UNSW: The Richard Madelaine Memorial Lecture
“The Shakespearean inheritance”, (Professor Jonathan Bate, Oxford University)

Date: Tuesday 26 May
Time: 6:00pm–7:30pm
Venue: Tyree Room,John Niland Scientia Building, UNSW Kensington (map ref G19)
RSVP: http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/othersites/?path=othersites/fass/form/index.php&i=546

As we approach the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, this lecture will explore various aspects of the Shakespearean inheritance today in theatre, film, text and his wider cultural influence.

It will also look at Shakespeare’s own cultural inheritance from classical antiquity, and will argue that Shakespeare does for us today what the Classics did for him.

This So What? Lecture is dedicated to the memory of Richard Madelaine, who worked at UNSW from 1973 until his death in 2012.

Richard was a dedicated teacher who passed on his critical enthusiasm for Shakespeare to generations of UNSW students. He earned an international reputation for his scholarship: for his engaging account of the staging history of Antony and Cleopatra in the Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge University Press, 1998); for editing ‘O Brave New World’: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage (Currency Press, 2001) with John Golder; and for his editorial work on the Bell Shakespeare Series (Halstead Press).

Richard was a member of the Executive Committee of the English Association for over twenty years and its President for more than ten of these years. He contributed significantly to the success of the Association’s publications through his consistently witty, incisive, wide-ranging, carefully targeted and finely crafted pieces on Shakespeare.

It is fitting to honour Richard Madelaine’s life and career by presenting this lecture by another renowned Shakespeare scholar, Professor Jonathan Bate.

Biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar Jonathan Bate is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His many books include acclaimed works on Shakespeare, The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of the Age, and a biography of the poet John Clare that won Britain’s two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. In the 2015 New Years Honours list, he was knighted for his services to literature. His new book, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, will be published globally by HarperCollins in October.