It’s fair to say that we do a lot of things at Beyond, and the vastness and range of our work can be overwhelming. So here’s a quick guide to what we do, and suggestions as to how you can navigate it.

Our work attempts to start from a place of relative ignorance. In an ideal world we start by looking at a play knowing as little about it as possible, and then see what the text gives us for performance today. That’s not to say we won’t think about how it was put together back in the day, but we’re a performing company and our needs requires thinking about performance now. After pulling together an editable digital script, we begin with…

First Look Exploring Sessions. These are rough, quick, and low quality (mostly) zoom sessions that we record and throw onto YouTube (originally these were audio only and on the podcast, and occasionally we still do audio only exploring sessions). We take a play, read it, discuss it every scene or so, and go on. We try not to be prepared with too many expectations, and are generally trying to capture that sense of surprise and confusion that a new play might give to a live audience. Anything we say there is what seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you want something to throw on in the background, or to skip through looking for ideas, then a First Look is for you. But they are not a performance of a play.

Then, having vaguely got an idea of a play, we do…

Second Look Exploring Sessions. These are also mostly zoom videos, but this time we run the play at pace, and some people occasionally do some acting (if the spirit moves them). These videos are sometimes quite useful in terms of getting a sense of the flow of a play, but are still just a bunch of people throwing stuff together. Whilst still in the realms of background viewing, these videos move towards an actual viewing experience.

We might also do additional zoom based workshops, and also a Third Look session, to dig deeper into a text – and, as we are a reiterative company, we will probably keep going around plays in some fashion online in this way. Why? Because it’s open to all, and we get to meet new people who want to discover these plays. You too can join in – exploring sessions are open, online, and free to all comers. Join in today!

What’s next? Well, for a more professional product, you need to go to our podcast. Because having done all this prep work, we go to produce a string of episodes for the podcast that cover the play in greater depth and quality.

On the podcast you will generally find…

Full Cast Audio Adaptations – our primary method of releasing early drama. These are sometimes recorded live, or in studio. For example, The Old Wives’ Tale by George Peele – which has also got…

!Spoilers! are breakdowns of individual plays, often (though not always) with a plain text recording of the dialogue. These cover all the details that came out of producing the audio adaptation and more. And for more expert exploration of the work we have…

Discussing Episodes – which are just that: chats with experts and producers on/of early English drama. Have a browse.

Plus other stuff we produce on a whim, including dives into Prologues, Epilogues, Fragments of lost plays, civic pageantry like the Lord Mayor’s Show, books, and other things of interest.

These productions on the podcast push us towards the next step: producing full productions – and videos of full productions – of the plays we have covered above. We have produced some fullish shows, but they are not as well archived digitally – see Entertaining Henry.

And we’re also still here to promote, share and develop other work out there – we list other productions as well as our own on our Live Events page.

There is also a host of additional material, and early access stuff, on our patreon feed – you can pop in as a free subscriber, or contribute for different releases at different tiers of support.

On YouTube you will generally find…

Our YouTube channel holds most of our Exploring sessions, put into playlists for different plays, playwrights and playing companies (though these are still a bit rough). The regular podcast is also available on the platform, just to confuse you.

Patreon Exclusives

Our patreon feed is mostly where we share material early to those who pay the bills, but on Mondays, monthly, and probably other times, we release exclusive material – Mondays (£5 tier) are usually explorations and readings of literature from the period, including (at time of update, releases will change over time): Jest Books (Tarlton, Peele, Merry Tales, Skelton), A Mirror for Magistrates (historic poetry), Cony-Catching pamphlets (crime), and more. Monthly exclusives (£1 tier) are usually rehearsals and bonus material from our live shows, or similar. There is also a free subscriber tier, who receive some early access material and monthly updates, but as of yet no regular bonus material. Additional exclusive and video content is planned for £10+ tiers.

Getting Around

Obviously, this is all A LOT. And navigating A LOT is tricky.

If you’re looking for a play, then most plays can be found via our Timelines menu, which includes details of plays, place in rough chronological order. We are working on other indexing forms, and other routes into the text.

If you’re looking for a playwright, there are some featured authors in the menu, but this is still fairly patchy. We are working on it.

If you’re looking to browse by genre, again, that’s something we’re lining up now. Hopefully there will be genre menus soon, both ancient and modern.

If you have something specific that you’re looking for, then sometimes the easiest way to find something we have done is just use an online search engine, with the title of what you want and Beyond Shakespeare in the search. We might build a better search function into this website in the future, but for the moment the internet at large will do the job for us. We do it all the time, and we run the website!