On the evening of January 28^th, 2026, English professors Andrew Loeb and Stephen Brown turned Sadleir House’s John into their very own perverse Globe Theatre for their 24^th annual Shakespeare Pub Night.

Brown started this event in 2003 as an offshoot of the Champlain drag show, where students would perform in drag as Shakespeare characters, keeping in line with the Shakespearean crossdressing tradition. Since Loeb’s arrival at Trent in 2017, the pair have collaborated in satirizing Shakespeare, taking Shakespeare Night as an opportunity to make out for an audience and ask (in Brown’s words) “how far [they can] go to get the administration’s attention (negatively)?”

“It’s always different [every year],” Brown explained. “The trick has always been [to] take the single most important English language author and probably the most important playwright in any language and do what he wanted [us] to do—play.”

Loeb emphasized this point, telling Arthur that “it’s an exciting opportunity to get people to be silly with Shakespeare. We spend a lot of time asking them serious questions about it and this is where we can do what plays do best, which is to have fun.”
This year’s Shakespeare Night featured musical acts by Willow Hanlon, Georgia Dunning, Sadye Middleton, and Georgia Strain-Niziolek, including a rendition of a Shakespearean ballad, covers of Hozier and Adele, and an original song. 

Theatrical odes to the Bard ranged from a satirical play on Hamlet’s fragile masculinity by Jewelle Robbins, Skye Stewart, and Kyle Storr-Stronach to two crossdressing-centric acts by Chlöe Gibbon and Lily Prime, and Arden Robertson-Payne and Jones Payne, respectively.

The night featured a variety of other incredible performances by Mason Perkins, Meaghan MacNeill, Kass Franceschini, and Kade Loertz.

“For me, it’s an extraordinary thing to know that we can, by making a few email gags and sending around a poster, get eighty people into a room to have a good laugh at Shakespeare together, to satirize and play,” Loeb explained. “[It] makes me feel like I’m doing something right at my job that we can get that many people who are inspired and creative with the material that we teach.”

The English professors credit the success of the student showcase to the confidence, acceptance, and complexity of Trent students.

“They’re comfortable with showing themselves … they don’t feel that they have to create an academic persona who writes the essays and gets the As,” Brown told Arthur. “They realize that finding themselves within that is actually the best way to actually believe in the outcomes they get, that their academic achievements confirm who they thought they were as creative, right people.”

“Rather than posturing, which I think goes on in a lot of traditional programs, you learn a persona that will get you where you want to go. Here, there’s more opportunity to bring your own persona to the program and find it accepted.”

The main attraction, however, was Loeb and Brown’s divorce ceremony officiated by Cultural Studies’ Hugh Hodges, who donned his University of Toronto graduation robes to conduct the “unholy disunion” of the English Department’s star-crossed lovers. Their separation didn’t last long, with the recently divorced pair reuniting for a reimagining of A Winter’s Tale before the night’s end.

The event concluded with Brown announcing his upcoming retirement, blaming this choice on both the declining age expectancy of men in Canada and his fear of his wife using his pension on oceanic exploration and threesomes, making it clear that his advertised divorce was not from Loeb, but from Trent.

“Trent is like nothing [else], you really have to hold onto this part of Trent, there’s less of [it] than there used to be,” Brown said in his closing speech. “[It’s] what makes Trent really work. We’ve recently had administrators who take this place and themselves seriously, and the irony has just washed down the Otonabee. More irony, believe me, it’s the only thing that will get you through life. Life is not a tragedy nor a comedy, none of those things really exist outside of [the] novel, but it is profoundly ironic. And what I found at Trent, what a wonderfully ironic community.”

Stephen has invited Trent president Cathy Bruce to join as a special guest for his Shakespeare Pub Night finale in the fall. I will spare you the details of his proposal, but I urge her to check her email inbox come September.