Qualla: Shakespeare Institute https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Shakespeare Institute https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute Shakespeare Institute: Introduction https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Public domain. In the 1890s, the most popular novelist in England was not Hardy or Conan Doyle or Wilde. It was Marie Corelli -- a writer whose name almost nobody recognises today, but whose books outsold every one of her famous contemporaries combined. She bought a Queen Anne house in Stratford-upon-Avon called Mason Croft, planted a garden, kept a pet pony she sometimes brought indoors, and made the literary pilgrimage to Shakespeare's hometown her personal court. When she died in 1924, her house sat quiet for a generation. Then in 1951, the University of Birmingham did something improbable: it founded the world's first postgraduate research centre devoted entirely to Shakespeare, and chose Corelli's old drawing rooms to house it.

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Shakespeare Institute: A House Full of Books https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Mattykey, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mason Croft today contains roughly sixty thousand volumes, including three thousand early printed and rare books -- one of the deepest collections of Renaissance drama scholarship anywhere on Earth. The library was purpose-built in 1996, attached to the Queen Anne house, designed...

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-a-house-full-of-books.mp3 0:06 2 full Shakespeare Institute: An Improbable Foundation https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Mattykey, CC BY-SA 3.0. Allardyce Nicoll, the Glaswegian theatre historian, became the first director in 1951 and stayed a decade. The idea -- an institute existing only to study one playwright -- was unusual enough that nothing quite like it had been attempted before. The 1970s nearly killed it. Birmin...

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-an-improbable-foundation.mp3 0:06 3 full Shakespeare Institute: The Players in the Garden https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Mattykey, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Institute's dramatic society, the Shakespeare Institute Players, has existed in various forms since 1953. Postgraduate students who spend their days reading folios spend their evenings staging the plays they read. The first recorded production was A Yorkshire Tragedy, an anon...

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-the-players-in-the-garden.mp3 0:06 4 full Shakespeare Institute: Stratford's Other Academic Life https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Mattykey, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most visitors to Stratford never know the Institute exists. They walk past Mason Croft on Church Street -- a substantial brick house with a walled garden -- on their way to Shakespeare's Birthplace or the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, unaware that behind the wall, doctoral students ...

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-stratfords-other-academic-life.mp3 0:06 5 full Shakespeare Institute: Corelli's Ghost https://qualla.com/shakespeare-institute/ Photo credit Mattykey, CC BY-SA 3.0. Marie Corelli would be appalled, and pleased, in equal measure. Appalled, because she fought her whole Stratford life to keep the town small and unchanged, picking feuds with anyone who proposed paving, electric lights, or motor cars near her beloved monuments. Pleased, because s...

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]]> Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/q/b/shakespeare-institute-wp/gcqb-shakespeare-institute-corellis-ghost.mp3 0:06 6 full