August 19, 2008
Professor Ann Thompson, Head of the School of Humanities at King’s College London and a general editor for the Arden Shakespeare, will present the 2008 Julia Briggs Memorial Lecture. The lecture, entitled Staging Shakespeare’s Plays at the Globe: Then and Now, will be given 6 September at King’s College London.
Most recently, Thompson edited [...]
Globe Education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London will host a major conference this October to mark the 400th anniversary of the re-acquisition of the Blackfriars Playhouse by Shakespeare’s theatre company, The King’s men. The event is being organized in partnership with the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. The center is home to a full-scale, working replica of the Blackfriars Theatre. The conference, titled Outside In / Inside Out: Shakespeare, the Globe and the Blackfriars, will bring together Shakespearean scholars and theatre practitioners to consider plays that were written for outdoors theatres that transferred to indoor theatres and vice versa.
It’s just a coincidence that the new Arden edition of “Timon of Athens” is being released at the same time that the Globe Theatre in London is premiering a major new production of the play. But both make the case that Timon, one of Shakespeare’s least read and least performed plays, still has something to offer to 21st century audiences. The latest Arden edition of “Timon of Athens,” was edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. In the opening pages of the volume, they warn readers, “Timon of Athens is a peculiar and to some an unpalatable play.”
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The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS) has issued a call for papers for four sessions to be held at the International Medieval Congress on the weekend of May 7-10, 2009 at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
The congress is an annual gathering of over 3,000 medieval studies scholars in. It features over 600 paper [...]
Four years ago, linguist David Crystal and his actor son Ben Crystal created a subscription website to accompany and expand upon their Shakespeare glossary, “Shakespeare’s Words.” Because of space limitations, the book was able to include no more than six quotations from the plays/poems to illustrate each of the words and senses contained in the [...]
The Guardian has published an obituary of Richard Helgerson, one of the world’s leading authorities on Renaissance literature and culture. Helgerson died on April 26, 2008 at the age of 67 following a long battle with of pancreatic cancer.
Helgerson was a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had taught since 1970. He was the author [...]
The British Shakespeare Association (BSA) is currently accepting nominations for ten elected trustee positions. All current members of the BSA Board of Trustees are retiring this year in accordance with the association’s rules. The BSA was formed in 2002 to educate, promote, and foster a better understanding of Shakespeare and his works in the United [...]
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has announced that historian Andrew Gurr will receive the theatre company’s 2008 Sam Wanamaker Award. Gurr is one world’s leading authorities on Elizabethan theatre. His historical research on the original Globe Theatre helped to determine the dimensions and shape of the modern Globe reconstruction.
Patrick Spottiswoode, Director of Globe Education, [...]
Dr. Robert Bearman, archivist for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has been named to the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Dr. Bearman is being honored for his services to heritage. Source: Coventry Telegraph
The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies in Chicago, Illinois recently announced that it has received a $775,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a series of eight vernacular paleography institutes. The institutes will train scholars and graduate students from various academic disciplines to read handwriting from the late medieval period through [...]
