CSC Presents DOUBLE FALSEHOOD 3/11-4/3
By: Gabrielle Sierra Feb. 25, 2011
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Classic Stage Company (CSC), under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Executive Director Jessica R. Jenen, continues its 44th season with DOUBLE FALSEHOOD, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, adapted for the 18th Century stage by Lewis Theobald, and directed by Kulick. DOUBLE FALSEHOOD will play a limited engagement at CSC (136 East 13th Street) from Friday, March 11 through Sunday, April 3. The official press opening is scheduled for Tuesday, March 22 at 7pm.
DOUBLE FALSEHOOD is now believed to be an adaptation of the long lost play Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher that was rediscovered and adapted in the 18th Century by Lewis Theobald. The Times of London recently wrote, "For the most part of three centuries DOUBLE FALSEHOOD has been ridiculed as a hoax. That all changed when the Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare's works, endorsed its credentials and made it available." Long considered the "holy grail" of the Shakespeare canon, CSC will be the first professional theatre company to present this work since it was first remounted some 250 years ago. DOUBLE FALSEHOOD has prompted a spirited debate, having been called both "a piece of fraudulence" (Ron Rosenbaum, Slate Magazine) and "brilliant and unusual...the Bard's style and influence seem irrefutable." (The Observer)BIOGRAPHIES
Brian Kulick (Director) is in his eighth season as Artistic Director at CSC, where he has directed The Forest, The Age of Iron, An Oresteia, The Tempest, Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, The False Servant, and The Mysteries. During his tenure at CSC he has returned the theatre to its classic roots with acclaimed productions of the Greeks, Shakespeare and Chekhov, while also expanding the theatre's programming with new works by Anne Carson, David Ives, Sarah Ruhl, Yasmina Reza and Mac Wellman. He has also introduced such popular programs to CSC as The First Look Series, Monday Night Open Rehearsals, Books on Stage, and the nationally recognized Young Company that brings Shakespeare to all five of New York's boroughs. From 1996-2001 he was an Artistic Associate at The Public Theatre, where he directed Twelfth Night, Kit Marlowe, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, A Dybbuk and Timon of Athens. Prior to this, he was the Associate Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company, where he directed Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote, and The Illusion. He has directed the premieres of works by Nilo Cruz, Tony Kushner, Charles L. Mee, Han Ong and Kathleen Tolan. His work in opera and musical theatre includes Carmen, Pelleas and Melisande, A Soldier's Tale, The Guilty Mother and The Anatole Cycle (all for Long Beach Opera). His work has also been seen at Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum, ACT (Seattle), the McCarter Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Magic Theatre, among others. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum and the Creative Director for The Shakespeare Society of New York. Currently he is on the faculty of Columbia University's School of the Arts Theatre Program, where he teaches directing with Anne Bogart.PARTICIPATING SCHOLARS:
HAROLD BLOOM. Hailed by many as "the finest contemporary American critic," Harold Bloom is a specialist in English and American poetry and in the theory of criticism. He is most associated with Romanticism in poetry and the works of Shakespeare, but he has explored such topics as the Kabbalah, children's literature, Mormonism and the anxiety of literary influence in his extensive bibliography. An outspoken figure, Bloom often has been quoted in the popular press about controversial issues in literature and academia. One Boston Globe critic stated: "Bloom without the urge to shock would no longer be Bloom." He is the author of more than two dozen books, including the 1970 work "Yeats," which was one of the nominees in the Arts and Letters category of the National Book Awards. Bloom's 1973 work, "The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry," was praised by a New York Times reviewer who wrote, "Bloom has helped to make the study of Romantic poetry as intellectually and spiritually challenging a branch of literary studies as one may find." His work "Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present" won Phi Beta Kappa's 1989 Christian Gauss Award for an outstanding work of literary scholarship or criticism. Among Bloom's other critically acclaimed books are "The Visionary Company," "Kabbalah and Criticism," "Poetry and Repression," "A Map of Misreading," "Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism," "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate," "The Book of J," "The Western Canon," "Omens of Millennium," "The American Religion" and "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human." More recent efforts include "How to Read and Why," "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds," "Hamlet: Poem Unlimited" and "Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?" Bloom joined the Yale faculty as an instructor in 1955, the year he received a Ph.D. from the University. (He earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell University.) He became assistant professor in 1960. In 1963, Bloom was promoted to associate professor, and two years later, at age 35, he was appointed professor of English -- making him one of the youngest scholars in Yale history to become a full professor in the department of English. He was the William Clyde DeVane Professor of Humanities, 1974-77, and became professor of humanities in 1977 and Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1983. In 1988 he was named the Berg Visiting Professor of English at New York University, holding that post simultaneously with his Yale appointment. He has held numerous other visiting professorships, and he continues to teach undergraduate classes at Yale on poetry and Shakespeare. Bloom has been editor and introducer of Chelsea House Modern Critical Views and Interpretations since 1984. He was awarded the John Addison Porter Prize for his doctoral dissertation in 1955, and since then has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors. They include the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Zabel Prize of the American Institute of Arts and Letters. He received Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and in 1985 was awarded a MacArthur Prize "genius grant."
He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the recipient of many awards, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Criticism. Among his other honorary degrees, he holds one from the University of Bologna. He received the Catalonia International Prize in 2002 and the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2005.
Brean Hammond (editor of the Arden edition of Double Falsehood) MA, Edinburgh; DPhil, Oxford, is Professor of Modern English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham. His areas of expertise include 17th and 18th century literature; the early English novel; literature and politics in 18th century; and modern drama. He is the author of Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670-1740, an extended meditation on Foucault's famous question "what is an author?," arguing that our modern conception of proprietary authorship developed during that period. More recently, he has completed an edition of five plays by the dramatist and architect Sir John Vanbrugh for Oxford's World's Classics series; and a book in the Writers and Their Work series called Pope Among the Satirists. In collaboration with Shaun Regan at Queen's, Belfast, he has written Making the Novel, a book that considers a wide range of early novels in the light of an approach that marries social history and cultural criticism, considering and critiquing several recent approaches to this elusive subject. Mr Hammond has also just finished a critical biography of Jonathan Swift for the Irish Academic Press of Dublin (2010). His most recently completed project is an edition, for Arden Shakespeare, of a lost Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration called Cardenio, published as Double Falsehood. Professor Hammond's research on this play led to its eventual acceptance and inclusion into Shakespeare's canon.
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D., Yale University) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding co-editor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. David Scott Kastan (B.A., Princeton University; Ph.D., University of Chicago) is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. Areas of expertise include drama, early modern, history of the book, media studies, early modern literature and culture, editing and editorial theory, media studies, and literary theory. Although he teaches broadly across the field of Renaissance literature, his primary intellectual concern is with the relations of literature and history in early modern England, considered from a variety of perspectives. Increasingly this interest has focused on the production, transmission, and reception of texts (a focus that he likes to think of as "the new boredom"). He is one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare series and the series editor of the new Barnes and Noble Shakespeare, and he has edited Milton's Paradise Lost and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. His new book, Shakespeare and Religion, will soon be published by Oxford University Press, and he is presently working on two new projects: The Invention of English Literature, and, with the painter Stephen Farthing, a book called Living Color.
James Shapiro (B.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., University of Chicago) is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University. Areas of specialization include Shakespeare; medieval and early modern drama; Jewish studies; British poetry; and the book review. Professor Shapiro is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize for best book on sixteenth-century literature; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the Theatre Book Prize as well as the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, awarded to the best nonfiction book published in the UK. His most recent book is Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010). He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry. He has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library. He is currently at work on another book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.
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