Assembling Shakespeare's Life in Warwickshire Spaces, in Partnership with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute

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At sites where we seek to encounter Shakespeare, how do changing assemblages of objects, words and images reformulate his life? This project, developed in discussion with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Head of Research, Dr Paul Edmondson, focuses on overlooked sub-genres of Shakespearean biographymaking.Centring on underexamined SBT archives and assets, including the SBT's own people, my research encompasses 'off-the page' life-writing, adopting Julie Sanders's stance that Shakespeare walks, for example, can be seen as part of the wider field of biographical writings on Shakespeare. The project has application to wider cultural production of off-the-page life-writing. It is underpinned by a confirmed partnership with the SBT, offering unparalleled access to untapped archives in Stratford-upon-Avon, while allowing me to anchor theory in the SBT's, Stratford-upon-Avon's, and Warwickshire's, physical curated space.My project will apply spatial theory (e.g. Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze) to key sites and will provide an original theoretical framework, based on Manuel DeLanda's Assemblage Theory, in order to ask how fresh iterations of Shakespeare's life continue to arise. Dr Edmondson, and my primary Shakespeare Institute supervisor, Dr Laoutaris, are Shakespearean biographers with extensive experience researching, writing about, and curating, early modern lives andmaterial culture. My secondary supervisor, Professor Michael Dobson, has extensive expertise in the field of Shakespearean cultural production. Under this uniquely qualified supervision team, I will examine primary sources showing how Shakespeare's story has been constructed: records of curated exhibitionsand the reasons for them (so far as they are retrievable); artistic responses to the five Shakespeare Houses; guidebooks, diaries, guiding scripts, and itineraries; and records showing how the interiors and gardens of the Shakespeare Houses have looked and evolved since the 1850s. I will conduct interviews ofpast and present guides, curators and biographers in order to create an important resource: the SBT's first oral history archive. The SBT and the University of Birmingham will provide the oral history training I need to do this.