“How many goodly creatures are there here?”

Philip Milnes-Smith, Digital Archivist at Shakespeare’s Globe offers an introduction to five new resources

The first editions of four new intersectional Research guides at Shakespeare’s Globe were launched in January 2025, following grant-funding from The National Archives. These guides offer a starting point outside the archive catalogue for researchers interested not only in race, but queerness, gender and disability in our collections. However, because they look beyond the performance and production directly into the texts, they are intended to help users anywhere to see the four themes in the plays, particularly through character.  Indirectly, they also help to offer a more realistic picture of Shakespeare’s London than the Merrie England people often imagine. 

Plays included in the guides are those with a degree of full performance at Shakespeare’s Globe and that includes those programmed over the years in our Read Not Dead series (which includes many works without a continuous performance history). The fifth resource is a timeline, cross-referenced to the guides, plotting the Early Modern plays included (with information about dates of first publication – not necessarily close to the date of first performance). A prose (screen-reader friendly) version of the timeline has also been prepared [link].

Importantly, having covered the past performance history of the modern Globe up to the summer of 2024, the plan is to update annually with material relating to the most recent productions. Longer-term, there are other ideas for development that could supplement the focus on character, with more incidental textual references to, for example, Africans, that are not necessarily well footnoted in scholarly editions (which have assumed a particular user).

History

Perhaps surprisingly, the idea for the guides began with a piece of new writing at Shakespeare’s Globe: Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan. The archive team wanted to assemble a small temporary display of items featuring queer characters in new writing. But it was immediately obvious that the catalogue alone could not support that – because, for example, there were no subject tags. To identify characters with queer identities we needed to look at reviews – that we were not keeping. We had no internal records to support the research. 

In curating the display, another problem was revealed. Sometimes queerness was in the published script, but the lines cut in performance. Sometimes queerness was embodied on stage with characters who were collections of (negative) stereotypes. In other words, mere representation alone was not all we needed to know. If we wanted to help others with their research, we needed to do the work ourselves of deepening our understanding of our collections.

In the summer of 2023, I began that work by roughing out early versions of the guides as ‘proof of concept’. That autumn I applied for a Research and Innovation Grant from TNA. In 2024, the main drafts of the guides were produced by the summer, and further formatting, proof-reading and editing took place over the autumn.

Structure and content

The structure of the four guides is similar, with introductory notes and essays, followed by sections for the theme in the plays and productions (including casting), and in other records. Each guide also has advice on searching the catalogue, a glossary, some select biography and links and a fuller bibliography. Before this project, the catalogue could boast only 58 hits for race, 17 for gender, 13 for queerness, and 4 for race.  They now average over 150 pages each.

The disability guide divides characters up as follows: those who are so characterised at their first appearance; those who become disabled during the action of the play; those who pretend to be disabled; and those where disability could be inferred from lines in the text, but where there remains uncertainty. 

Although focused on women the gender guide also looks at ungendered and ambiguously gendered characters, as well as a small sample of men who seem not to be performing their gender in line with expectations.

The queerness guide has the following subsections: Characters with evidence of same gender desire, affection and intimacy; Characters resistant to or avoiding heterosexual coupling; Characters whose conduct challenges convention (gender non-conforming); and Characters portrayed as at odds with binary conceptions of appearance based on dress and accoutrements.

When looking at race-making, we focus on the characters where language is being used in the plays to create racial difference between them (which is broader than just physical characteristics like skin colour and hair texture, and includes geographical origin, religion and culture). 

‘Archival ethics’

There can be no question that there are gaps and silences in what has been deposited and collected in archive repositories (and this will continue to be the case unless we change our practices). However, it is also important to note that researchers wanting to find the contributions that have been made by people other than, say, straight, white, non-disabled cis-men, encounter difficulties partly because archival ‘good practice’ has continued to assume a default record creator (and user). At a conference in 2024, I was introduced to an emerging conception of ‘archival ethics’ which resonated because I have felt “haunted by the ghosts of the ones excluded, sidelined, not listened to, dispossessed, and in other ways oppressed” and sought to make them more discoverable.

The title quote for this blog is from the not unproblematic play The Tempest.  Miranda has grown up on an island with very limited experience of humanity and is exclaiming in this way because seeing new things is wonderful. It is hoped that our new thematic Research Guides will give readers the same experience when encountering those in our collections (and the plays), many of whom were simply not findable in our catalogue. Developed with the assistance of an inclusion advisory panel of volunteers with lived experience across all four areas, they also diversify the range of standpoints beyond academic interpretations, to include community perspectives.