Shakespeare Forever

The date of this Round Table is not a coincidence: William Shakespeare was born on or about April 23, 1564, and he died on April 23, 1616. This is a particularly auspicious year for celebrating Shakespeare: 2023 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected printing of Shakespeare’s plays and one of the most important books in all of English literature.

Shakespeare’s works remain as compelling as ever, and they are being envisioned in both traditional and often astonishingly new ways. In Boston, Chicago, Idaho, Kentucky, Lake Tahoe, Oregon, New York City and beyond, regional companies are gearing up for their annual sell-out summer Shakespeare festivals. The books and articles keep coming, and there is no end, it seems, to the new and different ways in which the Bard can be perceived: “All of Shakespeare’s Plays Are About Race,” declared a recent article in The Atlantic.

Picture: https://www.nypl.org/events/tours/audio-guides/treasures-audio-guide/item/4101

Participants

Carl Cofield

Chair of Graduate Acting, New York University

Carl Cofield is the Chair of Graduate Acting at New York University. He was appointed Associate Artistic Director of the Off-Broadway award winning Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2018. For CTH he has directed: Seize the King (New York Times Critic’s Pick) The Bacchae ****(New York Times Critic’s Pick), Antigone, Macbeth, The Tempest and Dutchman.... read more! »

Jeff Dolven

Poet
Professor | Acting Chair, Princeton University

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. He has an abiding interest in the relations among reading, writing, teaching, and learning—especially the way readers become writers, as a contemporary and a historical question. He is the author of three books of criticism: Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), a study of what poets of... read more! »

David Scott Kastan

George M. Bodman Emeritus Professor, English at Yale University

David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Emeritus Professor of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. He has served as one of the General Editors of the Arden Shakespeare, the co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare, and the series editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. He... read more! »

Rhodri Lewis

Professor, English & Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Rhodri Lewis was for many years Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and is now Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer (with Rank of Professor) at Princeton University. He has interests in literary, cultural, and intellectual history from about 1500 to the present day, but has tended to concentrate on the first three centuries... read more! »

Sophie McIntosh

Playwright
Co-founder, Good Apples Collective

Sophie McIntosh is a New York–based playwright and the co-founder of Good Apples Collective, a developmental orchard for new theatrical works that she leads alongside director Nina Goodheart. Her writing celebrates queer communities, gives voice to women’s experiences, and lovingly riffs on the cynical sincerity of young adults. Recent productions of Sophie’s work include the... read more! »

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