About Lord Denney’s Players

Lord Denney’s Players is a theatrical group housed in The Ohio State University Departments of English and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. It was founded in 2014 to demonstrate the value and vitality of student-driven academic theatre. LDP provides an opportunity for Ohio State undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to engage in intensive experiential learning and research around the annual production of an early English play or series of plays. During the rehearsal and performance process, related special topics workshops, courses and assignments throughout both departments offer myriad opportunities for hands-on student and faculty investment.

LDP is invested in all dramatic works of the medieval and early modern periods, but because of his role in the formation of the English literary canon, LDP often returns to Shakespeare. It is now almost a cliché to say that Shakespeare’s plays were exclusively meant to be vehicles for performance, but in the past thirty years, mounting evidence that Shakespeare considered himself a literary dramatist now requires scholars to consider the effects of his works both on the page as well as on the stage. LDP productions are therefore as preoccupied with the ways that Shakespeare’s texts were transmitted through the technologies of the past as they are with the ways that modern audiences reshape his plays to suit the preoccupations of the present.

Surviving documentary evidence reveals that Shakespeare was a compulsive self-editor and reviser, regularly returning to offer updated or alternative versions of now-canonical works like Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. As part of its educational mandate, LDP regularly chooses to perform these less familiar versions of the works of Shakespeare to bring these scholarly debates about Shakespeare’s working habits to wider public attention. For our work with the 1602 early quarto text of The Merry Wives of Windsor in 2018, LDP was awarded a Resolution of Expression from the Columbus City Council.

In our endeavors to use the resources of Ohio State University to investigate unusual texts of Shakespeare and his predecessors and contemporaries, it might be argued that LDP is following historical precedent: the title page of the first quarto, or “bad” text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet of 1603 insists that the play had not only been performed in London, but also at “the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.”

Casting

LDP is all-inclusive, welcoming the talents of all Ohio State students, faculty and staff. Alumni who have graduated within the previous 3 years are also welcome. Enthusiasm is mandatory; experience is optional. So that we are easily able to accommodate everyone who might be interested in learning more about early English drama, the concepts for LDP shows are always built around our ensemble, and we regularly cast more than 50% of those who audition. LDP engages in gender- and color-conscious casting, which means that we are attuned to how an actor’s race and gender carry implications for the way that audiences interpret a play. Because we regularly perform the works of Shakespeare and other canonical authors, part of LDP’s mission is to challenge traditional casting decisions that have kept disabled, female, and BIPOC actors offstage or allowed them only limited roles. In an LDP show, all roles are open to all bodies, and actors are encouraged to read for all the parts they are interested in, whether they have loads of experience or have never been onstage before. We are also always on the lookout for backstage and front-of house crew to help get the show on the boards.

Our work is made possible thanks to the support of anonymous alumni donors, for which we are eternally grateful.

Black Lives Matter Statement

In the final scene of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio agrees to marry Antonio’s daughter in recompense for wrongfully slandering Hero and causing her death. Hero’s father, Leonato, asks if Claudio is sure about this. Claudio replies: “I’ll hold my mind were she an Ethiope” (5.4.38). In this tiny moment, Claudio’s line of comparison makes clear just how easily, just how casually, white supremacy is baked into the world of Shakespeare’s Messina. Claudio is letting it be known that even if Antonio’s daughter were Black, he would still marry her because his commitment to remedying Hero’s wrongful death is so strong. Claudio’s admission not only reveals that he thinks that marrying an Ethiope is undesirable but also that he assumes that his view is universal. His comparison, in other words, depends on the assumption that everyone else on stage feels the same way that he does about people with nonwhite skin. This is the same racist attitude that we see Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio exhibiting at the beginning of the tragedy of Othello, though here it appears at the resolution of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies. What is a racist comment doing here?

Such casual allusions to the undesirability of blackness, and the corollary preference for whiteness, are common in Shakespeare’s plays and the plays of his contemporaries. In 1995, scholar Kim F. Hall detailed many of them in her book Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, where she demonstrated that “blackness . . . is an infinitely malleable presence that has been used, mostly negatively, to define white subjectivity” (257). Because of Shakespeare’s status in the literary canon, then, his attitudes towards blackness, and the way that blackness can be used to elevate whiteness, have become entrenched in our own understandings of value. If we don’t draw attention to these moments when Shakespeare’s characters speak casually of their preferences for whiteness, we risk endorsing these preferences; when we don’t talk about the ways that Shakespeare’s plays have served the interests of white supremacy and colonialism, we likewise fail at recognizing how the stories we tell help to promote systemic racism and we fail to recognize how these inherited narratives of value have contributed to the unjust killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and far too many others.

As an academic theatre company designed to share the contexts and histories of Shakespeare’s plays with broader student and public audiences, Lord Denney’s Players is committed to helping better understand Shakespeare’s role in narrativizing and normalizing whiteness and the concomitant devaluation of blackness. We are committed to supporting our colleagues, friends, and fellow students at the Ohio State University as they work towards justice. We all have so much to do.

If you would like to learn more about current scholarship into Shakespeare and race, follow the #ShakeRace hashtag on Twitter or start your research with the Race and Periodization program of the Folger Shakespeare Library.