Event Date: 10 December 2015
Rose Theatre,
24-26 High Street,
Kingston, KT1 1HL

 

The Kingston Shakespeare Seminar

The Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (KiSS) brings leading Shakespeare scholars to the Rose, which the director Peter Hall created to be a “teaching theatre”. Here Sir Peter directed Dame Judi Dench in a celebrated production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Trevor Nunn staged the Barton / Hall ‘Wars of the Roses’. But KiSS also commemorates Kingston’s historic connection with Shakespeare, which goes back to David Garrick – who lived here, and built the beautiful Shakespeare Temple beside the Thames – and to the very first royal performances of some of his greatest plays in the Great Hall at Hampton Court.

Professor Jeffrey Knapp (Berkeley) – Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons

Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at UC Berkeley. He received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. Knapp has published three books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002); and Shakespeare Only (2009).  Knapp recently completed his fourth book, Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood, which is his first on film as well as literature and theater.

Introduction by Professor Richard Wilson (Kingston):

Talk:

Questions: