Â鶹¾«Ñ¡

On 26 April the 2025 Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture – co-organised by the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – was placed as the climax to a whole Shakespeare’s Birthday Symposium, ‘Performing Shakespeare’s Women.’  

Dame Harriet Walter, presented with a University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ honorary doctorate in the Institute garden as part of our 50th birthday celebrations in 2001, spoke about her experience of playing not only Shakespearean heroines (Ophelia, Helena in Dream, Lady Percy, Helena in All’s Well, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra) but also Shakespearean heroes (Brutus, Henry IV, Prospero), and read from her poetry collection She Speaks!. 

In the morning Professor Carol Rutter reflected on the making of her groundbreaking book of interviews with Royal Shakespeare Company actresses, including Harriet Walter, Clamorous Voices (1989); and Abigail Rokison-Woodall interviewed a comparable batch of Shakespearean performers, Alexandra Gilbreath, Lucy Phelps and Mariah Gale. 

The day also featured a presentation by the Romanian actor-playwright Olivia Negrean, whose Feast: a play in one cooking (in which a collection of Shakespeare’s female characters gather to talk as they cook a meal which they subsequently share with the audience) has been a huge hit on the international festival circuit.  

In the year in which Clamorous Voices appeared, it might be remembered, the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ conferred an honorary degree on Dame Judi Dench, and its Shakespeare Institute in Stratford continues to be the site of intelligent conversation between the worlds of Shakespearean scholarship and Shakespearean performance.