The Centre for the Book is very excited to welcome back an Otago graduate to talk about her latest book history work. You can hear a taster of her talk in an interview with Lynn Freeman this Sunday’s episode (14 August) of Standing Room Only.
Dr. Hannah August is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University in Palmerston North. Originally from Dunedin, she holds several degrees, including a PhD from King’s College London and an Honours degree in Classics from the University of Otago.
Please join us for Dr. August’s talk on
“How to read a play in Shakespeare’s England – tips from the archives”
Over the past few decades, “reconstructed” Shakespearean theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the Pop-up Globe in Auckland have given us a sense of what it might have been like to attend a play in early modern England. But what about reading a play? In an era in which the novel as a genre hadn’t yet hit its stride, 16th– and 17th-century Englishmen and women with a penchant for literature sought out poetry and plays. But what were they hoping to get from reading drama, and how did they respond to the plays they read? In this public lecture, Dr Hannah August draws on archival research conducted for her book, Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England, in order to answer these questions.
Same readers, new books!
