Shakespeare scholars to give two lectures in UCC
Dr Paul Edmondson (left) and Professor Stanley Wells.
Dr Paul Edmondson (left) and Professor Stanley Wells.
Two leading Shakespeare scholars from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, will deliver two lectures at UCC next Thursday, 22 March.
Professor Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson will give a lecture on ‘Shakespeare Bites Back’ at 12 noon in West Wing 5. Provoked in part by Roland Emmerich’s film ‘Anonymous’ (2011), Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson are leading an ambitious and vigorous campaign on behalf of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in defence of Shakespeare’s authorship of his works. In this entertaining and informative presentation they will discuss the rise of the phenomenon of anti-Shakespearianism, demonstrate its fallacies, and propose some strategies to counter it.
At 6pm on Thursday the two scholars will discuss ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Senses’ in Boole Auditorium 3. Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most famous love poems in the English language. Described even before they were published as ‘his sugared sonnets among his private friends’, they drew heavily and alluringly on the language of the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. In this talk Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells discuss the sensuality of Shakespeare’s sonnets, illustrating their remarks with live and recorded readings—and a few surprises.
Professor Stanley Wells, CBE, and Dr Paul Edmondson are internationally known and popular public speakers and scholars of Shakespeare. They have co-authored and co-edited a number of publications, most notably the highly acclaimed Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford UP, 2004); they have lectured widely in Europe andNorth America and have made numerous media appearances.
In his long and rich career as a Shakespeare scholar and editor of Shakespeare’s works, Stanley Wells, currently Honorary President of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, was Director of The Shakespeare Institute at The University of Birmingham (1978-1997); General Editor of The Oxford Shakespeare and Director of the Shakespeare Department of Oxford University Press; Past Editor of the world-renown journal of Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge UP); Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; President of the International Shakespeare Association; Governor, then Vice-Chairman, and now a new Honorary Governor Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He is the General Editor of the New Penguin Shakespeare. Professor Wells has an extensive record of publications, mostly concerned with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A selection of his single-authored, edited books, and critical editions include Literature and Drama (1970), Shakespeare: The Writer and His Work (1978), Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (1984), Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling (with G. Taylor, 1979), Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life (1994; published in the USA by Norton as Shakespeare: A Life in Drama, 1997), Shakespeare: For All Time (2003), Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare, Sex and Love (2010), Shakespeare and Co (2007), English Drama Excluding Shakespeare (1975), a five-volume collection of Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesque (1977). He’s the General Editor of The Complete Oxford Shakespeare (modern and old-spelling editions, 1986, 2nd ed. 2010), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1985), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1986), William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (with G. Taylor, 1979), An Oxford Anthology of Shakespeare (1987), Shakespeare and the Moving Image (1994), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with M. Dobson, 2011), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in the Theatre (with S. Stanton, 2002). He has also edited a number of plays in The Oxford Shakespeare, The Penguin Shakespeare, and other single-text editions of Shakespeare.
Paul Edmondson is Director of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and former Director of the Education Department at the Trust. In addition to co-authoring numerous publications with Wells, Edmondson is the sole author of Twelfth Night (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005 ) and of numerous articles in leading journals and collections concerned with Shakespeare and the drama and poetry of his world.