Brian Cummings gives Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at Folger

Posted on 30 April 2014

Professor Brian Cummings gave the annual Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture at the Folger Institute in Washington DC, as part of the Folger's celebration of the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 2014.

Brian Cummings

Professor Cummings asks whether literary biography tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Shakespeare. He considers the the nature of biography, memory, literature, and loss. Perhaps, he suggests, the act of reading the plays and the sonnets creates a life form of its own, somewhere between writer and reader.

The lecture, "Shakespeare, Biography and Anti-Biography", was delivered in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre on Tuesday, April 3, 2014.

Professor Cummings has written widely on sixteenth-century religion and literature. His latest book, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, appeared in 2013. In 2012 he gave the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of 'Bibliophobia', the title of his next book.

To listen to a podcast of the lecture, visit the Folger Shakespeare Library's website.