The Stage

Shakespeare’s Globe to revive four rare plays

Published Thursday 22 April 2010 at 16:37 by Natalie Woolman

Shakespeare’s Globe is reviving four rarely-performed plays that link with the venue’s main programme this season.

Part of the theatre’s 15-year-old Read Not Dead initiative, actors will present four “performances with scripts” in the Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre in the Globe complex.

The four texts are an alternative King Henry IV written by Thomas Betterton in 1700, The Chances by John Fletcher, The Sea Voyage by Fletcher and Philip Massinger and Virtue Betrayed, or Anna Bullen by John Banks, which will sit beside the Globe’s productions of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, a new play by Howard Brenton, on the main stage.

The first Read Not Dead performance is King Henry IV on May 9.

Since the Red Not Dead series began in 1995, Globe Education has presented and recorded more than 150 plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries.