How to Make a Shakespearean Playbook

At this hands-on workshop, curator and English professor Aaron T Pratt (University of Texas), walks participants through the way 16th and 17th century English booksellers turned inky sheets of paper, churned out by printers, into readable copies of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Early playbooks originally circulated in a form that look rather different from the way books do today. Even the copies of Shakespeare's earliest editions, that have managed to survive for more than four hundred years, usually bear little resemblance to the way they appeared when originally sold.

As participants try their hand at making their own Renaissance playbooks, Dr Pratt considers the impact their flimsy format has had on the histories we have been taught about English drama and shifts our understanding of how Shakespeare became perhaps the most famous author of all time.

This project was produced in collaboration with the 2025 Being Human Festival.