Sold my soul to the devil for this Pie(r)ce of paper
In this piece Eleanor and fellow-performer Alice Connolly take on the 1590s author Thomas Nashe and his angry, misogynistic, xenophobic, ableist and classist persona, Pierce Penniless.
Thomas Nashe was an influential sixteenth-century author who is little known today.
His satirical works mock the pretensions and hypocrisies of his age. They reveal a darker, more anxious side to the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth I: one where university graduates like Nashe had to scrabble to find money for food and rent, where job opportunities were scarce and where ‘trickle-down’ economics weren’t working.
In this performance, Eleanor May Blackburn and Alice Connolly explore the resonances between Nashe’s anxious age and our own, taking on Nashe’s angry, misogynistic, xenophobic, ableist, and classist persona, ‘Pierce Penniless’.
The project is a collaboration with Proffessor Cathy Shrank (School of English, University of Sheffield) and grows out of work that she has been doing for the forthcoming edition of Nashe’s works, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Read more about the Nashe Project, and its spin-off, Penniless? at https://research.ncl.ac.uk/thethomasnasheproject/thomasnashe.
This performance features adult content.
Credits
Academic Lead
- Cathy Shrank, Faculty Director of One University Strategy Delivery at the University of Sheffield
Creative Partners
- Eleanor May Blackburn, Performance Artist
- Alice Connolly, Performance Artist
