Please note the correct 11:00 AM start time!

If the original shout came from a Plutarch translation, a British chronicler, or a rival playwright, William Shakespeare’s echo is louder. Proof? Imitating his contemporaries, we flock to his plays on or off Broadway. Playwrights then as now competed intensely, writing about 36 new plays a year for the nine open-air theaters built in Shakespeare’s lifetime. A weekly audience of 15,000 paid at least one penny to enter the theater, tuppence for a seat, and, in winter, six for a roofed theater’s warmth and candlelight. His troupe could expect two plays a year from Shakespeare. With no New York Society Library to rely on (no New York, for that matter), where did he read his material? Books were expensive. At a St. Paul’s bookseller’s he could buy a rival’s play. An aristo might offer him Jonson’s latest manuscript. Was it his memory only of Grammar School Latin texts, of Ovid, Plautus, and Julius Caesar, which sparked his invention?

Checking out sources for his Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Lear, his Falstaff, Juliet, and Bottom, his Kate, Petruchio, and Prospero, allows us to speculate about why and how he competes with his sources. Remember—we don’t have his library card.

A reading list will be provided to registrants, and the books for discussion are available for purchase from the Library.

This seminar meets Thursdays
October 6,
November 10,
and December 8.

Click here for registration instructions.