At 12pm Blackwell’s are delighted to welcome Simon Callow, Michael Pennington and Don Paterson to talk about Shakespeare.
With the World Shakespeare Festival this year and the Globe to Globe festival at Shakespeare’s Globe, it seemed a shame not to run an event to discuss why a 400-years-dead playwright is still performed more than any other and why his work is the standard against which plays are still measured.
Simon Callow is a star of stage and screen as well as a successful author, writing on Shakespeare as well as other subjects. His books include Shakespeare on Love, two books in the Actors on Shakespeare, Henry IV part I and Henry IV part II, the seminal work on acting, Being an Actor and his recent autobiography My Life In Pieces.
Michael Pennington is a co-founder of the English Shakespeare Company and a premier Shakespearean actor. He has spent upwards of 20,000 hours acting, directing and writing about Shakespeare. His investigation of Shakespeare’s life and work, Sweet William: Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare is illuminated by his own experiences in the theatre. He has also written several books in the ‘user’s guide’ series, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night and Hamlet.
Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee, Scotland. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and began writing poetry around the same time. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently, Rain won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.
He has written Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a book which offers a fresh and direct approach to the Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Paterson discusses the meaning, technique, hidden structure and feverish narrative of the Sonnets, as well as the difficulties they present for the modern reader. His most recent book is 101 Sonnets which is a sharing of Paterson’s personal favourites as well as a celebration of high moments in the sonnet’s history.
To book your free tickets email events.london@blackwell.co.uk.
