In the summer of 1592, London’s theatres were dying. A catastrophic outbreak of plague gripped the capital, forcing authorities to lock down the city and shutter its playhouses for an agonising 18 months. Out of work, and desperate to survive, London’s finest acting companies – including several connected with a young William Shakespeare – took to the treacherous muddy roads of early modern England. But this was a tour of desperation. To regional towns, travelling actors were no longer purveyors of entertainment – they were suspected carriers of a terrifying, invisible killer. Shunned, feared, and turned away at town gates across England, the players faced financial ruin and starvation.
But one of the few cities that still opened its gates was Coventry.
Following on from his popular talk in May 2026 on Shakespeare’s early connection to Coventry, join theatre historian Dr. Will Green as we uncover the macabre, true history of plague in Renaissance Coventry, and performance inside St. Mary’s Guildhall. Far from a rare emergency, contagion was a continuous shadow that the city had to constantly outmanoeuvre. Discover the harrowing first-hand experiences of these exiled London actors on the road, learn how Coventry’s civic leaders balanced the terror of infection with the appetite for spectacle, and step back in time to an era when a night at the theatre could quite literally mean a matter of life and death.
Staged in the very building where these struggling players sought work, this event peels back the centuries to reveal the dark, resilient history of regional drama surviving against the odds, and explores how this one outbreak changed Shakespeare’s theatres forever.
William David Green is a historian focused on the relationship between drama and culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in 2021, and has held positions at the universities of Birmingham, Warwick, and Nottingham. From October 2026, he will be a visiting fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He leads the Travelling Players Project at Shakespeare’s Schoolroom & Guildhall, Stratford-upon-Avon, and recently curated their new exhibition on their building’s history as a theatre venue in Shakespeare’s lifetime. He is currently working on his next book, provisionally titled “Stages of Disruption: Civic Authority and Regional Theatre in Shakespeare’s England“.
Tickets cost £15 for adults and £12.50 for students and the over-60s. The talk takes place in the Dame Ellen Terry Room, but all tickets also include full standard entry to the guildhall museum itself. If you require a carer ticket, please email [email protected].