Shakespeare Globe

Talks and Lectures

Contested Will

Wednesday 24 March

James Shapiro, author of the bestselling and prizewinning 1599, talks about his new book Contested Will - the definitive investigation into who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi).

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.

Contested Will will be published by Faber from 1 April 2010. £20.

Time: 6pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £10 (£8 FoSG/concs/student) includes a glass of wine/juice

Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture

A Kind of Character in thy Life: Shakespeare and the Character of History
By Professor Peter Holland
Thursday 24 June

Professor Peter Holland from the University of Notre Dame gives the 2010 Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture.

When the Duke in Measure for Measure tells Angelo that he has ‘a kind of character in thy life’, he links it to history: ‘to th'observer [it] doth thy history / Fully unfold’. If for us history is the grand narrative across nations and across time, for Shakespeare it was individualised, the story of characters inscribed onto and through lives.

Shakespeare’s own life, the History of William Shakespeare, and the ways in which we have told and retold that history might offer a new perspective through which the modes in which Shakespeare’s histories tell their very different stories can be rethought.

The annual Sam Wanamaker Lecture was founded in 1995. Each year, a leading Shakespeare scholar is invited to give a public talk to complement the work at the Globe. Professor Holland’s lecture will complement the Kings & Rogues plays chosen for the 2010 Globe Theatre season.

Time: 6pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £12 (£10 FoSG/concs/students) includes a glass of wine

Perspective: Anne Boleyn

Thursday 12 August

Playwright Howard Brenton and members of the creative team discuss the process and staging of his play celebrating the great English heroine Anne Boleyn.
More on the 2010 Theatre Season production of Anne Boleyn »

Time: 6pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £8 (£5 FoSG/concs/students)

Perspective: Macbeth

The Missing Scenes and the Added Scenes
Wednesday 8 September

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in about 1606. The play is known to have been produced after Shakespeare’s retirement, at which time several unauthorised changes were made. The play was not printed until 1623, and when it was, the published version was not the play as Shakespeare left it. A number of scenes as well as songs had been inserted by hands other than Shakespeare. But even with the added items, Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and this suggests that several scenes were either deleted or lost.

John Wolfson’s annual talk at Shakespeare’s Globe is always a highlight in the summer events calendar. This year he will examine the surviving text of Macbeth and as always will be supported by two Globe actors.
More on the 2010 Theatre Season production of Macbeth »

Time: 6pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £8 (£5 FoSG/concs/students)

Perspective: Bedlam

Thursday 16 September

Playwright Nell Leyshon joins a public panel discussion to explore the writing and staging of her drama set in eighteenth century London and inspired by Bethlem Hospital.
More on the 2010 Theatre Season production of Bedlam »

Time: 6pm
Venue: Nancy W Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets: £8 (£5 FoSG/concs/students)

Back to Top

---