A CO-PRODUCTION BY GREEN SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLISH THEATRE MILAN TWO SISTERS
by Maggie Rose
The play will be performed on Wednesday 18 June and Thursday 19 June at 7.30pm at Tudor Experience, Sheep Street, Stratford upon Avon.
Tickets £8.
For reservations: email Liz Willetts on liz.willetts@btinternet.com or phone 00447957294994
Author’s note.
“Susanna and Judith Shakespeare were two middle-class women, who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon in the 16th and 17th centuries. They married, had children and looked after a home. They led pretty ordinary lives. At the same time, they were the daughters of a man of genius, William Shakespeare. As I wrote my play, Two Sisters, I asked myself what it might have been like to have a father who was enormously creative, who might have allowed you into his world, but on his terms and for only brief periods, before he set off again to London and his work there. The few historical facts that have come down to us about Susanna and Judith and the people they were in contact with – birth, marriage and death certificates, court and church indictments, an epitaph, Shakespeare’s will – suggest their relationship was probably very close, sometimes tender and affectionate, sometimes, conflictual and tense, perhaps even violent. It is this everchanging ‘sisterly bond’, spanning from youth to old age, that I have attempted to unpick in Two Sisters. For narrative purposes I have moved the date of As You Like it, most likely written in 1599 and registered in 1600, to 1606”.
THE CAST
Judith Shakespeare, Rachel Gilmour
Susanna Shakespeare, Catherine Farrell
Writer and director, Maggie Rose
Video, James Willetts
Costumes & props, Liz Willetts
Making Costumes for Two Sisters
By Liz Willetts
Who would have thought aprons could be so interesting? I recently scrolled through 2,327 images of aprons in the Victoria & Albert Museum Archive catalogue online. Most of the items are not on show, and I was only interested in British aprons from around 1550 to 1650, tempting though it was to wander off in the direction of Masonic Regalia and ponder on the purpose of miniscule frilly aprons that signify “French Maid” when worn over a black minidress on the British stage. I wanted to see the kind of aprons Shakespeare’s daughters, Judith and Susanna, would have seen their mother Anne Hathaway, and grandmother Mary Arden, wearing. They might have worn similar aprons themselves when they in turn had a household to run and a family to look after.
My research was a prelude to making costumes for Judith and Susanna in Maggie Rose’s new play, Two Sisters, about to have its premiere in Stratford upon Avon. Well, it turned out to be fascinating.
Aprons are practical items. Form follows function, and from the earliest to the most recent examples, they were almost all (French Maid version apart) worn primarily to protect the wearers’ clothes. Until comparatively recently, and certainly in Shakespeare’s daughters’ time, clothes were made of fabrics, mostly wool or linen, that were costly to buy or replace; cotton was not widely used until the 17th century and later. Wool was difficult to clean and dry if garments got marked or damaged during cooking or other household chores.
But their usefulness was not only to protect a housewife’s clothes. Aprons were no doubt used to dry wet hands, lift hot pans, wipe up spills or gather apples. Or to swish wasps off the fruit and flies off the ham, or to flap at chickens if they strayed into the kitchen. Maybe the corners were used to wipe children’s sticky faces or runny noses if there was nothing else to hand. They were essential items for women with busy domestic lives, and they conjure up a vivid picture of what those lives were like.
Aprons like this were made of whatever material was available, that couldn’t be used for anything else. Garments that were worn in places would be used to make other items, or children’s clothes, until they were good for nothing else but the humble apron. Old bed linen, patched, side-to-middled too many times to do it again, or old worn flour bags or grain sacks could have a little more usefulness squeezed out of them when strings were attached to tie them round the waist.Later – this was one of my digressions – when even quite modest families were able to employ help with the household chores, the lady of the house sometimes wore an embroidered, embellished, decorated apron as a badge of office. It proclaimed to the world that she was a dutiful and competent housewife, but that she didn’t do the rough and dirty work. Supervising and managing the servants were not tasks that risked getting one’s clothes dirty. Some of these middle-class aprons were pretty and beautifully made, but not useful examples for me in my search for plain work-a-day Tudor versions.
Like all garments in Judith and Susanna’s time, aprons would have been sewn by hand. The simplest shape, and quickest, easiest, to make, were simple rectangles with a waistband attached to the middle and long strings to wrap around the waist. Aprons like this, with the top corners flapping free, can be seen in paintings of women engaged in all kinds of tasks. Some were knee length, some longer, perhaps depending on what cast off fabric was available. Or was the length determined by the tasks the wearer was engaged in? Like the paintings that show women with long skirts hitched up and tucked into the waistband of their apron, were they just being practical and preventing everything from trailing in the mud?
Devising and making costumes requires decision making. Whether or not to go for realism, or try to be as authentic as possible within the constraints of budget and practicality everyone has to work with. I remember visiting the Royal Shakespeare Costume workshop years ago, and more recently the wardrobe department at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan when we were working on the Green Shakespeare documentary. Both those professional costume makers often use wonderful traditional fabrics that drape and fold in the way historic garments would have done. Or does the designer opt for symbolism, or an impressionistic fantasy, or modern dress? Suzanne Marshall’s costumes for some of Maggie Rose’s earlier plays have been stunningly imaginative and beautiful, and I so envy (in a good way!) her professionalism and creativity.
I decided to stick with a traditional look and I was very grateful for the images I found on a website called ‘The Tudor Tailor’. Not only did they give their permission for us to use one of their images for our posters and fliers, but Ninya Mikhaila sent a copy of her book (The Tudor Child) to help with designing and making costumes for Judith and Susanna. The decision to make Tudor costumes for Susanna and Judith was a practical one, but also an aesthetic choice. The venue is ‘Tudor World’ in Stratford upon Avon. It’s a little museum and visitor attraction in the heart of town, a stone’s throw from Shakespeare’s birthplace, and New Place that Shakespeare bought and lived in. Records show that the Tudor World buildings date back to the 1500s, when part of it was an ale house that Shakespeare is known to have visited. No doubt the landlady there would have worn an apron, too.
CREATIVE TEAM – BIONOTES
Catherine Farrell (in the role of Susanna Shakespeare) is from the United States where she trained in acting at Drake University. She also holds a Master’s Degree in Shakespeare and Creativity from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford upon Avon. Theater credits include Silent Sky (Harmon Fine Arts), Helen/Cressida (RSC The Other Place), Othello (Harmon Fine Arts), Romeo and Her Juliet (SI Players), Hand to God (Coleman Studio), The Bald Soprano (Harmon Fine Arts), Twelfth Night (SI Players), Henry V (Courtyard Shakespeare).
Rachel Gilmour (in the role of Judith Shakespeare).
Rachel is an actor from Central Scotland. After training at Glasgow’s Acting Coach Scotland, she made her professional debut portraying Sophie Scholl in the play Being Sophie Scholl at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023. Since then, she has worked across Scotland in theatre and film, steadily building a versatile and dynamic portfolio.
Her recent stage credits include the play To The Letter at Glasgow’s renowned Òran Mór, as well as performances in Gateway New Writing Festival at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. On screen, Rachel co-starred in the award-winning short film Before You Leave, which received recognition at the Wolverhampton Film Festival (2025), and recently appeared in a commercial for Hilton Hotels. Rachel continues to refine her craft through ongoing performance work at The London Dungeons.
Maggie Rose (writer of Two Sisters) is a teacher, writer, dramaturg. She held the Chair in British Theatre Studies and Performance at Milan University. Recent publications: “My Green Shakespeares” (Critical Stagesscene critiques, December 2022) and “Sulle tracce delle guaritrici nel Cinquecento e primo Seicento attraverso la lente del teatro shakespeariano” (Nuova Rivista della Storia della Medicina, 2022). Her plays, A Walk in Shakespeare’s Garden, Ophelia, Herb Woman and Caliban’s Castle, which have been performed in Italy and the UK, retell Shakespeare, with a focus on the environment, wellbeing and healing. Play Your Part. Climate Change Theatre (Milano University Press, 2022), a cycle of plays, international research seminars and a video, was inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She co-curated and worked as a dramaturg on TYPUS (Transforming Young People Using Shakespeare), a Creative Europe programme based at Milan’s “Cesare Beccaria” Young Offenders Institution (2022-24). She is a member of the Scottish Society of Playwrights and Chairperson of English Theatre Milan.
James Willetts (video of Two Sisters) is a photographer and film-maker who particularly enjoys filming interesting plays in unusual venues. He has filmed and edited a fifteen-year series of semi-staged productions in the Old Divinity School Theatre at St John’s College, Cambridge. They include plays in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as modern English, French, Italian, and Polish. The Green Shakespeare Project came about after seeing Maggie Rose’s promenade play – A Walk in Shakespeare’s Garden, directed by Donatella Massimilla and performed in the gardens of New Place, Stratford upon Avon, in 2016, and the workshop on the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, led by Stefano Guizzi and Mace Perlman.
Liz Willetts (costume design for Two Sisters) is a writer. She is a regular contributor to The Daily Sparkle, a resource for people with dementia. She is particularly interested in women’s writing from the First World War, and is editing a collection of women’s poetry from that era. She has collaborated on various aspects of the Green Shakespeare documentary, and devised costumes for Maggie Rose’s play Ophelia, Herb Woman, performed at the Teatro Gerolamo, Milan in 2018, as well as for several of the ‘bite-sized Shakespeare’ productions James Willtts filmed in Stratford upon Avon for his YouTube channel.
