The Stage

A platform to be heard

Published Tuesday 8 July 2008 at 10:15

I should like to comment on Colin David Reese’s article of Wednesday, June 25 (The Stage Online). He writes as if the public stage in Shakespeare’s time was the only venue for the theatre. But in fact, before the public theatres were built, there was constant theatrical activity in the universities and inns of court, not to mention the court itself and in the major country houses.

I was in the Oxford University Dramatic Society in the late sixties, and in my generation the star of the Oxford Playhouse, among other talented people, was Diana Quick. She easily and naturally made the transition from university theatre to the professional stage. I do not know whether she spent any time at drama college after leaving Oxford, but she certainly did not need it.

Young Elizabethans at the universities and the inns of court were encouraged to take up the drama to prepare them for public oratory, and no doubt there was no shortage of volunteers. Casts would have been large (as they are in Shakepeare’s plays).

The Earl of Oxford, for example, was at both Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. Marlowe presumably came into the theatre from university, and yet no-one says that he was a poor dramatist because he knew nothing of the stage.

Elizabeth Winder (nee Sykes)

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