Theatre for a New Audience Teams with New York Public Library for 'FIRST FOLIO' Event

Theatre for a New Audience and The New York Public Library will mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death with a viewing of a First Folio followed by a conversation among scholars and conservators on the Folio's innovative origins, its history as a wildly coveted (and carefully conserved) artifact, and its continued role in the robust afterlife of Shakespeare.

An Evening with the First Folio is free at The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, Wednesday September 28, at 5:30pm. The featured speaker that evening is Folger Shakespeare Library Director Emerita Gail Kern Paster in conversation with Tanya Pollard of CUNY Graduate Center. Richard McCoy, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Chair of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars, will introduce the program.

The event will convene in Gottesman Hall where a First Folio and other rare items from the Library's Shakespeare collections will be on display. Guests will then make their way to Celeste Auditorium for the evening's program.

This is the first in a series of free events co-presented by the Library and Theatre for a New Audience: public dialogues between the Library's Shakespeare collections and Theatre for a New Audience's family of artists and scholars. More information on Theatre for a New Audience's year-long celebration of 400 Years of Shakespeare can be found at www.tfana.org/shakespeare400.

This event is free, but registration is required. To register and for more information, visit www.showclix.com/event/firstfolio or call 917-275-6975.

Gail Kern Paster is editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the leading scholarly journal devoted to Shakespeare. She retired in July 2011 as Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. She came to the directorship from George Washington University, where she was a Professor of English. She earned a B.A. at Smith College and a Ph.D. at Yale University. She has won many national fellowships and awards, including fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, National Endowment from the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She was named to the Queen's Honours List as a Commander of the British Empire in May 2011. She has published widely­including three books (The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare [1986]; The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England [1993]; and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage [2004]).

Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her publications include Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell, 2003), Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), and Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, co-edited with Katharine Craik (Cambridge, 2013), as well as essays on early modern theater in journals including Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance Drama, and edited volumes. She has served on a national advisory counsel to the U.S. Secretary of Education, and has received fellowships from the NEH, Whiting, and Mellon foundations, and the Warburg Institute. She is currently completing a book about the sixteenth-century popularity of Euripides' tragic heroines, and their influence on strategies for transmitting sympathy in early modern English theaters.

Richard McCoy, Chair of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars, is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of four books -Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Rutgers, 1979), The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (California, 1989), Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (Columbia, 2002), and Faith In Shakespeare (Oxford, 2014) - as well as many articles on Shakespeare's plays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and The Huntington Library. He has also served as a speaker and consultant for Shakespeare performances for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Classic Stage Company, Target Margin, The Public Theater, and The Shakespeare Society as well as Theatre for a New Audience.

Theatre for a New Audience established a Council of Scholars to expand the scope and depth of the Theatre's humanities programs. A primary goal of the Council is to provide perspectives that illuminate contextual themes and heighten intellectual conversation around Theatre for a New Audience's season. The Council helps to design comprehensive and integrated programs that meet the needs of target audiences and that deepen the contributions of the Theatre to Shakespeare study and scholarship over time.

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is a modern classic theatre. It produces Shakespeare alongside other major authors from the world repertoire, such as Harley Granville Barker, Edward Bond, Adrienne Kennedy and Wallace Shawn. It has played off- and on Broadway and toured nationally and internationally. Theatre for a New Audience's productions have been honored with Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Lortel and Audelco awards and nominations and reach an audience diverse in age, economics and cultural backgrounds. Theatre for a New Audience created and runs the largest in-depth program in the New York City Public Schools to introduce students to Shakespeare, and has served more than 128,000 students since the program began in 1984.

Theatre for a New Audience's Humanities programs are supported in part by a humanities endowment established by a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leadership matching gifts provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Perry and Marty Granoff, John J. Kerr and Nora Wren Kerr, and Theodore C. Rogers.

The New York Public Library is a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations­including research and branch libraries­throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars, and has seen record numbers of attendance and circulation in recent years. The New York Public Library serves more than 18 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.

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