Pre-Show Talk: Cymbeline with Valerie Wayne (2014)

Pre-Show Talk: Cymbeline with Valerie Wayne was held on May 29, 2014 as part of the Talks and Screenings at the Folger in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre. Why was the Cymbeline (Fiasco Theatre, 2014) production so successful? What did the talented actors play up in their production of this dramatic romance, one of William Shakespeare's plays written late in his career, what do they play down, and why did their choices work so well? Valerie Wayne examined the production in light of Cymbeline's performance history and considerable confusion about what kind of play this is.

Valerie Wayne

Valerie Wayne is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is completing an edition of Cymbeline for the Arden Shakespeare, third series, which is to be published in 2016. An award-winning teacher, she has taught in Honolulu for over thirty years and held visiting positions at the University of Liverpool, the University of Szeged in Hungary, and the University of Kansas. As a textual scholar she edited Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage, and Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One for The Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, serving also as Associate General Editor on that project. Her edited collections include The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare and, with Mary Ellen Lamb, Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare. She has been a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, served on the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly, chaired the New Variorum Shakespeare Committee, and been president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.