baiting

The Box Office Bears team share some news about recent publications and the announcement of our forthcoming monograph, Box Office Bears: Bears and Baiting in Early Modern England.

Box Office Bears and 1623 Theatre are in pursuit of Shakespearean bears. Although we don't often connect Shakespeare and bears now, everyone in Tudor or Stuart England would have known or encountered a bear, and they made a fair few memorable cameos in the period’s drama. You may have heard about the bear sweeping across the stage in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: 'Exit pursued by a bear'. At this event we'll be staging and exploring these kinds of moments in Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights, including a devil who disguises himself as a bear, an old man who turns into one, and a sexy hero who first attracts his girlfriend by showing off his ability to fight a bear. Join the Box Office Bears team and 1623 actors for a playful and thoughtful exploration of Shakespearean (and others’!) bears as we enter their playworlds, performed by, or as, a bear, returning to a time when bears fundamentally shaped popular entertainment during this period.

A bearward of questionable repute assembles her band of battling bears of varying sizes in the playfight wrestling school, London...

In this blog post, Harvey Shepherd attempts to think through some of the problems of studying visual culture as a means of reconstructing baiting practices in Europe, using examples from his research on France in the eighteenth century.

We can glean information about bear baiting from different medieval sources such as manuscript marginalia or sketches. But there is a lot more to bears in visual culture than first meets the eye.

We've been tracking bears in inns, arenas, and marketplaces, but they were also “presented” in royal residences and recreational spaces, including the distinguished Banqueting House.