Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "From Script to Stage to Script"

"This article is about the annual Shakespeare Birthday lecture. For other articles about Shakespeare's Birthday, see Shakespeare's Birthday (disambiguation).

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

This was a lecture given by Tiffany Stern on March 17, 2016, as part of "Shakespeare's Theatrical Documents (symposium)," and the 2016 Anniversary Lecture Series.

This lecture considers the relationship between ballads and Shakespeare’s plays on stage and page. Considering the way ballads were traded at playhouses, sung in plays, performed as post-play entertainments, and sold to promote playbooks, Professor Stern examines how ballads, in performance and in broadsheets, came to advertise Shakespeare – and how Shakespeare’s plays, in performance and in playbooks, came to advertise ballads.

Listen to the lecture here.

Read the transcript.

Lecturer: Tiffany Stern is Professor of Early Modern Drama and a Tutorial Fellow at University College, at Oxford University. She has twice won the David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Modern Drama Studies, for Documents of Performance in Early Modern England and Shakespeare in Parts. She is on the editorial board of the RSC Shakespeare, the Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia and Shakespeare Quarterly.