"Shakespeare and Trump" in Lowell's Parker Lecture Series

September 12, 2017

"Shakespeare and Trump"

Jeffrey R. Wilson
Harvard University

Tuesday, September 12, 2017
7 PM
Pollard Memorial Library
401 Merrimack St, Lowell, MA 01852

Presented by the Moses Greeley Parker Lecture Series
parkerlectures.com

During the 2016 election, scholars invented a new kind of criticism: the Shakespeare-inspired commentary on modern US politics. The rise of Donald Trump has drawn comparisons to the Netflix hit House of Cards, based on Shakespeare’s Richard III. Trump’s chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, wrote two absurd Shakespeare adaptations in the 1990s. Days after the election, students at the University of Pennsylvania protested Trump by tearing down a portrait of Shakespeare. And this past summer, the assassination of a Trump-esque Julius Caesar led corporate sponsors to pull out of the famed Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. Taking stock of these flashes of Shakespeare in recent US politics, and holding nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life, this talk will explore the wayward connections between William Shakespeare and Donald Trump. 

jeffrey_r._wilson_22shakespeare_and_trump22_flier.pdf1.03 MB