Shakespeare, the Earls of Derby and the North West

Knowsley is the 2022 Merseyside Borough of Culture, the highlight of the year being the opening of the exciting new £33 million Shakespeare North Playhouse in the heart of the old market town of Prescot, reviving the original late Elizabethan and early Jacobean playhouse. It will be a striking modern structure designed by Nicholas Helm of Helm Architecture and incorporating an octagonal wooden replica of the Cockpit-at-Court theatre once housed in the long-destroyed Whitehall Palace.

The original Prescot playhouse would have been constructed with the approval of the Stewards of the town, the theatre-loving Earls of Derby, who lived nearby at Knowsley Hall, where the 4th to 7th Earls entertained the leading acting companies of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Also performing at Knowsley Hall were Derby’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men, the prominent avant-garde company of actors under the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, later 5th Earl of Derby. William Shakespeare was closely connected with Lord Strange’s Players and this talk drew out the many connections between the Stanley family and Shakespearean performance culture in the North West.

Dr Stephen Lloyd is the Curator of the Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall where he also looks after the library and the archive. He was previously Senior Curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (National Galleries of Scotland) in Edinburgh.