Ambition should be made of sterner stuff …

Further details have been announced of the RSC and Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning's January Conference in London, titled ‘Towards a Creative Curriculum’. Intended for teachers and arts education professionals working with young people up to Key Stage 3, the 10 January full-day conference costs £90 to attend and sets out to help teachers to develop a curriculum that successfully embeds the arts within the new Ofsted framework.

The conference's lineup of speakers promises ‘practising teachers and senior leaders from a wide cross section of schools who have successfully driven whole school improvement through a commitment to arts and cultural learning. Their practical examples will explore intent, implementation and impact, clearly demonstrating how arts and cultural learning deepens pupil engagement and improves outcomes.‘

Speakers will include Professor Jonothan Neelands, Andria Zafi rakou and Bob and Roberta Smith.

To book a place, call the RSC Education Ticket Hotline on 01789 403434. www.rsc.org.uk/education/teacher-professional-development/towards-a-creative-curriculum

How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties …

No Bardwatching is complete without a report on a recent piece of academic research which shines a new light on some Shakespeare mystery. This issue it's Petr Plecháč of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who's used Artificial Intelligence to work out how much of Henry VIII was written by the Bard himself, and how much by the second author generally supposed to be John Fletcher – known co-writer of The Two Noble Kinsmen.

In his paper, ‘Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An Analysis Based on Most Frequent Words and Most Frequent Rhythmic Patterns', Plecháč explains how he trained a machine learning algorithm to recognise the styles of the two authors. He claims that the machine has therefore been able to show how much of each scene was penned by which playwright. To test it against other possible authors, Philip Massinger's style was also taught to the algorithm but it found no evidence of his having written any of the play.

Fletcher continued to work with the King's Men after Shakespeare's death, and has long been assumed to be the co-author of Henry VIII, one of the Bard's latest plays, so really the AI is only making the same observations made by ‘real’ human intelligences for centuries, but it's fun to see technology being applied in this way to ‘prove’ scholars correct. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05652

He'll remember with advantages what feats he did …

Adam Matthew Digital has announced a forthcoming collaboration with the RSC which will see the publishers digitising key items in the theatre company's archive and making them available globally to the academic community. Slated for launch in Spring 2021, the project is at the moment only in its earliest stages, but plans to include almost the whole prompt book collection in the RSC archive, which publisher Claudine Nightingale has said ‘will offer great insight into each of the RSC productions from the earliest days up to 2012.’

‘We're then pairing this with over 50 case studies,’ Nightingale continues, ‘focusing on key productions in the RSC's history. This will provide users with the prompt book, costume bibles, music folders, and production notes for each (where they are available). There will be great opportunities for comparison of different productions of the same play (especially Shakespeare), and a rare insight into how the productions were put together by the creative team.’

This is the second such collaboration Adam Matthew has undertaken, with the first making a host of productions from the Globe Theatre performance archive digitally available. Bardwatching will of course report as more details emerge. www.amdigital.co.uk

I must be belee'd and calmed by debitor and creditor …

It has emerged that the collapse of the company behind the pop-up Shakespeare's Rose Theatre and liquidation of its assets has generated £378,000 in claims from creditors including caterers and actors.

The theatre ran for a successful summer season in 2018 in a car park in York, and a disastrous pair of twin seasons in York and at Blenheim Palace this summer, with an international tour planned for the end of the run which was cancelled at short notice when it became clear that ‘unsustainable losses' were being suffered.

While the producers, Lunchbox Theatrical Productions, blamed Brexit for a lack of audience takeup, anecdotal evidence suggests that ill thought-through ticket pricing and poor planning was at fault for what has become an embarrassing and costly debacle.