Diversity and Inclusion at the Globe: Lamely in the Verse
“Lamely in the verse”
In this post, Philip Milnes-Smith, Digital Archivist at Shakespeare’s Globe, introduces the new Disability Research Guide and reflects on the importance of co-production.
Shakespeare’s Globe is a world-renowned theatre, education centre, archive and cultural landmark in London, England. The archive was part of founder Sam Wanamaker’s vision for the Globe as a place of research, documenting the organisation’s radical theatrical experiment and helping to make Shakespeare accessible for all.

At the end of January 2025, Shakespeare’s Globe held a launch event to mark the completion of four guides to help researchers looking for disability, gender, queerness and race in its collections (see Image 1). In this blog post, I am going to focus on the first of these but, obviously, disabled lives feature in all four guides.
Importantly, our aim was for the guide not just to be about which disabled performers, creatives and staff have made their contributions to the modern organisation, or about meeting the needs of disabled patrons through the provision of accessible live events, and the development of accessible records and collections. This includes, for example, captioned recordings, or braille cast lists. It was also about identifying disability within the plays and productions, particularly in terms of characters. This helps readers to repopulate Early Modern London with the disabled people who were there, but we are not used to imagining. We even sometimes get to point to real people like Margaret Gryffith and Will Sommers, who were referenced in the plays.
Archive catalogues were not designed for thematic searching. As a result, in many cases a quick search using the terms disabled/disability might suggest there are few, or even no relevant hits to follow up. In our case, in July 2023 there were just 4. The published guide, however, is 117 pages long, with 58 pages offering starting points for research, plus introductory materials, bibliographies, glossary, and so on. Consequently, disability (which we define broadly and inclusively) is now considerably more findable.

Developing the guides was a project funded by a Research and Innovation Grant from The National Archives, and one important aspect to securing that was an element of co-production. We recruited an inclusion advisory panel of volunteers with lived experience across all four of our themes. We asked them to read our draft guides and comment ahead of three meetings, where we could thrash things out together.
They made an incredibly valuable contribution to the development of the guides, meaning that the guides come from a broader sample of human experience than we could offer from archive staff alone. They helped ensure that the guides would be readable by a general audience, but it also gave us the opportunity to share community perspectives on characters. Excitingly, many want to continue working with us, as we move forward with a more accessible reading room and as we develop future programming.
Philip Milnes-Smith is a Diversity and Inclusion Ally for the Archives and Records Association. He founded the Disability Collections Forum, a network to support colleagues across libraries, archives, museums and broader heritage organisations.
Blind Writing Before Braille
Blind Writing Before Braille
Tilly Guthrie delves into the history and development of tactile literacy through this examination of the letters of Victorian writer, Charles Cook.
In May 1859, Charles Cook wrote a letter to the Earl of Derby, seeking an investment in his new small business. He had arrived in Liverpool from India five years previously “for the purpose of learning Music”. Unfortunately, things hadn’t gone to plan; “not being able to render my Music of any practicle [sic] value”, he had turned instead to the “business of a hawker”. Now he only lacked “capital sufficient to procure some tea & coffee” to sell on. What Cook doesn’t mention, but is apparent from the physical form of his letter, is that he was blind. Instead of using ink, the shapes of letters are made up of a series of dots embossed into the paper with pins. This created visually recognisable characters for the sighted recipient of the letter, but in a tactile form that could be legible to the fingertip.

This letter catches a crucial moment in the history of tactile literacy. Although Braille was invented in the 1820s, it wasn’t taught across Britain until the 1870s, and was not standardised until 1905. Instead, various embossed scripts were developed for blind readers based on the printed Roman alphabet. The aim was integration with the sighted world, but with a failure to acknowledge that the complex shapes of Roman letters were impractically difficult to decipher by touch alone.

Charles Cook’s letter embodies this approach. He uses embossing stamps made from a block of wood or metal, with protruding pins arranged in the shape of a letter. The character appears backwards on the stamp, and the text written right to left, so that once pressed into the paper it appears the right way around in relief. This technique allowed Cook to write independently, in a script that was legible to the sighted reader who was not familiar with Braille. However, it proved to be a compromise for both parties; the pin-prick letters were difficult to read both by touch and by eye. Further examination of the materiality of this text shows that the downfalls were not merely practical, but affected how a blind writer was perceived in their correspondence.
![Zoomed image of the date and a section of the first line of the letter, again overlaid with a digital tracing in red. The pin-prick words are interspersed with corrections in pencil italic handwriting, which I illustrate here with square brackets: 'May [21st] 1859' and 'I hu[m]bly'.](https://culturesofdisability.mmu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/451/2025/01/Picture3-300x178.png)
Even though Cook uses lengthy formal language appropriate for addressing a social superior, mistakes in spelling and spacing become more frequent as this letter progresses. This not only indicates the arduousness of the writing process, but also makes Cook appear careless or unprofessional in his request for investment. Similarly, where corrections are added to the text, they are written in pencil. This has the feel of a teacher correcting a student’s work, especially when the smooth italic handwriting is juxtaposed with the childish letter shapes created by these stamps.
Charles Cook’s letter therefore serves as a case study of a blind person who was clearly aware of formal epistolary conventions, but whose writing inadvertently gives the impression of childishness or perhaps carelessness. Through this kind of material analysis of text, the experience and perceptions of blindness in the Victorian era can be partially uncovered. When faced with the dearth of autonomous disabled voices in the archives, these fragments provide a vital insight into their history.
Further Reading
- Armitage, Thomas Rhodes, The Education and Employment of the Blind: what it has been, is, and ought to be, second edition (London, 1886).
- Golden, Catherine, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville, 2009).
- Levy, William Hanks, 'Blindness and the Blind' (London, 1872).
- Ott, Katherine, ‘Material Culture, Technology, and the Body in Disability History’, in Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (New York, 2018), pp. 125–39.
- Tilley, Heather, Blindness and Writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge, 2018).
Tilly Guthrie is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield, working on the history of blindness and tactile writing in the Nineteenth Century. She is sighted, but an avid appreciator of Braille in all its forms.