Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast 18: Peter Kirwan and Brett Greatley-Hirsch on Shakespeare and Performance Studies

Interviewer: Di Wang, Natalie Cline, Edwin "Ted" Nagasawa

Audio edited by Di Wang

Background music: Falconieri's Folias, performed by the Early Interval Ensemble (Thanks Early Interval Ensemble for permission to use this recording!)

Time: November 7, 2025

Di: 

My name is Di Wang. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and a Graduate Research Associate for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies here at The Ohio State University. I’m here with Ted Nagasawa, an undergraduate student majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and History of Art, as well as Natalie Cline, an undergraduate student majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Italian Studies. 
 

Today, we are joined by Dr. Peter Kirwan and Dr. Brett Greatley‑Hirsch. Dr. Peter Kirwan is a professor and co‑director of the Shakespeare and Performance Graduate Program at Mary Baldwin University. In partnership with the American Shakespeare Center, he is the general editor of Shakespeare Bulletin and has published widely on Shakespearean authorship and canonicity, including his first monograph, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha, and on the performance and textual afterlives of Shakespeare. He is currently working on a new edition of The Winter’s Tale for the Arden Shakespeare. 
 

Dr. Brett Greatley‑Hirsch is a professor of Renaissance Literature and Textual Studies at the University of Leeds. He is an editor of the journal Shakespeare, coordinating editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, a trustee of the British Shakespeare Association, and a British Academy Mid‑Career Fellow. 
 

Dr. Kirwan and Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch, thank you so much for joining us. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Thanks for having us here. 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

Thank you. 
 

Di: 

What drew you to specialize in early modern drama and Shakespeare studies? 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

One of the big questions. Do you want to take that one? 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

Oh, I fell into this almost by accident. I was originally a law student, so I fumbled my way through three years of a combined law and arts degree at the University of Western Australia. I wasn’t especially good at the law that I was studying. I just couldn’t wrap my head around why everything was so rigid. 
 

I was mostly doing philosophy units, and that was because I was interested in the history of ideas and in philosophy and religion. But I hadn’t twigged that the further down the rabbit hole of philosophy. You go, the more mathematics it becomes. It actually just becomes formal logic. And I thought, I need to get out of this. 
 

So I took a module on sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century poetry, and that really resonated with me. This was the sort of stuff that I’d been good at in high school, and I really resonated with the instructor. And so I decided to put all of my eggs in that particular basket and do my undergraduate dissertation on The Merchant of Venice and Jewish mysticism. So this was about the Kabbalah and a Kabbalistic reading of The Merchant of Venice. 
 

And after that, I stayed on to do a PhD—kind of by accident. A late academic bloomer. It was never something I imagined I was going to do coming up through primary school and high school. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Similar to Brett, a bit by accident, or certainly not by design. I was originally going to be a Theatre student, and then I started doing a Theatre Studies degree and hated it, and switched to English literature, where I felt more comfortable. 
 

And I was specialized quite widely across English lit. I loved medieval literature, I loved early modern literature, I loved eighteenth‑century literature. But I stayed on at the University of Warwick, where I did my English degree, to do my master’s degree. 
 

And I was doing my master’s from 2005 to 2007. And during that period, the Royal Shakespeare Company was staging a complete works festival. So they were putting on, over the course of the year, fifty‑four productions from around the world, in different languages—every play in the canon, with big caveats. 
 

And I was there, and I thought, Well, I’m never going to get a chance to do this, and I’m young enough to get five‑pound tickets. So I thought, I’ll go and see every single one of them. 
 

And I did. And it just—it blew my mind. It blew my mind to see Shakespeare being performed for so many different political purposes, being made to mean so many different things. Seeing kind of acrobatic pan‑Indian productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with no subtitles; seeing Brecht’s company doing Richard II; seeing a beautiful Russian Twelfth Night by a company called Cheek by Jowl, who I went on to work with later. 
 

I was just—I thought I could spend my life trying to work out how this single body of plays can mean so many different things to so many people. And so I decided to. And so I kind of particularly specialized in the contemporary performance of Shakespeare’s plays, and then the broader early modern canon, and just made that my thing. 
 

I started a blog that year called The Bardathon, which I think is now—I say this confidently, and no one’s corrected me—I think it’s the longest‑running theatre review blog in the world at this point. It’s been running for nearly twenty years. I’ve reviewed more than 850 productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And the great thing is, they keep doing new ones, so I’m not running out of anything to work on. 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

You write with prodigious speed. So Pete and I went to see the production of Fair Em last night, and lo and behold, this morning he’s already produced a 2,000‑word, very insightful, very detailed performance review—and he did not take any notes. I’m sitting next to him, so I have questions about how you managed to do that. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Well, I’ve got questions about people who do things with numbers. 
 

Natalie: 

I’ll start by saying that we actually ran into Dr. Highley and heard about your review, and we got a review of the review, which says that it’s a bloody good one. 
 

So this is kind of a two‑pronged question. I think they go together. The first bit is, how do you think that performance informs textual interpretation? And along with that, has seeing a performance of a play that you’re interested in or researching ever influenced your research or your interpretation? 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

That’s good. I mean, I went first last time, so Brett, if you want to handle that. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

I’ve got a lot of different ways of answering that question. I suppose one of the first things I’ll say is that I’m someone who does textual editing, like Brett does. But I’m also a performance studies scholar, and it really depends on what hat I’ve got on. 
 

One of the things I’m often quite cautious of, if I’m doing history and textual study, is the use of productions to illustrate a textual reading. My kind of disciplinary belief is usually to take the performance as the main thing that I’m analyzing. So I tend to take a performance and think, What does this performance teach us about performance culture and how the play can be activated for now? rather than necessarily revealing something about the play itself. 
 

But with that said, every production I see reveals something new. And what I’m mostly fascinated by is the ways in which actors and directors work on the text. I think these plays are so beautifully—plays of the period, even—I mean, I love Fair Em, but people dismiss it as a less good one. 
 

But regardless of the quality of the play, they’re so open to many different ways of exploring power and politics and gender and the ways in which human beings interact with one another. And I think that more than anything, when I see a performance, I learn more about how people react. 
 

I think the production of Fair Em last night—something I had not thought about at all—was especially the childishness, the immaturity within that play. And I think what I love about theatre is that it opens up these possibilities, these new ways of thinking about the text. 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

Yeah, I’d agree with all of that. I think fundamentally, the simple answer to your question is that drama is a hybrid genre. And unlike the novel, a work of drama is never complete in and of itself on the page. It needs to be, as Pete says, activated and embodied. 
 

And so as an editor of drama, I think one of the big shifts—if you look at the longer history of textual editing—has been the move away from treating drama exclusively as a literary genre. And so, where previous generations of textual editors would have taken pains to try to assist readers to imagine the action as if they were reading a narrative, this is more about producing a text that allows actors to do what they do. 
 

And sometimes that means taking a step back and trusting in the text rather than trying to impose a sense of order on the text. But that’s the sort of interface. 
 

I’m not a performance scholar. I do enjoy performance. And at Leeds we have our Playhouse Lab, where we do staged readings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And these have been really valuable exercises, especially for those of us who do textual editing, because we can road‑test our scripts. 
 

But there’s an important caveat: a staged reading is an entirely different beast from putting on a fully fledged, off‑book production of the kind that we saw performed last night. And so the sorts of insights that I’ve been able to glean from seeing Lord Denny’s Players' production last night are very different from those that I would have gleaned from the staged reading. 
 

One of those has been that I realized that I can be a bit more aggressive with my modernization of punctuation. I think when I first edited the play, I had a tendency to be more conservative and not want to go in and be too heavy‑handed with repunctuating the text. 
 

But actually, with these set speeches and these lengthy pieces with multiple clauses, an actor’s not going to remember the first clause that’s been and gone ten minutes ago, and neither is your audience. So, actually, if putting a full stop at the end of these clauses is going to help the actor and audience make sense of it, then that seems to be a justifiable intervention. 
 

And so I’m becoming a bit more interventionist—what a colleague of mine, Helen Ostovich, calls “decolonoscopy,” going through and removing all of the colons and semicolons and just making it a bit more manageable. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

I mean, that’s really interesting, because what you’re saying is activating for me a lot of things I’m wrestling with in my editing as well. And I’m finding working on performance very tricky, especially for punctuation. That is the thing which I’m finding very debilitating as an editor, because in a rehearsal room I can work with actors again and again to explore all the different options, all the different ways in which a colon or a full stop—or maybe that’s a subclause, or maybe actually we need a new sentence there—takes a new thing. 
 

I love it in a rehearsal room. We can unpunctuate, and we can work through the options. And then I get very frozen by the fact that when I put my edition down in print, there will be a punctuation option that I have chosen. 
 

And I see so often how actors, when they’re picking up a play—if they pick up a nineteenth‑century edition of a play sometimes—they will play that punctuation. And they won’t necessarily go back and think about options. 
 

If you’ve got a way of—this is an anxiety you have? Does that keep you awake at night? Do you worry about predetermining performance choices? Because we have to make a choice, ultimately. 
 

There’s a quote—and I can’t remember who said it, but it is a textual editor—and I’ll look it up for you later, Pete—if you worry too much about hyphens, you’ll go mad. But I think one of the other things to keep in mind is that punctuation meant very different things to pre‑modern readers. 
 

You can’t really have hard and fast rules about what punctuation means, even within the context of an early modern reader. We often don’t know enough about the provenance or state of the underlying manuscript that served as copy for the printed playbook, which is all that we have for these plays. 
 

We don’t know if the punctuation reflects an authorial habit or a scribal habit. Once it’s transmitted into print, we don’t know whether it reflects print‑house practice. For a long time, punctuation was treated as an accidental—something contingent that editors could feel quite free to intervene in. 
 

But one of the other projects I’m involved with is the Thomas Nashe project. Nashe is a fascinating late Elizabethan bad boy, and this project is trying to reconstruct his canon and produce a critical old‑spelling edition of his work. 
 

Part of that editorial work has involved collating all early textual witnesses, which is not ordinarily done for prose works. What’s interesting is that we’ve found a lot of stop‑press corrections—where the proofreader stops the press to make a change—and some of those changes are punctuation. 
 

That raises the tantalizing possibility that Nashe was overseeing printing and imposing his sense of punctuation. So at least in some cases, punctuation matters for meaning. 
 

But punctuation also means very different things to modern readers. It doesn’t have the same rhetorical function it did for pre‑modern readers. And actors approach punctuation differently as well—it’s about breath, about delivery, rather than syntax. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Well, and this goes back to Natalie’s question for me. One of the things I’m constantly working out, when we’re thinking about conversation between text and performance, is precisely those questions. 
 

What reads well on the page—those long subclauses—sometimes need to be broken up differently for an actor. Sometimes an actor literally can’t deliver it; they need a breath. 
 

I find it fascinating. One of the things I love is working on The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, in the Folio—the only authoritative text we’ve got—has tons and tons of question marks all the time. Long questions broken up by maybe a dozen question marks.  And editors get rid of most of the question marks. And on the one hand, one of the actors I was working with this really loved all of the short questions when I presented that as an option. Love the chance to kind of have these very staccato kind of little peaks all the time. I can't remember any of the words.  
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

But Fair Em is the same. Fair Em opens with a question: "Why are you so upset?” So, there're three lines to the to the to the opening speech where one of the members of the court is asking King William why he's sort of walked away from the sort of jousting tournament. And in the quarter, the question mark is placed at the end of the second sentence, not the end, which is where most editors relocate it to. One of the things that I'm sort of juggling with, like you, is do I retain that sort of mid-question and have this staccato sort of two-part question, or do I leave it as a single question? 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Well, exactly. So, because one of my colleagues, who's an actor, had the exact opposite reaction and said, "I want as few caesuras as possible in a line if I'm an actor." And all these extra questions are kind of breaking the meter up for me in a way that I find unplayable. And like, even the different rhetorical training modern actors can get will affect the kinds of punctuation they feel able to work with in a performance. And that's what I find endlessly fascinating. You get further and further away from the idea of a right answer. There are just things that are more or less playable for different people. 
 

Sorry—that was a long answer. 
 

Ted: 

As you mentioned students and student actors, how do you engage students with Shakespeare and early modern texts today? What challenges do you face when teaching plays written for a very different cultural and political context? 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

Good question. I recently taught a second‑year undergraduate class. This is teaching a module to Theatre and English students called Performing the Past. And ordinarily, the main assessment would get them to break up into small groups, and they'd put sort of a scene or two, and then write reflections on this. But given that they had all worked with each other before and there were 15 of them, I thought, okay, this is the perfect opportunity for them to work as the equivalent of a Renaissance performance troop. This could be risky, but it could have a lot more reward. And I gave them the opportunity to stage an early modern play in its entirety. And I gave them a couple of choices.  
 

And the one that they went with was Mucedorus. So this is a relatively obscure play for us today, but at the time was sort of a Renaissance bestseller. It's one of the most frequently reprinted playbooks in the period. It's never out of repertoire. There are some interesting questions about some of the later additions that may have been added by Shakespeare when the play entered his company's repertoire. 
 

So one of the things that I think students struggle with is the language, and that's inevitable, as you all know, as students of medieval and Renaissance literature. Language evolves. Even if a word has stayed the same, its valency has shifted, syntax has moved, and grammar has changed. That can be off-putting, but I think it also means that students who come to the drama are all similarly tourists in a foreign country. And this can be reassuring to students for whom English is not their first language. So several of my students were foreign students who'd come to study abroad, so they don't necessarily feel as disadvantaged as say they may have if they were working with a text that was in modern English. 
 

Yeah, so getting them to embrace the weirdness and the alienness is sort of the first tactic. The next bit for me is really getting them to trust the text. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

I agree with everything Brett says. I have a slightly different situation in that my teaching program is entirely graduate students, almost all of whom are actors and directors who have pre‑committed to spending their graduate careers on these plays. So I don’t have to fight for buy‑in in the way that a lot of people do with Shakespeare. 
 

For us, the biggest questions come up around how we deal with these plays. First, we have the privilege—like Brett with Mucedorus—of staging several very obscure plays every year. Our MFA company, even in the last year, has done what I think are the modern world premieres of about four obscure early modern plays. 
 

One of the things we struggle with most is how putting on these plays aligns with theatre‑makers’ missions in the world today—the kinds of stories they want to tell. The most difficult conversations we have are about the fact that these plays rarely do the work that people want them to do. 
 

A huge number of theatre‑makers in our community identify as queer theatre‑makers who want to tell stories of queer joy, and early modern drama rarely does that for you. There is a great deal of homoerotic potential, queer possibility, and subversion within the plays, but there are also narratives of oppression and containment. 
 

One of the things we often work with is how contemporary students come in looking for what is relatable in a text—trying to find themselves in a play. This is especially challenging for actors whose primary method is an American‑style inside‑out approach to character, rather than a more British‑style outside‑in approach where identification with the character is less central. 
 

The question becomes: where do we find identification with characters and situations, and where do we maintain historicized distance from the stories we’re telling? How far are we telling stories to uplift what’s within them, and how far are we telling stories to challenge or resist what’s within them? 
 

This is particularly difficult when working with plays that aren’t performed regularly. When people come to Twelfth Night, they usually already have ideas about how to negotiate its tensions and where the crunch points are. With plays like Fair Em, The Goblins, or The Witch—Middleton’s The Witch was one we did last year—we have to work out which characters should be taken seriously in this context, which were satirical even in their own time, and which viewpoints are deeply challenging for modern audiences, but which the play is nevertheless asking us to invest in. 
 

We also have to ask how we engage with the play and trust it while simultaneously trying to align it with our own ideological commitments as theatre‑makers. There’s no easy answer to this, except to model an alignment between scholarship and practice—thinking deeply about what the play is doing and trying to do, so that we can then unmake it or remake it as needed for our productions. 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

That ideological commitment also means that sometimes we have to walk away from some plays. There are a lot of so-called “Turk plays,” for example, that could not be staged today at all because of the rabid Islamophobia that is inescapable in these plays. I mean, by the same token, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is deeply problematic because it is inherently anti‑Semitic. 
 

There have been attempts to rehabilitate that play through adaptation—making Shylock a more of a likeable character, but you move further and further away from the original, to the point where it is no longer recognizable as The Merchant of Venice. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Yeah. Aligned with that as well is the problem many actors have. As an actor, you want to advocate for your character and make sure you follow their objectives. But particularly many young cis male actors who are asked to take on roles of being the “problem person” in plays often find that very, very difficult. And it can really break a play. 
 

Take a play like The Merchant of Venice. I think some actors are still drawn to the role of Shylock because it offers the opportunity to humanize the character, to find empathy and purpose. But they are still working within a play that is structurally anti‑Semitic, and one’s own advocacy for a character can clash with the overall narrative the play is trying to spin. 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

But some of the best parts in these plays are the villains. Iago is clearly the best part if you’re going to do a thriller.  
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

No one wants to play Petruchio because that’s not like me. Whereas for me, I’m like that’s the joy of acting like being something I’m not. 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

Barabas in The Jew of Malta is a dream role for me. But again, this is a play that would be deeply problematic to revive in a modern production. Even though I think you could make an intellectual argument to say that it is less inherently anti‑Semitic than The Merchant of Venice because, at least in Marlowe’s—and I’m going to put an asterisk next to Marlowe’s when I talk about this play because of the questions about its authorship—at least in the universe of that play, there are no moral winners. Everybody is as awful as everybody else. Whereas in The Merchant of Venice, very clearly, Christianity is coming out on top. 
 

Di: 

And the last question: both of you have worked on digital humanities projects. How do you see digital humanities shaping the future of Shakespeare scholarship? 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

I will go first on this one because Brett’s going to have much better answers than I am.  
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

Pete says that, having co‑edited a really important collection on Shakespeare in the digital world— 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

That’s true, that’s true—but the interesting thing for me is that that collection is now from 2014, and of course, things date so quickly. 
 

For me, I suppose I’ve got more hope than a sense of transformation. I’m very worried by the evil that is artificial intelligence. I’m really worried, even in just the last couple of years, about how difficult it has become to find good, reliable information online. 
 

And so for me, I’m thinking that digital humanities actually has an enormous community‑building role to play now—trying to find how we invest our time, our authority, and our knowledge and expertise in projects that build community, share knowledge, and are robust enough to withstand attempts to confuse and separate scholars and prevent collective progress. 
 

This is why I look so excited to see the work that people like Brett are doing. There is so much labor and rigor that goes into large database and bibliography projects, the ways they share information and provide access to resources. These are projects that often aren’t given the credit the academy should be giving them, but which I think are absolutely integral if scholarship in the humanities is going to survive the next ten years. 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

Yeah, no, I take no issue with any of that. I think you’re absolutely right. We all have a stake, whether we’re digitally minded humanists or not, in what is happening. I would like digital humanists to be more front and center in conversations about things like generative AI. 
 

I’m perhaps a little less pessimistic than Pete is. I use generative AI quite a lot, but I also recognize its fundamental limitations. I don’t think AI is going to be the massive revolution and the massive loss of jobs it’s been played up to be, and I think that bubble is starting to burst. But I do think it’s important to know something about large language models because they’re so ubiquitous now. So I would just say: know your enemy. Having a critically informed sense of what these technologies are doing is not a bad thing. 
 

Where the future of Shakespeare studies is going in relation to AI and digital humanities is a tricky question. It’s tricky because, as Pete says, a lot of the directions of travel in scholarship tend to be, are a matter of funneling resources. Digital scholarship is not free; it has material costs. 
 

When people talk about data being “in the cloud,” there’s a tendency to think of it as immaterial, just floating out there. But no, there is code sitting on a server somewhere, and there is an electricity bill that needs to be paid to keep it there. Unlike print and manuscript, keeping digital data accessible and computationally tractable is a moving target. 
 

None of us has computers anymore that come with CD‑ROM drives. I’m sure several of us at this table have never seen a VHS tape, let alone had to repair one as a first job working at a video store, which is not a job anymore. 
 

Where am I going with this?  
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

I think there’s something really important here about long‑term retention. Some of the major digital humanities projects of the early twenty‑first century are already crumbling a bit—like the Cambridge Ben Jonson project, for instance. It’s a wonderful and amazing edition in many ways, but cracks are already starting to show, and it doesn’t have long‑term upkeep built into it. I know, Brett, you’re thinking about futureproofing with your current projects. 
 

But I mean, even a few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services had a major glitch, and suddenly Canvas went down everywhere. Half of American universities couldn’t access their virtual learning records anymore, which was how I found out that Amazon Web Services hosted our systems. We need distributed, backed‑up, state‑insured infrastructure and archiving. 
 

The British Library had a cyberattack several years ago. It’s a national shame and an international research disaster, and every six months the British Library has to post a notice saying that it’s still an emergency. Digital humanities absolutely needs to be talking about the losses we face if we don’t address these structural issues. 
 

Dr. Greatley-Hirsch: 

There also has to be a move away from the heady days of digital humanities, when we were thinking digital projects as being sort of maximal and doing everything, toward more streamlined approaches focused on long‑term sustainability and preservation. If that means letting go of bells and whistles, so be it. 
 

And trying to learn a bit from previous media formats that are still with us, like manuscripts and print. How do you ensure the survival of an addition? You keep lots of copies. Lots of copies keep stuff safe. That’s the LOCKSS principle. There is now a movement in digital humanities toward adopting that principle for digital projects—rather than treating institutions like the British Library as the sole point of contact, making materials available in distributed formats. 
 

Di: 

Fascinating! Thank you so much. I’m Di Wang. I’ve been here with my fellow The Ohio State University students, Natalie Cline and Ted Nagasawa, interviewing Dr. Peter Kirwan and Dr. Brett Greatley‑Hirsch. We are looking forward to your talks later today. Thank you so much for joining us. 
 

Dr. Kirwan: 

Thank you. 
 

Dr. Greatley‑Hirsch: 

Thanks for having us.