1. Shakespeare and Roman History

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module we ask the question: Why did Shakespeare write about Roman history? What was it about this two-thousand year old civilization that interested him and his audience?

Course

In this course, we explore several aspects of Antony and Cleopatra. We begin by thinking about why Shakespeare was interested in writing plays that were set in Ancient Rome, before looking at a number of aspects of the play and its performance. In particular, we explore the play’s wide scope in both space and time, the roles of Antony and Cleopatra themselves, and the ‘divided catastrophe’ at the end of the play.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.