Shakespeare and Love and Shakespeare and Spirituality

Shakespeare and Love and Shakespeare and Spirituality are two short films inspired by my ongoing conviction of the potential of Shakespeare’s plays, as text and performance, to generate dialogue about the things that matter. The films draw together a range of voices and map onto Shakespeare scholarship and criticism the knowledges of people who engage with Shakespeare in different ways in their daily lives. The actors explore the themes of love and spirituality through their work of embodying characters in the plays. The Royal Shakespeare Company Front of House Assistants work a range of plays in any season, seeing them repeatedly, sometimes as a whole and sometimes in fragments, and in this mode of serial encounter, register ideas and moments in the narratives that are important to them personally and to audiences. The heritage workers in the Shakespeare Houses offer visitors a wealth of historical and geographical information about the place where Shakespeare was born and died, and have developed their own questions and theories about Shakespeare’s life and works. All their contributions show how Shakespeare informs our understanding of apparently simple, yet enduringly complex concepts that make demands on our attention― whether because they are of particular significance at a personal level, or on a local, national, or global scale―and which are a focus of reflection for anyone involved in working on or seeing the plays. Researcher and Director - Dr Laura Higgins