The Newberry Library (Venue Partner)
60 W Walton St
312.943.9090
This event has passed.
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- When
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Wednesday May 5, 2010 (6–7:30pm)
- Where
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Directions: The Newberry Library is located at 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL, directly across from Chicago’s famed Washington Square Park and just a few blocks west of Michigan Avenue.
- Price
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“James Shapiro is both a Shakespeare scholar and a deft cultural historian working on bigger questions than literary meaning — or, in this case, whodunit, as he intervenes on the perennial debate of who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Shapiro has examined the cultural and historical context for anti-Semitism in Renaissance England (Shakespeare and the Jews) and performed a close reading of four plays' historical and personal context in A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. Contested Will focuses as much on why people continue to be drawn to the authorship question as the detective work itself that he and others undertake in a field that continues to be riddled with classism, forgeries, and in Shapiro's words, "endless trench warfare."”
Monica Westin, Flavorpill
Meet James Shapiro, Columbia University, author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Professor Shapiro is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize for best book on sixteenth-century literature; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the Theatre Book Prize as well as the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, awarded to the best nonfiction book published in the UK. He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry. He has taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library.
