Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "The Wisdom of Will"

This article is about the annual Shakespeare Birthday lecture. View the full list of all Shakespeare Birthday Lectures to date here. 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 Michael Witmore on April 24, 2017, as part of the 2016 Anniversary Lecture Series.

Folger Director and Shakespeare scholar Michael Witmore reflects on Shakespeare’s continuing appeal after 400 years. Treating Shakespeare’s plays as a kind of wisdom literature – itself a popular genre in Shakespeare’s time – Witmore discusses 10 things that Shakespeare knew about people, history, and power that we still need to know today.

This lecture also concluded The Wonder of Will: 400 Years of Shakespeare.

Listen to the lecture here.

Read the transcript.

Watch the recorded lecture on C-SPAN2's Book TV archive.