Breaking a 400-year-old Glass Ceiling

The Guardian reports that after 400 years a female playwright will finally have a work staged at what is now Shakespeare's Globe theatre.

The play is Bedlam by Nell Leyshon, and is a fictional portrait of the Bethlem – the London hospital for the insane – set during the mid-18th century gin epidemic.

Leyshon said it was a "great privilege" to be the first woman to have a play staged at the Globe. "It's a challenge and I'm quite aware of the fact," she said. "I have to be honest, it fed my writing; I thought I can't write a flabby play. I wanted to prove that women can do conflict, that they can write big structures, big stories because I've heard it too many times that women aren't as good at that."