothing of the “Nothing” survives). In a portrait of Mary by the Dutch engraver Simon van de Passe, dated 1618, the Dowager Countess of Pembroke appears richly and conventionally robed, ruffed, and bejeweled and unconventionally crowned with a laurel wreath. As in many portraits of well-bred women of the time, she holds in her hands a little book of prayers, an emblem of her pious devotion. But the words “David’s Psalms” appear along the edge of the volume, marking it as an emblem of poetic achievement. The book Mary reads is the book she herself had written.

Even so, the brass tablet on Mary Sidney’s casket hailed her as “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” which, as Targoff observes, is a “crushingly male definition of her identity.” Sidney comes first in Targoff’s pantheon of women writers not only because she was the eldest and best known but also because her case establishes the steep odds against them. If a woman with the Countess of Pembroke’s resources and connections had her achievements subordinated (or simply reassigned) to men, what hope was there for anyone else? The case of Elizabeth Cary underscores the point, but it also hints at the unexpected affordances of social exclusion. On the face of it, the fate of Cary’s History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II offers an enraging instance of gender bias. First printed in 1680, forty years after her death, Cary’s bold retelling of the fourteenth-century monarch’s notorious career was misattributed by its publishers to her estranged husband

Henry, Lord Falkland, a “gentleman . . . above fifty years since.” Never mind that, unlike his prolific, prodigiously gifted wife, Henry was known not as a writer but as a soldier and a courtier. Never mind, too, that “The Author’s Preface to the Reader” was signed “Elizabeth Falkland.” “Very few,” the publishers assured readers, could have “express[ed] their conceptions in so masculine a style.”

The owner of that style was indeed exceptional. Born to a wealthy lawyer who delighted in and encouraged her ability, Cary translated Latin and French as a child, argued with her father about Calvinism, and had the poet Michael Drayton for a tutor. But her marriage at seventeen, in 1602, to the fashionable and footloose Sir Henry Cary forced her into an unhappy domesticity, thanks partly to a mother-in-law who disapproved of her learning, took away her books, and confined her to her bedchamber, and partly to Henry himself, who spent her fortune freely while she bore him eleven children over a span of twenty-three years. Pregnancy and childbirth were hard for Elizabeth. After giving birth, as her daughters later recalled, she suffered episodes of “deep melancholy” and fits of “plain distractedness.” “Transported with her own thoughts [she] would forget herself, where she was and how attended.” But despite such an abundance of circumstances “hostile,” as Woolf would no doubt have judged, to art, Elizabeth continued to write. Indeed, hostility was her specialty. While shut up at her mother-in-law’s, her output included poems, plays, and various “things for her recreation,” including a life in verse of the bloodthirsty Scythian warlord Tamburlaine, who seized his bride in battle and put helpless virgins to the sword. After Cary began bearing children, she undertook a closet drama about the suffering of the virtuous Hasmonean princess Mariam at the hands of her cruel husband, Herod the Great. Mariam is a moral exemplar, but she is no patient victim. When she hears a rumor of Herod’s death, she weeps for joy; when he murders her relatives, she announces that she will never sleep with him again: “Yet had I rather much a milkmaid be.” Remarkably, The Tragedy of Mariam was published in 1613 and attributed on its title page to “that learned, vertuous, and truly noble Ladie, E. C.”

Henry Cary seems not to have objected to this print debut, but he objected furiously to Elizabeth’s growing interest in Catholicism. When, in 1626, she “declared herself...

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

a Papist,” she was cut off financially, lost custody of her four youngest children, and was placed under house arrest by order of King James I. It was a catastrophe—and an opportunity. Over the next two years, living with a single serving woman in “a little old house” ten miles outside of London, Cary completed two massive literary undertakings: the translation of a nearly five-hundred-page defense of the Catholic faith by a French cardinal and The History of Edward II. Christopher Marlowe’s version of Edward’s tragedy for the late sixteenth-century stage had focused on the king himself, portraying his struggles with rebellious councilors, his passionate attachment to a male favorite, and his brutal murder. Cary’s account pays equally close attention to Edward’s neglected queen, Isabella, “in name a wife, in truth a handmaid.” Although Cary’s Isabella comes to regret the relatively small part she plays in Edward’s downfall, she regrets its smallness even more, “tast[ing] with a bitter time of repentance what it was but to be quoted in the margin of such a story.” Cary was determined that Isabella’s fate would not be her own. Following Henry’s death from a hunting accident in 1633, she regained custody of her youngest children, whom she smuggled to France to be reared as Catholics, and secured from her eldest son a modest annual allowance. In her final years, according to her daughters, “her whole employment” was “writing and reading.”

To be made a pariah was, for Cary, a strange sort of boon. It released her from a life dominated by the demands of family and society into a freedom that was at once marginal and entirely her own. Though she would have been loath to admit it, disinheritance accomplished a similar transformative magic for Lady Anne Clifford, the cosseted only child of George and Margaret, the Earl and Countess of Cumberland. Presumed to be the heiress to a fantastic fortune, Anne was raised in luxury. Items from an expense book kept by her governess include “[m]usicians for playing at [her] chamber-door,” embroidery silk and silkworms, a month of dancing lessons, a masque, her portrait painted on canvas, “11 bunches of glass feathers,” and “2 dozen of glass flowers.” Though she had the poet Samuel Daniel for a tutor, Anne’s father set strict limits on her education. Reading was one thing: Anne had access to a lavish library of English books. Writing was another: among various luxuries and frivolities, the expense book includes an entry for “two pap[er] books, 1 for account, the other to write her catechism in.” Account-keeping and spiritual exercises, the

care of one’s estates and the care of one’s soul, were the only acceptable uses for a young lady’s pen. But at some point in her late teens or early twenties, reeling from the discovery that her father had written her out of his will in favor of a pair of male relations, Anne Clifford began to use her paper books for something else: a record of her own experiences from one day, month, and year to the next. Today we might call it a memoir. Anne called it The Life of Me.

Over the course of the next sixty-some years, through two marriages, the births of two daughters, the death of her beloved mother, and an all-consuming, unrelenting legal battle to recover her lost paternal legacy, Anne filled countless paper books with the consequential and inconsequential details of her existence, including visits from friends and neighbors, quarrels with her husbands, bouts of depression and ill health, ups and downs in her ongoing lawsuits, the arrival of children and grandchildren, and the memory of an occasion on which “I ate so much cheese that it made me sick.”

In 1643, having outlived both of the male relatives to whom she lost her inheritance, Anne recovered the vast Clifford estates and with them access to a trove of family records. Over the next three decades, The Life of Me was incorporated into a still larger project of selfcommemoration, a compendium of legal documents and family histories that Anne dubbed her Great Books of Record. About five-sixths of the more than a thousand handwritten pages in the three oversize folio volumes chart the fortunes of the Clifford dynasty, from the twelfth century through the late sixteenth. The remaining pages are all Anne. The details of her last days, from January through most of March of 1676, are recorded in one final paper book. A deaf woman from the almshouse brought too much lace to the house and was scolded for it; a beloved dog had puppies, “but they were all dead”; the local schoolmaster paid a visit. She died on March 22, her account books—the catechism of her existence—complete.

THE LOSSES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS of Mary

Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford mark their writing with what Virginia Woolf would have seen as the stigmata of sorrow, although none of them was ever as imperiled as Woolf imagined Judith Shakespeare to be. The last of Targoff’s four protagonists came remarkably close to Judith’s

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

fate. In 1587, eighteen-year-old Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian, likely Jewish, immigrant court musician and his common-law English wife, found herself orphaned, friendless, and near-penniless in the city of London. Like Woolf’s imagined heroine, Lanyer sought protection in an affair with an older man, and, also like her, she eventually became pregnant. But here history diverges startlingly from myth. Where young Judith Shakespeare takes up with the playhouse impresario Nick Greene, Lanyer caught the eye of Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain of England, cousin to Queen Elizabeth herself, and a married father of thirteen. When she realized she was expecting his child, rather than kill herself to avoid ignominy, Aemilia informed Hunsdon, who wed her to a member of his staff, Alfonso Lanyer. It does not seem to have been an especially successful union, but Aemilia would later look back on the affair that had prompted her marriage with equanimity and a hint of pride. The old Lord Chamberlain, she reflected, “kept her long . . . maintained her in great pomp,” and “loved her well.” Her years as his mistress were, in many ways, the happiest time of her life. If their relationship had not ended, she might never have written a word.

Freedom was never what Lanyer most craved for herself. Instead, poetry was a demand for recognition and attachment, not a consolation for exclusion but its intended remedy.

Much of what we know about Lanyer comes from the prurient case history of Simon Forman, a London astrologer and medical practitioner whom she consulted about her efforts to conceive a child with Alfonso. Forman’s records reveal how Aemilia struggled, in her marriage and on the fringes of court society, but also how she thrived, naming her baby Henry (after his well-known father) and lobbying keenly for her husband’s promotion. When those efforts proved unsuccessful, Lanyer parlayed her connections into a place in the household of Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and mother to young Anne. The association did not last—she seems to have spent just a few months with Margaret and Anne in the summer of 1604—but it proved pivotal for Aemilia. Through some alchemy of affection and envy, Lanyer’s time with the Cliffords made her a poet. In October 1610, a volume titled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was entered in the records of the London Stationers’ Company, and in 1611 it appeared in print, “[w]ritten,” as the title page announces, “by Mistris Aemilia Lanyer.”

The contents were remarkable. The book opens with a collection of dedicatory epistles in verse and prose summoning the attention and support of an exclusively female readership, from Queen Anne herself to “all vertuous Ladies in generall.” This is followed by a long

"Portrait of Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941), a British author and feminist, with her chignon." Photo by George Charles Beresford.

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

narrative poem in ottava rima, retelling the story of the passion of Christ from the perspective of the Gospels’ female characters. Lanyer’s adaptation of scripture is allusive, emotive, and strikingly free. She digresses to consider, among other subjects, the creation of the world, the paradox of redemption through suffering, the erotic career of Cleopatra, the martyrdom of St. Stephen, and the conjunction of Christ’s divinity and humanity. Throughout the poem, Lanyer repeatedly foregrounds the unjust plight of women, yoking their sufferings to the suffering of Jesus and holding the patriarchy responsible for it all. In one memorable detour, she endows Pilate’s wife—a figure who appears in a single verse in the Gospel of Matthew—with a lawyerly and full-throated defense of Eve, the original fallen woman. Her argument gleefully inverts the orthodox doctrine of atonement, whereby Christ’s death redeems the fall of Adam. The crime of authorizing and imposing the Crucifixion, Pilate’s wife reasons, is itself so great as to dwarf and swallow up all previous trespasses, including Eve’s own: “Your indiscretion sets us free, / And makes our former fault much less appear.”

But freedom was never what Lanyer most craved for herself. Instead, poetry was a demand for recognition and attachment, not a consolation for exclusion but its intended

remedy. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum concludes with a poem dedicated to Anne and her mother, recalling their summer together. “The Description of Cooke-ham” is a record of shared but unequal privation. As the poem begins, all three women are being forced to leave the lovely estate where they had spent the summer of 1604. “Farewell (sweet Cookeham), where I first obtain’d / Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain’d,” read the opening lines. The triple play on “grace”—as patronage, as aristocratic position, and as the perfection of inner and outer beauty—at once identifies the three women as versions of one another and sharply defines the hierarchical distinctions between them, as dependent, mistress, and mistress-to-be. And as the poem continues, mourning their imminent departure, it becomes clear that Lanyer feels herself doubly abandoned. Wherever Margaret and Anne are headed next, she is not coming with them.

“The Description of Cooke-ham” is often called the first English country-house poem, a genre marked by its graceful conversion of praise for a place into praise for its possessors and heirs. But Lanyer imbues the gesture with melancholy and more than a hint of passive aggression, as she labors to articulate, for the Clifford ladies and for herself, the peculiar sadness of losing something that was never really yours to begin with. Before leaving Cookham,

Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) © The British Library

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

young Anne bestows “a chaste, yet loving kisse” on a tree where she, her mother, and Aemilia used to read together. Aemilia, “ingratefull Creature,” repeats the gesture, but for the purpose of stealing Anne’s kiss from the tree and keeping it for herself. The nature of this ingratitude is hard to pin down: it is Aemilia’s for the tree, which she deprives of its intended reward, and, by extension, for Anne, whose liberal affections she would jealously hoard. But it is also, though this cannot be said, the Cliffords’ ingratitude for Aemilia herself, who is unkissed, unthanked, and evidently forgotten in the rush of departure. The final lines of the poem represent it as having been solicited by Margaret or Anne in tribute, but that bond of obligation is obviously the wishful product of Lanyer’s imagining. “The Description of Cooke-ham” is not only an expression of love and regret for a place where women communed with books, trees, and one another; it is also an attempt to recreate the attachments it—briefly—sustained by fencing them in rhyming couplets, as if assonance could compensate for defects of attention and care. “And ever shall, so long as life remaines, / Tying my heart to her by those rich chaines.”

ALTHOUGH SHE INVOKES A Room of One’s Own in her title, Targoff declares at the outset of Shakespeare’s Sisters that Virginia Woolf’s own “tastes and biases” are “a topic beyond our interest here.” Why should a highmodernist preference for aesthetic impersonality govern our appreciation of works written centuries before? It is certainly true, as Targoff insists, that “There’s so much more to learn through reading women’s writing than we can measure on strictly aesthetic or formal grounds.” Reading Mary Sidney illuminates the anguish of losing a child, and reading Elizabeth Cary shows how women interpreted and revised pieties about wifely obedience. Reading Anne Clifford and Aemilia Lanyer teaches us a great deal about the relationship between gender and property, about the difficulties women faced in staking claims of ownership and the satisfaction they took in doing so nonetheless. Shakespeare’s Sisters samples a rich archive of gendered experiences, opening windows onto aspects of early modern life that are rarely, fleetingly, and often only partially visible in the writings of men. And yet, Targoff ruefully observes, “One of the questions I’m frequently asked when I talk about these writers is, are they any good? Is there a reason, people want to know, why we should bother to read them?” The questions clearly

irk her. She answers them briskly, in the affirmative, in an epilogue, but they represent an opportunity it would be a shame to miss. For if we wish not only to recover early modern women’s writing for academic study—a project well underway since the 1970s—but to claim it for readerly enjoyment, we will have to confront the matter of taste.

The ghost of Judith Shakespeare has haunted the study of early modern women’s writing for nearly a century. It is time, perhaps, for an exorcism. The introduction to the recent, and admirable, Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700, edited by Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, calls the fable of Shakespeare’s sister “a defining narrative for feminist scholarship on women writers of the past, bequeathing a framework of occlusion and loss, exclusion and defiance, and a desire to recover matrilineal literary traditions.” This is generous, for it was also a witting and willful counterfactual. Proffered to explain women’s absence from the literary canon, the story of Judith Shakespeare simultaneously produced that absence as a rhetorical effect. To be sure, the archive of early women’s writing was in 1929 by no means as rich, varied, well-studied, and easily accessible as it is today, thanks to modern editions, monographs, collections like the Oxford Handbook, and digital undertakings like the online Bibliography of English Women Writers (1500–1640), The Perdita Project, The Pulter Project, The Lucy Hutchinson Project, Seventeenth-Century Women Poets, and more. But neither was it the bare shelf of Woolf’s imagining. Indeed, by the time A Room of One’s Own appeared in print, anthologies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s poetry and prose had been in circulation for nearly two centuries. George Ballard’s 1752 Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences offered extracts from more than sixty authors, going back to the early Tudor period. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s collection, Poems by Eminent Ladies, appeared in three separate editions between 1755 and 1785 and was followed by Alexander Dyce’s Specimens of British Poetesses (1825) and Frederic Rowton’s The Female Poets of Great Britain (1848). Woolf evidently knew some of these volumes, or at least knew something about their contents. In A Room of One’s Own, she references a range of earlier women writers, though always critically and often dismissively. Two she mentions date to the latter part of the seventeenth century, just after

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

Shakespeare’s time: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. The poetry of Lady Winchilsea “is harrassed and distracted with hates and grievances,” Woolf writes, and that of “hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle . . . disfigured and disformed by the same causes.” She laments, “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! . . . What a waste.”

In light of such despairing judgments, the suicide of Judith Shakespeare starts to look more like a euthanasia. Had she lived to write, Woolf insists, “Whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.” Woolf evidently preferred her fictive vision of Shakespeare’s sister to Vita SackvilleWest’s account of Anne Clifford, whose diaries SackvilleWest edited for publication in 1923. This was shortly after Vita and Virginia met at a party, when the pair was in the throes of their early infatuation. As Targoff points out, Woolf clearly knew about the book, which is prefaced by SackvilleWest’s astute and affectionate portrait of Clifford:

She went through her life permanently embattled, whether the quarrel lay with her husbands,—for she had two, and fought with both of them—with her servants, her tradesmen, or her tenants, to all of whom she spoke her mind on one occasion or other, or with Cromwell, whom she defied, or with Charles II, of whom she disapproved, or with a mere canvasser for parliamentary election, to whom she wrote, “I have been bullied by a usurper, I have been neglected by a court, but I will not be dictated to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.”

Woolf, if she read this, was not swayed in Clifford’s favor; maybe she was even repelled. Although she acknowledges Clifford in passing in a 1932 essay on John Donne, where she salutes the “active and practical and little educated” noblewoman as a generous literary patron, she makes no mention of her in A Room of One’s Own. As an author in her own right, Clifford seems not to have registered at all—except, perhaps, in the negative. Woolf’s admiring portrait of Shakespeare, as someone who quarreled with no one and never spoke his mind, is such a precise inversion of Sackville-West’s description of Clifford that it is hard not to wonder if it was written in conscious or unconscious

reaction to it. Here, after all, was a writer who made grievance her muse, whose grudges, spites, and antipathies are a continued theme and the vital spirit of her style.

And Clifford was not the only one. The enlivening revelation of early modern women’s writing is that good writing does not have to transcend or efface the straitened circumstances of its production. It can sing them, too, even in the key of rage. The writers Targoff champions are proof of this. Mary Sidney’s psalter is the pious offering of a devoted sister and a faithful Christian, but it is also a litany of righteous indignation: “Let God but rise, his very face shall cast / On all his haters flight and disarray,” implores Psalm 68; “Babylon, that did us waste, / Thyself shall one day wasted be,” promises Psalm 173. (Targoff notes the tenderness of her depiction of maternal love in Psalm 51, but here Sidney cheerfully envisions the “little ones” of Babylon “dash[ed] against the stones.”) As the villainous foil to virtuous Mariam, Elizabeth Cary’s Salome is the engine of the play’s tragic plot and gets many of its best lines, including an impassioned speech in praise of women’s right to divorce: “I’ll be the custom-breaker,” she declares, “to show my sex the way to freedom’s door.”

The woman “born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century was an unhappy woman,” Woolf declares, and so she may have been. But unhappiness is not necessarily a bar to art. Indeed, it might even serve as an inspiration. Consider the case of Isabella Whitney. Though she is mentioned only in passing by Targoff (and was unknown to Woolf, who would almost certainly have disliked her), Whitney is, to my mind, one of the greatest of early modern English writers. She is our poet laureate of resentment, brilliant and embittered, sarcastic and self-deprecating. When she moved to rented lodgings in London’s Abchurch Street in 1573, she had neither money nor a room of her own. That was why she turned to poetry, as she declares in “The Auctor to the Reader,” the opening poem of her 1573 collection of verse, A Sweet Nosegay:

This Harvest tyme, I Harvestlesse, and servicelesse also:

And subject unto sicknesse, that abroade I could not go, Had leasure good, (though learning lackt) some study to apply.

RENAISSANCE WOMEN CATHERINE NICHOLSON

She begins by reading the things she knows she ought to read—the Bible, chronicle histories, classics in translation— but they leave her confused, exhausted, and bored. She starts instead to compose a book of her own, this book, the book we are reading. A Sweet Nosegay is what Whitney’s contemporaries might have called a miscellany: a hodgepodge collection of long and short poems on various themes. Many of its pages are taken up by Whitney’s versification of moral sayings gathered in a then-recently published commonplace book, Hugh Plat’s 1572 The Floures of Philosophie; others are filled with verse epistles addressed to Whitney’s own family members and friends.

She writes in spite of everything, in all senses of the phrase.

As a landmark of literary history, A Sweet Nosegay has much to recommend it to the attention of scholars. It is the first solely authored printed book of poems by a known English woman and one of the first solely authored printed books by any English poet living at the time. It is a vernacular miscellany by a poet who dared to prefer English ballad meter to the hexameters of Virgil and Ovid. It was published by the pioneering printer Richard Jones and offered for sale in St. Paul’s Churchyard at a time when very few male authors risked committing their names to the press. It is also—and this is why you should read it—aggrieved, impatient, sly, petulant, defiant, fully alive (and utterly unreconciled) to the conditions of its making.

“All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed,” said Virginia Woolf of Shakespeare. Isabella Whitney— who, as it happens, had a poet-brother of her own, the emblem-book maker Geoffrey Whitney—does nothing but protest, preach, proclaim injuries, and pay off scores. To a married sister, she explains,

Had I a Husband, or a house, and all that longs thereto

My selfe could frame about to rouse, as other women doo:

But til some household cares mee tye, My books and Pen I wyll apply.

Here and elsewhere, Whitney draws the connection between grievance and art that Woolf refuses. She writes in spite of everything, in all senses of the phrase, and by doing so, gives the lie to Woolf’s insistence on writerly detachment. Woolf and Whitney emphatically agree that “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.” That poetry should depend upon intellectual freedom is not necessarily the case. Poetry can also depend, even feed, on the knowledge of privation and constraint, of all one has not been granted and cannot accomplish, given the world as it is.

“The Maner of Her Wyll,” the final poem in Whitney’s volume, invites us to imagine, with characteristic melodrama, her forced departure from London as a kind of death. What follows is both an outpouring of frustrated appetite and ambition and a refusal of their terms: a furious lament for the goods, pleasures, privileges, people, and properties to which Whitney has been denied access, and (as the scholar Crystal Bartolovich argues) the utopian summons of a world in which they are hers, or anyone’s, to command. The poem is a darkly exuberant catalogue of urban scenes, characters, and commodities, but it turns on a pair of linked puns, at once simple and profound: leaving and willing, willing and leaving. London has left Whitney nothing, and so she is leaving it, but in leaving the city, she can at last claim it, by leaving it to others. The thwarting of her will is countered by the writing—and, in some imagined future, the reading—of it. A will is a deathbed testament, but it is also a prophetic utterance, an attempt to shape and determine the content of time to come. The witnesses to Whitney’s “Wyll” are her faithful companions: “Paper, Pen and Standish [inkwell] were: / at that same present by.” Time, she says, will deliver her testament to readers. We are its executors..

CATHERINE NICHOLSON is a Professor of English at Yale University, where she teaches and writes about early modern literature. She is the author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance and Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

ADAM BEST (Macbeth). Theatre credits include: Cyrano De Bergerac (Jamie Lloyd Company); The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Lyric Hammersmith/Chichester Festival Theatre); The Duchess, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (The Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh); Hedda Gabler, Twelfth Night, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie (National Theatre); Lions & Tigers (Shakespeare’s Globe); This Restless House, Hamlet (Citizen’s Glasgow); Crime & Punishment (Citizen’s Glasgow/Liverpool Playhouse/The Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh); Flare Path, Our Country’s Good, Journey’s End (Original Theatre Company); The Deep Blue Sea (Watermill Theatre); Public Enemy (Young Vic); The Woman in Black (Fortune Theatre); The Golden Dragon (Actors Touring Company); By the Bog of Cats (Wyndham’s Theatre). Recent TV & Film Credits include: "The Crown" (Netflix); “Peaky Blinders” (BBC/Netflix); “Giri/Haji” (Sister Pictures Ltd/BBC); Kneecap (Fine Point Films); “Blue Lights” (BBC); “Say Nothing” (Disney+, FX). Training: Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama.

EMMANUELLA COLE (Lady Macduff/Mae). Theatre Credits: The Iliad (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh-Nominated for Best Female Performance, Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland); An Octoroon, Danton’s Death, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (National Theatre); Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (RSC); Faustus (Headlong), Amanda (Young Vic); Shakespeare at Westminster Abbey (Shakespeare’s Globe); But I Cd Only Whisper (Arcola Theatre); We Know Not What We May Be (Barbican); Roadkill (Traverse Theatre); The Claim (Paines Plough); Faith Hope and Charity (Southwark Playhouse); Dancing Bears (Soho Theatre), and African Snow (Trafalgar Studios). Award wins: Roadkill (Olivier for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre) Film: Hamlet (BKL Productions) TV: "I May Destroy You" (BBC/HBO); "The Tower" (ITV/Mammoth); "Cormoran Strike: Career of Evil" (HBO/BBC/Bronte); "Obsession" (Discovery USA); "Cucumber" (Channel 4/ Red Productions); "Scott and Bailey" (ITV/Red Productions); "Law and Order" (ITV/Kudos); Thorne; Sleepyhead (Sky One); "Little Miss Jocelyn" (BBC); "Top Boy" (Channel 4/Netflix); "In the Long Run" (Sky One/Green Door).

NICOLE COOPER (Lady Macbeth). Nicole is of Zambian and Greek heritage, growing up in Zambia before moving to Glasgow to train at the RSAMD (now RCS), graduating with a BA Acting in 2003. Nicole won Best Female Performance in the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2017 and 2020 for her performance in the title roles in

Adam Best (Macbeth), Taqi Nazeer (Lennox), Laurie Scott (Ross), Emmanuella Cole (Lady Macduff), Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Coriolanus and Medea with Bard in the Botanics. She was also nominated in the same category in 2020 for the title role in Hamlet and nominated in 2023 for Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (an undoing). Nicole has extensive Shakespeare experience with leading roles in: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Anthony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure, Othello, and Macbeth. Further theatre credits include: An Oak Tree (Lyceum Theatre); The Tempest (Glasgow Tron); The Scarlet Pimpernel (Pimpernel Productions); Sleeping Beauty (Byre Theatre); How to Fix a Broken Wing (Catherine Wheels TC); Pleading, The Spark (Glasgow Oran Mor); and Horizontal Collaboration (Fire Exit TC).

TV/Film: "The Nest" (Studio Lambert/BBC); "Novels That Shaped Our World" (IWC Media/BBC); Getting Close (National Theatre of Scotland); Where Did He Go? (Traverse Theatre); "Jonathan Creek" (BBC); and "Fried" (Bwark Productions Ltd). Radio: The Five Thousand (BBC).

LIZ KETTLE (Carlin). Theatre: Count Dracula/Jean in Dracula - Mina’s Reckoning (National Theatre of Scotland); Queen Margaret in Richard III (Rose Theatre/Liverpool Playhouse); Carlin in Macbeth (an undoing) (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh); The Girl on the Sofa (Royal Lyceum/Berlin Schaubühne/Thomas Ostermeier); Henry VI (Royal Shakespeare Co./World Tour); Caliban in The Tempest (Tron Glasgow); Waves, The Seagull, Attempts On Her Life (all directed by Katie Mitchell at the Royal National Theatre, National European Tour & Broadway); Catch 22 (Rachel Chavkin for Northern Stage); TRUTH – Song Theatre (Steven Hoggett/Helen Chadwick National Tour); Richard III, Taming of the Shrew (Phyllida Lloyd for the Globe Theatre); Iphigenia in Aulis (Abbey Theatre, Dublin); Laertes in The Roaring Girl’s Hamlet (Sphinx Theatre Co.); Plasticine (Domonic Cooke for Royal Court); Antonio in The Tempest/ Stürm (Schauspielhaus, Cologne and Hamburg, Germany). TV/Film/Radio: "The Crown" (Netflix); "Unforgotten IV," "Paris with Alexei Sayle" (ITV); The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton, "Doctors" (BBC); Fracture (20th Century Digital/ Disney); Honoria Glossop in "Jeeves & Wooster," "Inspector Morse," "Rosemary & Thyme," "Poirot," Keli (Martin Green/Wils Wilson/Lepus Arts); Between Us (Napier); The Final Journey (John Strickland for Working Title).

THIERRY MABONGA (Macduff/Doctor). Theatre: Everything Under the Sun (Oneill Ross); James IV: Queen of the Fight, First Snow/Premier Neige, Last Dream On Earth (National Theatre of Scotland); Frankenstein (Selladoor); Low Pay? Don't Pay!, Sleeping Beauty (Glasgow Life); Richard III (Perth Theatre); Brothers Karamazov (Tron Theatre); Titus Andronicus (Dundee Rep); Skins and Hoods (Cie du Veilleur). TV work includes: “Annika” (Season 2), “Meet you in Scotland”, “Vigil”, “River City”, “Scot Squad”, “The Split”, “Trust Me”, “The Replacement”, “Armchair Detectives”, “Dog Squad”, “Logan High”. Film includes: Trainspotting 2, Tent, The American Song. Radio includes: In the DRC, Pale Fire. Video Game: “Diablo IV”. Awards/Nominations: Fringe First Award 2023 (Everything Under the Sun by Jack MacGregor), Best Production Category at the Scottish Theatre Awards 2023 (Everything Under the Sun by Jack MacGregor). Training: The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

MARC MACKINNON ( Duncan/Murderer 2 ). Recent theatre appearances: An Oak Tree (Lyceum at The Festivals); Ode to Joy (Sydney Festival/Edinburgh Fringe Festival); Four Play (Above The Stag); Peter Gynt (National Theatre); Measure for Measure; Blithe Spirit (Changeling Theatre); Metropolis (Ye Olde Rose & Crown Theatre); and Daisy, Like the Flower (Gazing Theatre). Television credits include: “The Royals”. Award nominations/wins: nominated for Best Supporting Actor ( Four Play ). Trained at Mountview.

TAQI NAZEER (Bloody Soldier/Lennox). Theatre: An Edinburgh Christmas Carol (Lyceum), Jinnistan (Oran Mor), The Gun Powder Plot (Layered Reality), The Enemy (NTS), Passing Places (Dundee Rep), Rishta (Oran Mor), The Assessment (Shows on a Shoestring), Deranged Marriage (Rifco Arts), Stowaway (Analogue Theatre), The Domestic Crusaders (Tara Arts), Beautiful Burnout (Frantic Assembly). Television credits: “Casualty”, “SIX-FOUR”, “The Control Room”, “Shetland”, “ANNIKA”, “The Replacement”, “Scenes for Survival”. Film: Ghostlight. Narration: After Sheku (Documentary); Mr. Good: Cop or Crook? Radio: Death of a Matriarch, Music Match. Presenter: Scotistan Podcast, Double Lives Documentary. Writer: Jinnistan (Oran Mor/Traverse), Rishta (Oran Mor), Scot Squad (BBC Scotland), Music Match-various skits (BBC / Demus Productions).

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

STAR PENDERS (Missy/Malcolm). Recent theatre appearances: Aganeza Scrooge (Tron Theatre, Glasgow); SCOTS (PPP, 54 Below: Off-Broadway, Edinburgh Fringe); Ceilidh (Noisemaker); Macbeth (an undoing) (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh); The Girls of Cartridge Hut No. 7 (Outspoken Arts Scotland); Spuds (Play, Pie and a Pint); Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk (South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture). Trained at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

JAMES ROBINSON ( Banquo ). Theatre credits include: Macbeth (an undoing) (The Royal Lyceum); Landscape With Weapon (The Cockpit Theatre); Macbeth (National Theatre); This Little Life of Mine (The Park Theatre); Brassed Off (York Theatre Royal); In Time o’ Strife (National Theatre of Scotland); Wendy House (The Vaults); I Didn’t Always Live Here, Trilby (Finborough Theatre); King John (Union Theatre); Bonfires and Vanities (New End Theatre); They Came To a City (Southwark Playhouse); A Man’s A Man (Gaiety Theatre); Online Courting (Edinburgh Festival); Knives In Hens, Festen (Battersea Arts Centre). Television credits include: “Babylon” (Nightjack Ltd/Channel 4); “The Borgias” (Showtime Network); “Washington” (Railsplitter Pictures/History Channel); “Outlander” (Sony Pictures Television); “Charlatans” (Kingdom Entertainment); “Casualty”, “Doctors” (BBC). Film credits Include: Braveheart (20th Century Fox); A Merry Scottish Christmas (Hallmark Pictures); The Wee Man (Carnaby International); Saving Christmas Spirit (Nicely Entertainment); Dark Sense (Encaptivate Films); Ashes (Bradgate); Saxon (Silwood Films). Radio Credits Include: Macbeth (Almost Tangible). Awards: Winner of Audio Production award for Audio Performer of the Year. Training: Rose Bruford College

LAURIE SCOTT ( Ross/Murderer 1 ): Theatre credits include: Macbeth (an undoing) (Royal Lyceum Theatre); Cinderella (Stagedoor Entertainment); Stand By (Scottish Theatre Producers); Square Go (Francesca Moody Productions); The Dark Carnival (Vanishing Point/Citizens Theatre); Death of a Salesman, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Spoiling, Monstrous Bodies, George’s Marvellous Medicine (Dundee Rep Theatre); Edward II, Antony and Cleopatra (Bard in the Botanics); Mother Goose, Bairns in the Wood (Howden Park Centre); Eric the Elf’s Chaotic Christmas (Macrobert Arts Centre); Class Act, Playwrights Studio (Traverse Theatre). Film and Radio credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (BBC Radio 3/SSO); World War One at Home (BBC Radio Scotland); So Quiet Underwater (Lilablassblaukariert). Training: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

ZINNIE HARRIS (Writer/Director). Writing credits include: Macbeth (an undoing), The Scent of Roses, The Duchess (of Malfi), Rhinoceros (Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh); This Restless House (Citizens Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland); Meet Me At Dawn (Traverse Theatre); How To Hold Your Breath, Nightingale and Chase (Royal Court Theatre); The Wheel, Julie (National Theatre of Scotland); Further than the Furthest Thing (Royal National Theatre/ Tron Theatre); Midwinter, Solstice (RSC); Fall (Traverse Theatre/RSC); By Many Wounds (Hampstead Theatre); A Doll’s House (Donmar Warehouse). Directing credits include: The Scent of Roses, The Duchess (of Malfi), A Number (all Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh); Gut (Traverse Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland); Tracks of the Winter Bear (Traverse Theatre); The Garden (Sound Festival); Midwinter, Solstice (RSC); Gilt (7:84); Dealers Choice (Tron Theatre). Television credits include: “Partners in Crime”, “Spooks”, (BBC1); “Richard Is My Boyfriend”, “Born with Two Mothers” (Channel 4). Film credits include: A Glimpse (writer and director). Zinnie has received multiple playwriting and directing awards including the 1999 Peggy Ramsay Award, John Whiting Award, Arts Foundation Fellowship award and several Fringe First Awards. Her short film A Glimpse won best short drama at SMHAF Festival. She was joint winner of the 2011 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. Zinnie won the CATS award for Best Director for her production of A Number at The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, and Best New Play for This Restless House. Zinnie is currently the Associate Artistic Director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre.

TOM PIPER (Set Designer). Tom was Associate Designer at the RSC for ten years and has designed over fifty productions for the company. He was Associate Designer at Kiln Theatre (2020-22). Theatre work includes: Medea (EIF/NTS); Cyrano de Bergerac (Lyceum/Citizens/NTS); The Scent of Roses, Lyceum Christmas Tales, The Duchess (of Malfi), Rhinoceros, Mrs Puntila, Hay Fever (Lyceum); Endgame, King Lear, Hamlet, The Libertine, Nora (Citizens); Girl on an Altar, White Teeth (Kiln); Rusalka (Garsington Opera/ EIF); Faith (RSC/Coventry City of Culture); iHo,

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

The Haystack (Hampstead); Carmen La Cubana (Le Chatelet, Paris); Red Velvet (West End/Tricycle Theatre/New York); Orfeo (Royal Opera House); Tamburlaine The Great (TFANA New York); The Great Wave (RNT); Turn of the Screw (Wiltons/OperaGlassworks film). Design credits: Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London and received an MBE for services to Theatre and First World War commemorations. Exhibition credits: Living with Death (Humboldt Forum Berlin) Alice Curiouser and Curiouser, Winnie-the-Pooh, Curtain Up (V&A), and Shakespeare Staging the World (British Museum). Olivier Award for Best Costume Design for The Histories (RSC); Best Design (Scottish Critics awards) for Twelfth Night (Dundee Rep), and Macbeth (an undoing).

ALEX BERRY (Costume Designer). Recent theatre credits: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, Life is a Dream (Associate Designer, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh); Every Brilliant Thing (Theatre by the Lake); Shifters (Bush Theatre); Rumplestiltskin (Park Theatre); The Barber of Seville (Nevill Holt Opera); Don Giovanni (Nevill Holt Opera); No Sweat (The Pleasance London); The Rape Of Lucretia (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland); Spring Awakening (Redgrave Theatre); A Tender Thing (The Theatre, Chipping Norton); Rabbits (Park Theatre); These Trees Are Made of Blood (Arcola Theatre); The Cunning Little Vixen (Royal College of Music); The Lighthouse (Hackney Showroom); Robin Hood (The Old Market, Brighton); Song of Riots (Awake Projects); The Kreutzer Sonata (The Theatre, Chipping Norton); This Much (ZOO, Edinburgh Fringe); O Réjane (Bootleg Theatre, Los Angeles); Fast Track (The North Wall); Blue Stockings (The Tobacco Factory); The River (Brewery Theatre). Film credits: A Matter of Choice, Right Place Wrong Time. Award nominations/wins: Linbury Prize Finalist 2015; Best Costume Design Nominee - O Réjane, Stage Raw Awards, Los Angeles; and Best Design - Life is a Dream, CATS Awards. Trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

LIZZIE POWELL (Lighting Designer). Some of Lizzie's previous lighting designs include: Snow Queen, Macbeth (an undoing) (Lyceum Theatre); August: Osage County (Malmo Stadsteater); Same Team, The Grand Opera House Hotel (Traverse); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Mountaintop, Mother Courage, Anna Karenina, The Mighty Walzer (Royal Exchange, Manchester); Falstaff (Scottish Opera/Santa Fe Opera); A Midsummer Night's Dream (Scottish Opera); King John, Macbeth (RSC); Avalanche: A Love Story (Barbican/Sydney Theatre Company); The Da

Liz Kettle (Carlin), Star Penders (Missy), Emmanuella Cole (Mae). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Vinci Code, Dial M for Murder (Simon Friend Productions); Comedy of Errors, Endgame, The Libertine (Citizens Theatre); Cyrano De Bergerac (Citizens Theatre/National Theatre Scotland/Lyceum Theatre); James IV, What Girls are Made Of (Raw Material); Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (West End/National Theatre Scotland); Thrown, Orphans, Red Dust Road, Adam, Knives in Hens, Glasgow Girls, Venus As A Boy (National Theatre of Scotland); Victory Condition, B, Human Animals, Violence and Son (Royal Court Theatre); Our Town (Regent's Park Open Air Theatre); and Romeo & Juliet (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield).

PIPPA MURPHY (Sound Designer) is an award-winning composer, sound designer and music producer who scores for theatre, screen, radio, dance, choirs and orchestras. Known for her stylistic breadth, she works with writers, filmmakers and choreographers as well as Folk, Indie, Jazz and Classical musicians. Recent theatre credits: Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel (Tim Crouch, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh); Enough of Him (NTS, Pitlochry Theatre); Orphans (National Theatre of Scotland); Streetcar Named Desire (Pitlochry Festival Theatre); Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (Edinburgh International Festival, Royal Court, National Theatre Scotland & Tim Crouch); Lost at Sea (Perth Horsecross); Red Lion (Rapture Theatre); Woman in Mind (Dundee Rep); Crude (Grid Iron); Gilt (7:84); Strangers Babies (Traverse Theatre); and Standing Wave: Delia Derbyshire (Tron Theatre Glasgow). Her sound design for Karine Polwart’s Wind Resistance won the CATS Awards for Best Music & Sound 2018, and their album Pocket of Wind Resistance was nominated for BBC Folk Album of the Year 2018. Pippa was classically trained on piano, violin and percussion from an early age and completed her BMus, MA and PhD in composition at The University of Birmingham. She was Artist in Residence at the Scottish Parliament (2014) and Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (2020). She composed Anamchara for Scottish Opera with writer Alexander McCall Smith as part of the Commonwealth Games 2014 Glasgow.

OĞUZ KAPLANGI (Composer) is an award-winning Turkish composer and sound designer based in Edinburgh and London. He relocated to the UK in 2018 and has contributed to productions such as Hamnet, A Museum in Baghdad, #WeAreArrested with the RSC; Arabian Nights at the Bristol Old Vic; The Duchess of Malfi, Mrs. Puntila and her Man Matti, Rhinoceros at the Royal Lyceum Theatre; Still, The Mostrous Heart at the Traverse Theatre; Treasure Island at the Cumbernauld Theatre; Positive Stories for Negative Times with Wonder Fools; The Alchemist at the Tron Theatre; and Meet Me at Dawn with DOT/Arcola Theatre. In 2023, he toured Scotland as both a performer and co-artistic director of the critically acclaimed A Wee Journey during the Edinburgh International Festival. Oğuz also composes music for commercials and films in Istanbul. He has scored music for fifteen feature films, including box office hits. He has scored music for several UK short films. Oğuz Kaplangı has a diverse discography of albums, soundtracks, and singles available on all major streaming music services.

EJ BOYLE (Movement Director). Recent theatre credits: Leopoldstadt (Broadway/West End); Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) (West End/Toronto/UK Tour); The Fair Maid of the West, Henry VI, The Mirror and The Light (RSC); Pandemonium (Soho Theatre); Nachtland (Young Vic); Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sunshine on Leith (UK Tours); Measure For Measure (Shakespeare’s Globe); Macbeth (an undoing), Jumpy, Hedda Gabler, Wendy and Peter Pan (Royal Lyceum); Habeas Corpus (Menier Chocolate Factory); Great Expectations, Tay Bridge, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (Dundee Rep); Richard III (Leeds Playhouse); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Regent's Park); Exit the King (National Theatre); The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, Adults (Traverse Theatre), Nora: A Doll’s House (Citizens Theatre, Young Vic); Lanark, Oresteia: This Restless House (Citizens Theatre/Edinburgh International Festival). Television and Film credits: “The Crown” (Netflix); “Our Ladies” (Sony); “Two Doors Down” (BBC); “In Plain Sight” (ITV); and God Help the Girl (Barry Mendel/Sundance). Live event credits: Glasgow Commonwealth Games Ceremonies (Creative Associate and Choreographer); The Queen’s 90th Birthday Parade (Mass Movement Director); and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Faena Theatre Miami).

KAITLIN HOWARD (Fight/Intimacy Director) teaches Stage Combat and Intimacy at Manchester School of Theatre in the UK, is a teaching and examining member of The Academy of Performance Combat and an Equity Registered Fight

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Director. Theatre Fight Direction credits include: Macbeth (The Royal Shakespeare Company); Life is A Dream, The Scent of Roses, Red Ellen (Edinburgh Lyceum); Sweat (The Royal Exchange, Manchester); Romeo & Juliet, The Snow Queen, Faustus, The Great Gatsby (Storyhouse, Chester); Lucrezia Borgia (English Touring Opera); The Famous Five, Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty (Theatr Clwyd, Wales); A Skull In Connemara, Jack & The Beanstalk, Aladdin, The Jungle Book (Oldham Coliseum); Tom, Dick & Harry (New Vic Theatre, Stoke-On-Trent); Habibti Driver (Bolton Octagon); The Comedy of Errors (more or less) (Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough); Around the World in 80 Days, The Jungle Book (The Dukes, Lancaster); The Girl on The Train, The True Adventures of Marian and Robin Hood (The Barn, Cirencester); Guards at The Taj (Theatre By The Lake, Keswick); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Our Country’s Good (The Tobacco Factory, Bristol); The Little Mermaid, Cherry Jezebel (Liverpool Everyman); The Comedy of Errors (Greenwich Playhouse); Killer Joe (The Pleasance Theatre, London). Film & TV Fight Direction credits include: "So Awkward" (CBBC); "Crimewatch" (BBC); Blank (KenMor Films). Theatre Intimacy Direction credits include: A Taste of Honey (The Royal Exchange, Manchester); Cinderella (Storyhouse, Chester); The Sweet Science of Bruising (York Theatre Royal); Oppenheimer, Mary Stuart, Linda (Grosvenor Theatre, Manchester); Vincent River, The Pride (Hope Mill, Manchester). Film & TV Intimacy Direction credits include: Urge (Influence Films); Treading Water (Big North Films).

FRANCES POET (Dramaturg). Theatre writing credits include: The Prognostications of Mikey Noyce (Oran Mor/The Lemon Tree); Maggie May (Leeds Playhouse/Leicester Curve/Queens Theatre, Hornchurch); Still (Traverse Theatre); Sophia (Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh/Pitlochry Festival Theatre/Naked Productions); Fibres (Citizens Theatre/ Stella Quines); Gut (Traverse Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland); Adam (Traverse Theatre/MacRobert Arts Centre/Citizens Theatre); The Macbeths, Dance of Death (Circle Studio/ Citizens Theatre); and What Put The Blood (Abbey Theatre). Awards: Winner of Writers Guild Best Play Award for Gut, Winner of Fringe First, Herald Angel and Scottish Arts Club Awards for Adam and Susan Smith Blackburn Finalist for Maggie May. Frances is a Glasgow based writer with over twenty years’ experience working as a dramaturg for leading British theatres.

Taqi Nazeer (Lennox), Laurie Scott (Ross), Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth). Photo by Hollis King.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

SIMONE PEREIRA HIND (CDG Casting Director). Simone's first casting for theatre was for Arthur Miller and Michael Blakemore’s premiere of Miller's The Ride Down Mount Morgan for the Wyndhams Theatre in 1991. She followed this with Desire for David Lan at the Almeida, Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens for Giacomo Capizzano, Our Boys for Jonathan Lewis, Arthur Smith’s Sod for the Edinburgh Fringe and Twelve Angry Men for Harold Pinter with her sister Vanessa Pereira. More recently she has co-cast Life is a Dream, The Scent of Roses, Red Ellen, Macbeth (an undoing), Anna Karenina for the Lyceum Edinburgh, Dracula for the National Theatre of Scotland and The White Card for Northern Stage and Soho Theatre with Anna Dawson. She and Anna are currently casting the new musical stage show, Restless Natives and The Girls of Slender Means for Roxana Silbert. As well as theatre, Simone casts films including Munich: The Edge of War, Elizabeth, Hilary and Jackie and Hamlet and television, including two series of “Granite Harbour” and the casting in Scotland for 8 series of “Outlander”.

ANNA DAWSON (Casting Director) is an Edinburgh-based Casting Director. Working alongside Simone Pereira Hind. Theatre credits include: Macbeth (RSC), Dracula (National Theatre of Scotland), Sunset Song (Dundee Rep/Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), Anna Karenina (Bristol Old Vic/ Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), Life is a Dream (Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), The White Card (Northern Stage/Soho Theatre), Scent of Roses (Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), Red Ellen (Northern Stage/Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), Macbeth (an undoing) (Royal Lyceum Edinburgh/Rose Theatre). Screen credits include: the award winning “The Brilliant World of Tom Gates” (Sky), “Float” (BBC) and upcoming features Midwinter Break and Hidden . Associate screen credits include: 7 series of “Outlander” (Sony/Starz), Munich: The Edge of War (Netflix) and “Granite Harbour” (BBC).

HANNAH ROBERTS (Producer) is Senior Producer at The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh. During her time at the Lyceum, Hannah has produced a fringe season and numerous productions, including award-winning

Thierry Mabonga (Macduff), Nicole Cooper (Lady Macbeth), James Robinson (Banquo). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Macbeth (an undoing) and Castle Lennox . She is Interim Chair on the board of Independent Arts Projects. For the past 15 years she has worked for venues and theatre companies, including National Theatre of Scotland, Fire Exit, Catherine Wheels, Catalyst Dance, Byre Theatre, The Finborough Theatre and The Old Vic. She has produced national and international tours, and work of varying scales and genres. Hannah has also worked in the charitable sector as General Manager of Hearts & Minds.

ANDREW WADE (Resident Voice Director). The Royal Shakespeare Company: 1987-2003 (Voice Assistant), 1990 -2003 (Head of Voice). Since 2003: The Acting Company, Guthrie Theater, Stella Adler Studio (Master Teacher Voice and Shakespeare). Currently: The Public Theater (Director of Voice), Juilliard (Faculty Drama Division). Broadway: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child Parts One and Two (U.S. Head of Voice and Dialect), King Lear with Glenda Jackson (Voice Coach), Matilda the Musical (Director of Voice, Broadway and national tour), A Christmas Carol and tour, A Bronx Tale the Musical . Film: Shakespeare in Love . Workshops and lectures: Worldwide. Fellow of Rose Bruford College.

JONATHAN KALB (Resident Dramaturg) is professor of theatre at Hunter College, TFANA’s resident dramaturg, and a well-known Beckett scholar. His widely cited and consulted book Beckett in Performance issued from his experience of more than 70 Beckett productions and won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He has published five books and hundreds of essays and other writings over three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist and dramaturg. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at jonathankalb.com.

ROSE THEATRE is one of the largest producing theatres in London and has established itself since its 2008 opening as one of the most exciting theatres in the UK. Our mission is to entertain audiences, elevate artists, and empower our community.

Led by Artistic Director Christopher Haydon, we produce work that reflects the highest standards of artistic excellence here in the heart of Kingston and throughout the UK with our touring partnerships. We are home to one of the largest youth theatres in the country, offering over 1,200 participants each year training, careers advice and the opportunity to take part in productions alongside professionals.

Current and forthcoming Rose productions include: A new adaptation of Never Let Me Go by Suzanne Heathcoate, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Rose Artistic Director Christopher Haydon, co-produced with Bristol Old Vic, Malvern Theatres, and Royal & Derngate, Northampton; The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, directed by Atri Banerjee and starring Geraldine Somerville, touring until June; The Boy at the Back of the Class based on the bestselling children’s novel by Onjali Q. Raúf, adapted by Nick Ahad, and directed by Monique Touko, touring until June; The Lion Inside based on the bestselling story by Rachel Bright & Jim Field, in a brand new adaptation and directed by Sarah Punshon, with music and lyrics by Eamonn O’Dwyer that will tour the UK and Middle East through 2024; and for Christmas a new version of Robin Hood by Olivier Award winner Chris Bush and directed by UK Theatre Award winner Elin Schofield.

Recent Rose Original productions include: Shooting Hedda Gabler by Nina Segal, based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic Hedda Gabler and directed by Jeff James; A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller, directed by Holly Race Roughan, co-produced with Headlong, Chichester Festival Theatre, and Octagon Theatre Bolton; Richard III directed by and starring Adjoa Andoh; The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, directed by RTST Award winner Denzel Westley-Sanderson (nominated for four Black British Theatre Awards); The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, in a new version by Steve Waters with music by Michael Henry, directed by Christopher Haydon (nominated for Best Revival at the WhatsOnStage Awards); Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie in a new version by Evan Placey, with music & lyrics by Vikki Stone and directed by Lucy Morrell; A Christmas Carol in a new version by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, with music by Eamonn O’Dwyer, directed by Rosie Jones; Zog and Zog and the Flying

THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Doctors based on the books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, co-produced with Freckle Productions; Jeff James and James Yeatman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, featuring an explosive foam party and a soundtrack of Frank Ocean, Dua Lipa and Cardi B; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, adapted by Rona Munro, which transferred to the West End in July 2019 following a successful UK tour; and the world premiere stage adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend, adapted by April De Angelis, which transferred to the National Theatre in November 2019. The latter were both directed by Rose Associate Artist Melly Still.

THE ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE EDINBURGH sits at the heart of the city in our 140-year-old building welcoming over 100,000 people each year. At the Lyceum, we believe that theatre is good for the soul. Led by our Artistic Director David Greig, we bring the best theatre from around the world to Edinburgh and share the best of Scottish theatre with the world. We’re experts in making theatre. We rehearse in our studio space across the road from the auditorium, and our costumes and sets are designed and built in house at our workshop in Roseburn, Edinburgh. Community is at the heart of what we do. In 2024, our creative learning department celebrates 25 years of developing and nurturing talent. Our Youth Theatre programmes have been the starting point for many Scottish actors, fostering newfound confidence and lifelong friendships. We also host 60+ writing groups, technical courses and training. Over the past 59 years the Lyceum has continued to make world class theatre–take a seat, and experience it for yourself. lyceum.org.uk

BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing arts organizations and cultural institutions. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, National Sawdust, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, PEN America, StoryCorps, Symphony Space, the Fisher Center at Bard, Peak Performances, Irish Arts Center, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Onassis Foundation, Taylor Mac, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, PlayCo and more.

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE . Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, this is Theatre for a New Audience’s (TFANA) 44th season. Through its productions of Shakespeare and other new plays, humanities initiatives and programs in NYC public schools, TFANA creates adventurous dialogues with diverse audiences. TFANA has produced 33 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays alongside an international mix of classical and contemporary drama; promotes ongoing artistic development through its Merle Debuskey Studio Fund; and in 2001, growing from a collaboration with Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s director of voice, TFANA became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the RSC.

ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION (“Equity”), founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 50,000 actors and stage managers. Equity seeks to foster the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions. #EquityWorks

STAFF FOR MACBETH ( AN UNDOING)

Production Manager........................................Niall Black Sound Supervisor........................................Amir Sherhan

Lighting Associate........................................Maria Chirca

Wardrobe Supervisor.....................................Morag Pirrie

Hair & Makeup Consultant.........................Ola Szczygiel

Deck Crew...............Cory Asinofsky, Tristan Viner-Brown

Production Assistant.............................. Carson Ferguson

Dressers..................................... Kim Kaiser, Caro Becker

Wardrobe Day Crew.................................... Khari Walser

Light Board Operator................................. Paul Kennedy

Production Audio..................................... Erik Cereghino

Audio Technicians................. Cheyenne Chao, Zen Perry

Sound Engineer................................................ Zen Perry

Carpenters...Cory Asinofsky, Steven Cepeda, Daniel Cohen, Julia Conlon, Jules Conlon, Jessica Debolt, Frann McCrann, Tobias Segal, Jack Spalding Riggers.....Cory Asinofsky, Steven Cepeda, Daniel Cohen, Jules Conlon, Frann McCrann, Tobias Segal

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE LEADERSHIP

JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and the artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award from The Acting Company, 2004 Gaudium Award from Breukelein Institute, 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement and TFANA’s 2020 Samuel H. Scripps.

DOROTHY RYAN (Managing Director) has served as Managing Director of Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) since 2003. Before joining TFANA, Dorothy spent a decade in fundraising roles with the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Museum and served as Visiting Assistant Professor for the Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management Program. A graduate of Brown University, she began her career in classical music artist management and has also served as Company Manager for Chautauqua Opera, Managing Director for the Opera Ensemble of New York, and General Manager for Eugene Opera. She is a 2014 Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree and was a founding member of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance.

JEREMY BLUNT (General Manager). Prior to joining TFANA in 2023, Jeremy was the managing director of the Sierra Repertory Theatre in Sonora, California. Before that, he was on the general management team at Broadway Asia where he worked on DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda Spectacular Live and served as the contract affairs coordinator at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. MFA: performing arts management, Brooklyn College. MBA, bachelor of science in business administration, California Baptist University. He proudly served in the U.S. Army and Air National Guard, retiring in 2021 after holding multiple leadership positions.

Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Photo © David Sundberg/Esto.

Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage. Photo © Francis Dzikowski/OTTO.

ABOUT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE

About Theatre for a New Audience

STAFF

Founding Artistic Director

Jeffrey Horowitz

Managing Director Dorothy Ryan

General Manager Jeremy Blunt

Director of Institutional Advancement

James J. Lynes

Finance Director Mary Sormeley

Education Director Lindsay Tanner

Capital Campaign Director

George Brennan

Director of Marketing & Communications

Eddie Carlson

Facilities Director Rashawn Caldwell

Production Manager Brett Anders

Technical Director Joe Galan

Company Manager Molly Burdick

Theatre Manager Lawrence Dial

Box Office Manager

Marketing Manager

Allison Byrum

Angela Renzi

Associate Director of Development

Sara Billeaux

Artistic Associate Peter J. Cook

Education Coordinator Emma Griffone

Coordinator, Administration & Humanities|Studio Programming

Nadiya Atkinson

Finance Associate Harmony Fiori

Associate to the Founding Artistic Director

Allison Benko

Grants Associate Emmy Ritchey

Development Associate Gavin McKenzie

Facilities Associate Tim Tyson

Archivist Shannon Resser

New Deal Program Coordinator Zhe Pan

TFANA Teaching Artists

Albert Iturregui-Elias, Elizabeth London, Erin McCready, Kea Trevett, Margaret

Ivey, Marissa Stewart, Matthew

Dunivan, Melanie Goodreaux

House Managers

Regina Pearsall, Adjani Reed, Nancy Gill Sanchez

Press Representative

Blake Zidell & Associates

Resident Director Arin Arbus

Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin

Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb

Resident Distinguished Artist

John Douglas Thompson

Resident Voice and Text Director

Andrew Wade

TFANA COUNCIL OF SCHOLARS

Tanya Pollard, Chair

Jonathan Kalb, Alisa Solomon, Ayanna Thompson

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, the mission of Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is to be home for Shakespeare and other contemporary authors. TFANA is dedicated to the ongoing search for a living, human theatre and forging an immediate exchange with an audience that is always new and different from the last one. With Shakespeare as its guide, the Theatre builds a dialogue that spans centuries between the language and ideas of diverse authors, past and present. In addition to its productions, TFANA offers development opportunities for artists through its Merle Debuskey Studio Fund, engages with the community through free Humanities programs, and created and sustains the largest in-depth arts in education programs to introduce Shakespeare and classic drama to New York City Public School students.

Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs

Theatre for a New Audience’s education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the New York State Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 140,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide.

A Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District.

Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first New York City theatre conceived and built for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s 1965 Vivian Beaumont. The 27,500-square-foot facility is a uniquely flexible performance space. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology. It allows the stage and seating to be reconfigured for each production. The facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatres in the country, with LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council.

Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre has expanded its Humanities offerings to include lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and the general public. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Board Chair

Robert E. Buckholz

Vice Chair

Kathleen C. Walsh President

Jeffrey Horowitz

FoundingArtisticDirector

Vice President and Secretary

Dorothy Ryan

Managing Director

Executive Committee

Alan Beller

Robert E. Buckholz

Constance Christensen

Jeffrey Horowitz

Seymour H. Lesser

Larry M. Loeb, Esq.

Philip R. Rotner

Kathleen C. Walsh

Josh Weisberg

Members

Arin Arbus*

John Berendt*

Bianca Vivion Brooks*

Ben Campbell

Robert Caro*

Sharon Dunn*

Matthew E. Fishbein

Riccardo Hernandez*

Kathryn Hunter*

Dana Ivey*

Tom Kirdahy*

John Lahr*

Harry J. Lennix*

Catherine Maciariello*

Marie Maignan*

Audrey Heffernan Meyer*

Alan Polonsky

Dorothy Ryan

Joseph Samulski*

Doug Steiner

Michael Stranahan

John Douglas Thompson*

John Turturro*

Frederick Wiseman*

*Artistic Council

Emeritus

Francine Ballan

Sally Brody

William H. Burgess III

Caroline Niemczyk

Janet C. Olshansky

Theodore C. Rogers

Mark Rylance*

Daryl D. Smith

Susan Stockel

Monica G.S. Wambold

Jane Wells

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS

CONTRIBUTORS TO THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE’S ANNUAL FUND

December 1, 2022 – March 12, 2024

Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. Theatre for a New Audience wishes to thank the following donors for their generous support toward our Annual Campaign. For a list of donors $250 and above, go to www.tfana.org/annualdonors

PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS

($100,000 and up)

Bay and Paul Foundations

Bloomberg Philanthropies

City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs

Constance Christensen

Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust

National Endowment for the Humanities

The SHS Foundation

The Shubert Foundation, Inc.

The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc.

LEADING BENEFACTORS

($50,000 and up)

Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine

Deloitte & Touche LLP

The Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.

The Whiting Foundation

MAJOR BENEFACTORS

($20,000 and up)

The Arnow Family Fund

Alan Beller

Sally Brody

Benton Campbell and Yiba Ng

The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation

The Fan Fox and Leslie R.

Samuels Foundation

Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone

The George Link Jr. Foundation

Agnes Gund

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust

The Hearst Corporation

Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia

Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP

Latham & Watkins LLP

Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer

National Endowment for the Arts

New York State Council on the Arts

New York State Urban Development Corporation

The Polonsky Foundation

The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation

Anne and William Tatlock

Kimbrough Towles and George Loening

Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein

SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS

($10,000 and up)

Anonymous (2)

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP

American Express

Peggy and Keith Anderson

Christine Armstrong and Benjamin Nickoll

The Claire Friedlander

Family Foundation

Ritu and Ajay Banga

Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis

Dominique Bravo and Eric Sloan

Jill and Jay Bernstein

Elaine and Norman Brodsky

Walter Cain and Paulo Ribeiro

Carlson Family Fund

Michele and Martin Cohen

Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc

Coydog Foundation

The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund

The Ettinger Foundation

M. Salome Galib and Duane McLaughlin

Ashley Garrett and Alan Jones

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP

The Gladys Krieble

Delmas Foundation

The Howard Bayne Fund

Ingram, Yuzek, Gainen, Carroll, Bertolotti LLP

JKW Foundation

The J.M. Kaplan Fund

King & Spalding LLP

Kirkland & Ellis Foundation

Anna Kuzmik and George Sampas

Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb

May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Inc.

McDermott Will & Emery

Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.

K. Ann McDonald

Caroline Niemczyk

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP

Ponce de Leon Foundation

Sarah I. Schieffelin Residuary Trust

Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz

Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust

Select Equity Group, Inc

Sidney E. Frank Foundation

Daryl and Joy Smith

The Speyer Family Foundation

The Starry Night Fund

Alice and Thomas Tisch

Fran and Barry Weissler

PRODUCERS CIRCLE—

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY ($5,000 and up)

Anonymous (1)

Axe-Houghton Foundation

The Bulova Stetson Fund

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP

Aileen Dresner and Frank R. Drury

Jennifer and Steven Eisenstadt

Kirsten Feldman and Hugh Frater

Debra Fine and Martin I. Schneider

Jenny and Jeff Fleishhacker

Katherine Goldsmith

Debra Goldsmith Robb

Kathy and Steven Guttman

Michael Haggiag

Judy and Douglas Hamilton

Jennifer and Matt Harris

Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein

Kirsten and Peter Kern

Sandy and Eric Krasnoff

Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins

Djena Lennix

Anna and Peter Levin

Litowitz Foundation, Inc.

Marta Heflin Foundation

Ronay and Richard Menschel

New York City Council

Margaret Nuzum

Janet C. Olshansky

Estelle Parsons

Richenthal Foundation

Pamela Riess

Philip and Janet Rotner

Mark and Marie Schwartz

Sidley Austin LLP

Susan Stockel

Theatre Development Fund

The Venable Foundation

Josh and Jackie Weisberg

Renee Zarin

PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE ($2,500 and up)

Anonymous (5)

Deborah Berke and Peter

D. McCann

Nancy Blachman and David desJardins

Hilary Brown and Charles Read

Consulate General of Spain in New York

Jane Cooney

DeLaCour Family Foundation

Dennis M. Corrado

Christine Cumming

Katharine and Peter Darrow

Sharon Dunn and Harvey Zirofsky

Suzan and Fred Ehrman

Judith and Alan Fishman

Heidi and Christopher Flagg

Sheryl and Jeffrey Flug

Foley Hoag LLP

Roberta Garza

Linda Genereux and Timur Galen

Monica Gerard-Sharp

Pamela Givner

Lauren Glant and Michael Gillespie

James Gleick

Karoly and Henry Gutman

Thomas Healy and Fred P. Hochberg

Sophia Hughes

Irving Harris Foundation

The Irwin S. Scherzer Foundation

Flora and Christoph Kimmich

Andrea Knutson

John Koerber

Sandy and Eric Krasnoff

Sonia and Arvind Krishna

Christopher Lawrence

Taryn and Mark Leavitt

Justine and John Leguizamo

Patricia and Frank Lenti

Seymour H. Lesser

Diane and William F. Lloyd

Lucille Lortel Foundation

Susan Martin and Alan Belzer

Bella L. Meyer

Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss

Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin

Barbara Forster Moore and Richard Wraxall Moore

Connie and Tom Newberry

Catherine Nyarady and

Gabriel Riopel

Annie Paulsen and Albert Garner

Ellen Petrino

Proskauer Rose LLP

Tracey and Robert Pruzan

Rajika and Anupam Puri

Leslie and David Puth

Heather Randall

Susan and William Rifkin

Joseph Samulski

Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles

Robert and Anna Marie Shapiro

Jeremy T. Smith

Ellen Sontag-Miller and William C. Miller

Douglas C. Steiner

Margo and Anthony Viscusi

Gayle and Jay Waxenberg

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS

Joanne Witty and Eugene Keilin PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE

($1,000 and up)

Anonymous (3)

Elizabeth and Russell Abbott

Actors’ Equity Foundation

Ann Ash

Jackie and Jacob Baskin

Elizabeth Bass

M.J. and James Berrien

Cece and Lee Black

Mary Bockelmann Norris and Floyd Norris

Lani and Dave Bonifacic

Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Campbell Jackson

Pamela Brier and Peter Aschkenasy

Deborah Buell and Charles Henry

Janel Callon

Joan and Robert Catell

Gerard Conn and Carol Yorke

Ron Chernow

Larry Condon

Susan Cowie

Sara Debolt

Ian Dickson and Reg Holloway

Jodie and Jonathan Donnellan

Frederick Eberstadt

Noah Eisenberg

Ev and Lee

Steven Feinsilver

Roxanne Frank

Herman Giddings

Virginia Gliedman

Joyce Gordon and Paul Lubetkin

The Grace R. and Alan D.

Marcus Foundation

Anne and Paul Grand

Alba Greco-Garcia and Roger Garcia

Kathleen and Harvey Guion

David Harms

Vicki and Ronald Hauben

Laura and Robert Hoguet

MATCHING GIFTS

Donald Holder

Maxine Isaacs

Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin

Helen Kauder and Barry Nalebuff

Debra Kaye and Steven Horowitz

Nora Wren Kerr and John J. Kerr

Parker L. Krasney and Allison

C. McCullough

Susan Kurz Snyder

Julius Leiman-Carbia

Dedee and Steve Lovell

Margaret Lundin

Kathleen Maurer

Chandru Murthi

Marie Nugent-Head and James Marlas

Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara

Annie Parisse and Paul Sparks

Lori and Lee Parks

Doris and Martin Payson

Margaret and Carl Pfeiffer

Susie Polsky

Anne Prost and Olivier Robert

Carol and Michael Reimers

Susan and Peter Restler

David A.J. Richards

Enid and Paul I. Rosenberg

Daryl and Steven Roth

Dorothy Ryan and John Leitch

Deborah Scharf and A. Ross Hill

Stacy Schiff and Marc de la Bruyere

Sandra and Steven Schoenbart

Cynthia and Thomas Sculco

Avi Sharon and Megan

Hertzig Sharon

Loren Skeist and Marlene Marko

Susan Sommer and Stephen

A. Warnke

The Bernard and Anne Spitzer

Charitable Trust

Lauren and Jay Springer

Wendy and Tom Stephenson

Barbara Stimmel

Julie Taymor

Roger Tilles

Donna Zaccaro Ullman and Paul

A. Ullman

Cynthia King Vance and Lee Vance

Elena and Louis Werner

Abby Westlake

Debra Winger

Devera and Michael Witkin

Evan D. Yionoulis and Donald Holder

Andrew Young

Nancy Young and Paul Ford

IN HONOR OF

In honor of Georgette Bennett & Leonard Polonsky and Liz &Joshua Tanenbaum

Marion and Daniel Goldberg

In honor of Leonard Polonsky birthday Robert Lewis

In honor of Sally Brody

Ann Ash

Sophie McConnell

Nancy B. Pearsall

In honor of Robert E. Buckholz

Martha and Stephen Dietz

Jennifer and Steven Eisenstadt

In honor of Connie Christensen

Nancy Rosenberg and David Sternlieb

In honor of Fred Eberstadt

Linell Smith and Dr. Tom Hall

In honor of Ned Eisenberg Anonymous

In honor of Audrey Heffernan Meyer

Ritu and Ajay Banga

Sheryl and Jeff Flug

Thomas Healy and Fred P. Hochberg

Cynthia King Vance

Agnes Gund

In honor of Susan Martin and Alan Belzer

Dale L. Ponikvar

In honor of Caroline Niemczyk

Silda Spitzer and Erik Stangvik

In memory of Steven Jackson Popkin

Susan Kurz Snyder

In honor of Ted Rogers

Janet Olshansky

In honor of Kathy Walsh

Natalie and Matthew Bernstein

Dave and Lani Bonifacic

Wendy and Jeff Maurer

Bruce Meltzer

In honor of Kathy Walsh and Gene Bernstein

Christina and Jack Bransfield

Michele and Martin Cohen

Christine and Alan Vickery

Jennifer and James Wilent

In memory of Michael Zarin

Renee Zarin

The following companies have contributed through their Matching Gift Programs: If your employer has a matching gift program, please consider making a contribution to Theatre for a New Audience and making your gift go further by participating in your employer’s matching gift program.

BlackRock, Inc.

Goldman Sachs & Co. Matching Gift Foundation

PUBLIC FUNDS

Google

International Business Machines

JPMorgan Chase Foundation

Omidyar Group Related Companies

TIFF Advisory Services

Theatre for a New Audience’s productions and education programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS

SHAKESPEARE WORKS IN BROOKLYN: CULTURE, COMMUNITY, CAPITAL

Theatre for a New Audience recognizes with gratitude the following donors to Theatre for a New Audience’s Capital Campaign to support ambitious programming, access to affordable tickets and financial resiliency.

Named funds within the Capital Campaign include the Henry Christensen III Artistic Opportunity Fund, the Audrey H. Meyer New Deal Fund and the Merle Debuskey Studio Fund . Other opportunities include the Completing Shakespeare’s Canon Fund, Capital Reserves funds and support for the design and construction of New Office and Studio Spaces

To learn more, or to make a gift to the Capital Campaign, please contact George Brennan at gbrennan@tfana.org or by calling 646-553-3893.

$1,000,000 AND ABOVE

Mr.◊ and Mrs. Henry Christensen III

Ford Foundation

The Howard Gilman Foundation

New York City Department of Cultural Affairs

The Thompson Family Foundation

$250,000-$999,999

Booth Ferris Foundation

Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fonatine

Merle Debuskey◊

Irving Harris Foundation

The Stairway Fund, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein

$100,000–$249,999

Alan Jones and Ashley Garrett

Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr.

Seymour H. Lesser

The Polonsky Foundation

Charlene Magen Weinstein◊

$50,000–$99,999

Bloomberg Philanthropies

Aileen and Frank Drury

Agnes Gund

The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund

New York State Council on the Arts

Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro

John and Regina Scully Foundation

Marcia T. Thompson◊

$20,000–$49,999

Peggy and Keith Anderson

Elaine and Norman Brodsky

Kathy and Steve Guttman

Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation

Cynthia and Robert Schaffner

Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz

Daryl and Joy Smith

Susan Stockel

Anne and William Tatlock

Earl D. Weiner

$10,000–$19,999

Diana Bergquist

Sally R. Brody

New York State Energy Research and Development Authority

Linda and Jay Lapin

Janet Wallach and Robert Menschel◊

Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin

Anne Prost and Robert Olivier

Allison and Neil Rubler

Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch

Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.

Jackie and Josh Weisberg

$5,000–$9,999

Alan Beller

Katharine and Peter Darrow

Bipin and Linda Doshi

Marcus Doshi

Downtown Brooklyn Partnership

Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust

THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Barbara G. Fleischman

Jane Garnett and David Booth

Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Jackson

Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin

Mary and Howard Kelberg

Kirsten and Peter Kern

Susan Litowitz

Ronay and Richard Menschel

Ann and Conrad Plimpton

Priham Trust/The Green Family

Alejandro Santo Domingo

Marie and Mark Schwartz

Cynthia and Thomas Sculco

Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss

◊deceased

A Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support in perpetuity the 360° Series: Viewfinders as well as the TFANA Council of Scholars and the free TFANA Talks series. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013 – 2015.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder or the Theatre’s Humanities programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.