Evelyn Wrench Speaker Program
Paul Edmondson, Ph.D
Evelyn Wrench Speaker Program
Region VIII, 2015-2016
Paul Edmondson, Ph.D.
Head of Research and Knowledge, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Shakespeare at 400: Why?
The year 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. In this lecture, Paul Edmondson, Head of Research and Knowledge at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, and a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will present his own personally inflected overview of why and how Shakespeare has become mightily prevalent in our world culture. He will also outline the ways The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is marking this very special Shakespearian year, not least by representing the site of Shakespeare's family home, New Place, in the heart of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Paul Edmondson, Ph.D, is Head of Research and Knowledge at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. After graduating from the University of Durham, he did his post-graduate work at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He is Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival and General Editor of Blogging Shakespeare. His numerous publications include Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life, and Shakespeare's Sonnets. He has co-edited Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy and A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival. He is co-series editor for Palgrave Macmillan's Shakespeare Handbooks, and co-supervisory editor of the Penguin Shakespeare.
He has taken up a number of poetic commissions for 2016, including a Shakespeare song cycle, the anthem for the Shakespeare Sunday service, and has produced a Shakespeare-themed libretto based on the final moments of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. His new publications include Shakespeare: Ideas in Profile (Profile Books, 2015); The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Finding Shakespeare's New Place: An Archaeological Biography (Manchester University Press, 2016); 1616: Shakespeare and Tan Xiang Zu's China (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Shakespeare's Creative Legacies (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is an Honorary Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute, and of The Society for Teachers of Speech and Drama. He is a trustee of The Rose Theatre Trust and Chair of The Hosking Houses Trust for women writers. He has lectured widely in Europe and the United States, and in 2014 undertook an epic road-trip of 10,000 miles, visiting 14 North American Shakespeare festivals in partnership with the University of Warwick and Misfit, Inc. (www.shakespeareontheroad.com). Dr. Edmondson also has a degree in Theology and is an Associate Minister in The Church of England at St Andrew's Church, Shottery (near Stratford-upon-Avon).