Farah Karim-Cooper and Chris Laoutaris Chaired by Ben Higgins

Shakespeare scholars Professor Farah Karim-Cooper and Professor Chris Laoutaris discuss their views on Shakespeare and their very different new books about the Bard.

Karim-Cooper says in The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future of His Legacy that we should neither idealise nor bury Shakespeare and invites us to look with new perspectives and interpretations to prolong and enrich his legacy. She says Shakespeare’s legacy will be in peril if we only read him as representative of one group and as a pinnacle of the white Western canon. Karim-Cooper argues we should look Shakespeare in the eye and reckon with the discomfort of his plays and society of the day. Karim-Cooper is professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London, president of the Shakespeare Association of America and codirector of education at the Globe Theatre.

In Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, Laoutaris looks at the making of the First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s work published seven years after his death. He looks at the personalities behind the publication and the challenges that had to be overcome. And he reveals how Shakespeare may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would be enshrined in the First Folio. Laoutaris is a biographer, historian and poet and associate professor at the Shakespeare Institute. He is author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe.

Discussions are chaired by Ben Higgins, a literary critic and book historian and author of Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade.