06/03/2026
Tonight at 6:00 PM on Zoom! Join Professor Philip Weinstein, former Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore University, for Session Three of Shakespearean Explorations, a four-part literary lecture series focused on two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear. Register here: https://forms.gle/mKuY6tbyqw36XafV9
Lectures are held via Zoom, from 6:00-7:00 pm on alternate Wednesday evenings in May and June as follows:
Session 1: Wednesday, May 6th, at 6:00 PM – Hamlet, Parts I - III
Session 2: Wednesday, May 20th, at 6:00 PM – Hamlet, entire play
Session 3: Wednesday, June 3rd, at 6:00 PM – King Lear, Parts I - III
Session 4: Wednesday, June 17th, at 6:00 PM – King Lear, entire play
All of us have come into contact with Shakespeare’s plays at some point in our lives—in high school, in college, on our own, and at theaters all over the world that continue to put on his plays. For none of us is he an unknown quantity. Yet there is no point in denying that his plays make considerable demands: over 400 years old, they are written in an early modern English that differs profoundly from contemporary usage, and they typically proceed by way of the poetic form we call “blank verse”: 10-syllable lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. These lines can be dense, even tortuous, but they also rise, recurrently, unexpectedly, to levels of sublimity found nowhere else. We do need the footnotes and the glosses. Yet, as one of Shakespeare’s first-rate critics (Stephen Greenblatt) puts it, his blank verse is “like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are”—that is, how we might speak if we were gods.
Click here for more information: https://vhpl.blogspot.com/2026/03/shakespearean-explorations-hamlet-king.html
