Lecture will be held in Room 405.

“What is love?” Feste sings in Twelfth Night. It is a question that Shakespeare keeps coming back to in his plays and poems. Where does love come from? How does one fall in love? Why do we become so crazy in love? What are the different kinds of love? This lecture will trace the concept of love in Shakespeare, from its classical roots, to its medieval ties to death, to its early modern poetic forms, to Shakespeare’s own performances of love on stage, in order to begin to answer the question, “What is love?”

Lecturer: Jim Casey is an Associate Professor of English at Arcadia University in Philadelphia. He loves all things Shakespeare and all things geeky, especially those involving the fantastic. He has published critical work on fantasy, monstrosity, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation theory, comics, anime, masculinity, grief, old age, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Battlestar Galactica. With Christy Desmet and Natalie Loper, he is the co-editor of Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, a collection of essays on Shakespeare and adaptation. He will be teaching in Hungary on a Fulbright Grant during the spring and summer of 2019.

Shakespeare in the World Lecture Series is presented by The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, in partnership with The Free Library of Philadelphia. (link to Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre: http://www.phillyshakespeare.org/see/shakespeare-lecture-series/)