Shakespeare's Women

This presentation is the opening event for Special Collections’ exhibition, "Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Elizabethan Culture." It runs from February 8, 2016 through April 30, 2016.

Professor Meg Lota Brown will examine the social and historical contexts of women’s roles in Shakespeare's England and how the playwright both generates and subverts his culture’s assumptions about gender. Given the extraordinary vitality of Shakespeare’s female characters, it is important to consider their equivocal relation to the state, the family, the church, political economy, and desire. In short, what was their relation to order and disorder?

Professor Brown teaches in the Department of English and also serves as the Director of the UA Graduate Center. She is the author or editor of three books and has published numerous articles on Reformation politics, Renaissance literature, science, art, gender, theology, and authors from Shakespeare and Donne to Christine de Pizan and Rachel Speght.

This lecture is offered as part of the programming in support of the installation of First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare exhibit at the Arizona State Museum.

For more information, please visit http://firstfolio.library.arizona.edu/.