A celebration in two parts of the 400th anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare's collected works.

Lecture: "Shakespeare's First Folio: Opening the Time Capsule" presented by Professor Laurie Johnson

In 2023, the world celebrates 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s collected plays in the First Folio. For this memorial lecture, Laurie will take the audience back to that moment when this remarkable book first appeared, to consider what the Folio can tell us about the time before its appearance. After all, Shakespeare had already been seven years in the grave when the Folio became available, so we inevitably view it as a time capsule as much as we see it as the product of his living imagination. Yet we can go further, to find evidence in the Folio of the players and audiences who populated the playhouses of his age. Like a time capsule, the Folio need not be frozen in time but can be used to bring many people’s pasts to life.

Book Launch: Please join us after the lecture (6pm) in the Bevery Room to launch a new series of books, presenting the Shakespeare Memorial Lectures of the last three years. By John Bell (2020), Janine Watson (2021), and Kate Gaul (2022). Copies will be on sale.

Laurie Johnson is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland and has been President of ANZSA (Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association) since 2016. His expertise in the study of Shakespeare’s plays and in the history of the Shakespearean playhouses and playing companies has been recognised with election as Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023, and he is an academic consultant on the development of the Museum of Shakespeare on the site of the Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London. His books include Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts (Routledge, 2018) and The Tain of Hamlet (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), and edited collections Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (with John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble, Routledge, 2014) and Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (with Darryl Chalk, Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Professor Johnson’s next book will be Leicester’s Men and Their Plays: An Early Elizabethan Playing Company and its Legacy, forthcoming in 2023 with Cambridge University Press.

Presented in collaboration with the Chau Chak Wing Museum.

The lecture will take place in the Photography and the Performative Gallery, Level 1 of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

The book launch will take place in the Bevery Room of the Courtyard Restaurant on Science Road, University of Sydney.

This event will not be streamed live, but will be recorded and posted after the event to the YouTube channel of the CREATE Centre.

While on campus, you can drop into the Fisher Library to see the exhibition of the University's copies of pages from Shakespeare's First Folio.

Shakespeare Memorial Lecture book series

Contact the host of Shakespeare Memorial Lecture

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