Shakespeare's Globe Announces Its 2007 Theatre Season

The three Shakespeare plays this season are all explorations of the promise and problems of his own moment, the late Renaissance. Othello and The Merchant of Venice are largely set in Venice – a city where East met West and where wealth and romance concealed commercialism and prejudice. Love’s Labour's Lost, is set in Navarre, where all the exuberance of young people in love with the world, each other, and the language they use to celebrate life, pours out unimpeded.

The three new plays celebrate tipping-points in history. They are reviving their great hit of last summer, Howard Brenton’s In Extremis, a love story about Abelard and Heloise. Jack Shepherd has written Holding Fire! for the Globe, an account of the Chartist movement, and a vivid, picturesque journey through early Victorian England. The third new play, We The People, recreates the moment in Philadelphia in 1787, when 50 men sat down over a long, hot summer, and wrote down what the United States could and should be.