Shakespeare's lost play focus of entertaining and informative lecture

Stephen Greenblatt, one of the world's most influential Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorist, will present a humorous and insightful exploration of the 400-year-old mystery surrounding Shakespeare's lost play.
 
On Wednesday, September 24, Greenblatt will present, “Cultural Mobility: The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s ‘Cardenio.’” The 7 p.m. event, at Grand Valley State University’s L.V. Eberhard Center, second floor, 301 W. Fulton St., on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus, is free and open to the public. It is presented as the university’s Fall Arts Celebration Distinguished Academic Lecture, in conjunction with Grand Valley’s 15th annual Shakespeare Festival.
 
Greenblatt is known as the founder of “new historicism,” which views literature as cultural formations shaped by the social energies of the time, and is hailed as the most influential strand of criticism in the past 25 years. The professor of humanities at Harvard University previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for 28 years and has lectured around the world.
 
Though among the academic elite, Greenblatt retains a sense of humor about his early years. Stories in the Harvard Gazette tell of his working at a summer camp playing guitar and singing with fellow counselor Art Garfunkel. When studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he performed with a group of students who went on to become the Monty Python’s Flying Circus troupe. While a student at Yale he “chummed around” with, now senator, Joseph Lieberman, and once rushed around a corner and literally bumped into T. S. Eliot, knocking him down.
 
Greenblatt’s version of “Cardenio” is both a major academic accomplishment and a delightful diversion from his more serious work. It is inspired by a legendary play Shakespeare wrote that was performed at court in London twice in 1613, then disappeared without any trace of written text. Both versions hint at the “Cardenio” episodes in the first volume of Don Quixote. Greenblatt’s collaboration with the distinguished playwright Charles Mee not only concocted a modern romantic comedy set in Italy, but in doing so also encourages others to adapt classic literature to a local culture.
 
For more information about this event contact Jo Miller, professor of English at (616) 331-3552.
 
For more information about the Fall Arts Celebration, call (616) 331-2180, or visit www.gvsu.edu/fallarts .