The English Departments of RGS Guildford and Tormead School were delighted to host a joint inaugural dinner for our A Level students. This was a fantastic opportunity to exchange ideas about the texts we have in common as we deliver the same examination board syllabus. It also allowed the students to meet their counterparts, who they will be collaborating with for various symposia across the year, notably a Lower Sixth conference on this year’s Booker Prize nominees and an unseen poetry seminar for the Upper Sixth.
The atrium of Tormead School was fantastically dressed for the event and we were fortunate to welcome Dr Harry McCarthy from the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, who delivered a highly engaging after-dinner lecture on the boy actors who appeared on early modern stages. Dr McCarthy’s research on this area of theatre resulted in him becoming the first British scholar to be awarded the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America. His monograph, Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre, has been widely celebrated and earned him a glowing review in The Times Literary Supplement.
The lecture explored the boy performers, aged from pre-adolescence to their early twenties, who performed all the female roles, and a great deal of male ones, on English stages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dr McCarthy discussed these performers’ skills and their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture, particularly how their exuberant physicality was instrumental to not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Specific care was taken by Dr McCarthy to connect his research to the Shakespeare plays taught at both schools, namely Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and Twelfth Night.