Thursday, 22 January, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm
Victoria University Common Room
91 Charles St W
The experience of confronting the almost unimaginable wealth of the modern theatrical archive can be disorienting to those of us trained in the economy of archival scarcity that governs early modern theatre historiography. Writing the history of Shakespeare performances in 20th- and 21st-century Berlin, as I am currently doing, raises not the spectre of the unknowable (though that necessarily haunts the work of all theatre scholarship) but the challenge of selecting from and framing the overwhelming amount of material. In this talk, I will chart what kinds of records of the past century’s 400+ Shakespeare productions can be found in the archives of three democracies and two totalitarian regimes, and sketch some of the narrative strategies (biographical, institutional, textual-dramaturgical, iconographic) I am developing to make sense of it all.
Holger Syme is a professor of English and a theatre historian at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on early modern English theatre, including two monographs (Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England [2012] and Theatre History, Attribution Studies, and the Question of Evidence [2023]) and a co-edited collection (Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing [2009]) as well as numerous articles and essays in venues such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, The Review of English Studies, and English Literary Renaissance. For the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare, he edited Edward III and The Book of Sir Thomas More and wrote the general theatre-historical introduction. Over the past decade, much of his research has been focussed on modern and contemporary productions of “classics,” and he is working on a book about Shakespeare in Berlin, 1920-2020.
