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About the business
The Shakespeare Institute, located in Stratford-upon-Avon, has been a beacon for international Shakespeare scholarship since its foundation in 1951. We bring Shakespeare to life through a range of innovative campus-based and online postgraduate degrees.
The Institute offers an environment in which students and staff are encouraged to be creative. We want to bring the directors, actors, writers, arts administrators, teachers and academics of the future to Stratford. We want to bring Shakespeare to life in new ways in the present.
Former Directors include major Shakespeareans such as Allardyce Nicoll, Philip Brockbank, Stanley Wells, Peter Holland and Kate McLuskie. Under the leadership of Professor Michael Dobson, the Institute is stronger in depth and scope than ever.
Home to world renowned academic staff, the Institute allows our vibrant community of postgraduate students to explore Shakespeare from a range of different perspectives. Though everything returns to Shakespeare, the research interests of its fellows have never been so exhilaratingly diverse. It provides the ideal environment in which to explore the impact Shakespeare’s work has had across four centuries of world culture.
Shakespeare Institute students benefit from our exciting collaboration with the RSC. This offers students a truly unique learning experience, blending academia and creativity in an exciting new way to foster innovative methods of theatre and learning. Students benefit from the expertise of RSC artists and practitioners through innovative modules, workshops and projects. These cover subjects such as directing, playwriting, lighting and design.
There is no research culture more vibrant than the Shakespeare Institute’s. It is home to the Shakespeare Institute Players. Every week its historic rooms and gardens buzz with rarely-played play readings, theatrical experiments and all sorts of other Shakespeare-inspired activity. Our famous Thursday seminars attract the big hitters of Shakespeare studies, as well as directors and actors.
All that is without saying that at the Institute you can study Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon where he was born and died. Just a short walk away from the RSC!
The Institute offers an environment in which students and staff are encouraged to be creative. Several staff are involved in major creative projects and are incorporating exciting new creative elements into their teaching.
They benefit, too, from our international collaborations. These include Waseda University in Japan, Nanjing University in China, and Shakespeare-focussed organisations across Europe and North America. To be a Shakespeare Institute student – whether on site or via our distance learning programmes – is to be at the centre of global networks in Shakespearean studies.
