How to perform Shakespeare has been one of the most enduring and ideologically fraught struggles in modern British theatre production. This module builds on the historiographical and cultural studies work of year one, providing a practical laboratory in which you will learn and explore modes of performance that will illuminate the theatrical work in performance while preserving its historical strangeness. Drawing variously on our contemporary understanding of the conditions of English Renaissance production and on performance techniques associated with experimental theatre artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you will work on text from Shakespeare plays, making use of, for example, rhetorical gesture, improvisation, flirting and showing off, talking to the audience, audio feeds, part-scripts, textual muddles, obscenity and cross-dressing. The emphasis will be on finding viable and intellectually rigorous modes of performance that challenge the dominant 'naturalistic' modes that operate in most British theatre production.