At more than 500 years old, the Birnam Oak is the oldest living tree of the Birnam Wood that appears at the climax of Shakespeare’s Macbeth – and the focal point of Dr Toria Johnson’s ambitious, IAA-funded research that began in November 2023.
Working with the Dunkeld Community Archive and Chapter House Museum, Birnam Arts and a range of community partners in Perthshire, Dr Johnson is working to co-create a dedicated Macbeth and Birnam Oak heritage trail in Dunkeld and Birnam, along the banks of the River Tay. In May 2024, she’ll return to Birnam with theatre and education practitioners to run workshops at the Living History Festival.
As part of the project, Dr Johnson has also secured funding to cultivate seedlings from the acorns of the Birnam Oak, which she then plans to give to arts, environmental, educational and community groups across the UK to plant, ensuring the future legacy of the famous tree through a new, 21st-century movement of the Birnam Wood. She has been interviewed about the project on BBC Radio Scotland, and will be at the Birnam Book Festival in October 2024 to deliver a public lecture: The Tayside Shakespeare: Uncovering Macbeth’s Scotland.
“In research terms I’m interested in the Birnam Oak as a cultural symbol that has captured the imagination of local and global communities alike. This site really invites us to consider how, through the country’s extensive network of Macbeth sites, Shakespeare might be seen to have a role in shaping Scotland’s national identity,” says Dr Johnson. “But the seedlings project has turned me into a self-confessed tree obsessive! Given the recent felling of the iconic tree at Sycamore Gap, there’s never been a more pressing time to confront the precarity – and centrality – of trees in our culture and identity.”
Dr Toria Johnson
Assistant Professor in Early Modern Literature
Toria teaches across the late medieval, early modern, and Restoration periods. Her research focuses on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern subjectivity, and the history of emotions.
Toria's profile