Shakespeare and His World: Recent Episodes
The Huntington
One of the Library’s most prized works is the first folio edition of William Shakespeare’s collected plays, published in 1623, seven years after his death. The First Folio contains 36 plays, 18 of them printed for the first time. This “authorized version,” prepared by his friends and colleagues from “true originall copies,” is the prime source of our knowledge of Shakespeare’s texts. An artist with remarkable intellect, perceptiveness, and poetic power, Shakespeare applied his keen mind and genius to portray the conflicts and emotions of human beings. Each year, The Huntington hosts scholars using the collections to conduct research on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. In lectures, conferences, and seminars, they explore Shakespeare and his world.
Bradin Cormack explores various plays—including “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra”—in which Shakespeare approaches the problem of characterization by analyzing the basic shape of action itself. Cormack is the author of “A Power to Do Justice” and co-editor of “Shakespeare and the Law.” He is professor of English at Princeton University. His talk was the 2013–14 Ridge Lecture at The Huntington.
David Schalkwyk, former director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and author of “Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare,” speaks about the copy of “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” that was secretly circulated, annotated, and signed by Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on Robben Island, the notorious apartheid prison. Schalkwyk is now director of Global Shakespeare, a new partnership between Queen Mary, University of London, and The University of Warwick.
Bruce Smith, the Dean’s Professor of English at the University of Southern California, spoke at the conference titled “Ingenius Acts: The Nature of Invention in Early Modern Europe,” held at The Huntington in April 2011 and sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
History is usually seen as a grand narrative across nations and across time; for Shakespeare it was individualized, the story of characters inscribed onto lives. Peter Holland, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, examines how our stories about Shakespeare's own life offer a new perspective on Shakespeare's histories.
Emma Smith, of University of Oxford, spoke at the conference titled “Representing Politics on the Shakespearean Stage,” held at The Huntington in September 2009.
Jean Howard spoke at the conference titled “Representing Politics on the Shakespearean Stage,” held at The Huntington in September 2009. She is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.