Reading Shakespeare’s plays aloud offers not only a communal way to enjoy these great works but also promotes a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s poetry and wordplay. No acting experience is required to participate — just bring a copy of the play we’re reading…and your voice!
This course will consider four plays that foreground issues of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Tempest. We will discuss these plays in terms of their historical context, performance history, reception, popular adaptations, and continued resonances with debates about identity, difference, power, and intimacy. In addition, we will see the Lantern Theater Company’s production of Measure for Measure on April 14.
Additional information coming soon!
Director Kittson O’Neill works with members of the cast to explore a scene from their new production of Moby-Dick. Music, movement, and the magic of found objects are all essential to this very theatrical exploration of one of the greatest stories ever told.
Get up close and personal with Bram Stoker’s handwritten notes (character and chapter outlines, chronologies, and more!) for Dracula as Rosenbach staff explore what it takes to create an enduring monster.
Female novelists of the 19th and 18th centuries traveled different routes to find readership for their work. Some used male or deliberately ambiguous pseudonyms; others published anonymously before claiming their creations. Through early editions and manuscripts of Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Elliot, we will explore the ingenuity these immortal writers used to bring their masterpieces before the public.
The Bibliococktails series celebrates great literature and great libations.
Adam Gopnik is a celebrated New Yorker writer. This conversation will be on his love for John Updike’s works. Books will be available for purchase from Shakespeare & Co., Booksellers.
The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore early mystery stories, examine an original cypher belonging to a female Civil War spy, and exercise your sleuthing skills to detect a forgery.
Join us for a conversation with Ernest Hilbert about his new book of poems, Last One Out. This new volume traces the poet’s life from childhood memories of his father, both elegiac and nostalgic, to poems of celebration on the birth of his own son. Along the way, myth and history mingle with private reminiscences, drawing the reader from the haunted halls of the Chelsea Hotel to tank-littered Sinai battlefields, the tough streets of Philadelphia to the siege of Leningrad, as he dines with representatives from Vatican Museum, rows in the Oxford dawn, and scales retreating glaciers.