Look About You

First performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, Look About You was a response to Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood plays. Here, the focus is on King Henry II’s court, where the princes and one of their page-boys, Robert Hood, are embroiled in factional disputes.

This summer, Read Not Dead celebrates the greatest outlaw hero in English history.

Robin Hood appears in six plays in the early modern period: Edward I by George Peele, two plays by Anthony Munday which include Maid Marian and a lecherous King John, Robert Greene’s George A Greene, first performed at the Rose Playhouse in 1593 and Look About You, in which Henry II appears. Ben Jonson’s unfinished, experimental and last play, The Sad Shepherd, or, A Tale of Robin Hood, set in Sherwood Forest, features Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet.

Instinctive, adrenalin-filled and inventive, the Read Not Dead ground rules are simple. Actors rehearse the play on a Sunday morning and present it, script-in-hand, to an audience later that afternoon. The Read Not Dead series is dedicated to reviving plays from the early modern period.