“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.

 

Image of Shakespeare's Globe's new guides: 'finding gender', 'finding race', 'finding disability', and 'finding queerness' in our records.
Image 1: The new diversity and inclusion guides at Shakespeare’s Globe

 

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.

 

Image 2: The Shakespeare’s Globe inclusion advisory panel, April 2024.

 

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.