As authorship devotees pack for the 13th Annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference to be held April 16-19 at Concordia University in Portland, Director Dan Wright of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre reminds us that the center is accepting 20 registrants for the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Seminar at the university August 16-21, 2009.
“This event will be the first to be convened in the new Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre,” Wright said. “And it doubtless will attract the interest of a host of people.”
Registration information is available at the authorship studies website.
The topic under discussion at the summer seminar is “Shakespeare and Religion”. Wright’s recommended reading on the topic:
. . . Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome(2008) – an argument that Shakespeare, in his writing and his personal convictions, was intensely Roman Catholic; Daniel Wright’s The Anglican Shakespeare: Elizabethan Orthodoxy in the Great Histories (1993) – an argument that Shakespeare, apart from his perhaps-unknowable personal convictions, wrote as a partisan of the Church of England; and Eric Mallin’s Godless Shakespeare (2007) – an argument that Shakespeare was a writer of evolving religious sensibilities who began his career as a religious skeptic but matured as an atheist, liberated by unbelief.
The Mallin book is one of a new series called Shakespeare Now! described as a series of newly minted short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilites of Shakespeare’s plays, edited by Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie and published by Continuum.
