Thursday 1st May, 5:00pm
York St John University Creative Centre Auditorium
Free
For the last 450 years, hordes of critics, scholars and jealous writers have been energetically doing their best to show exactly why and where Shakespeare has got it wrong. Whether because he is too long, too hard to understand, too posh, too violent, too bawdy, too rough, too unstructured, too wordy, too unpoetic, or too rude ‘to read to your servants without embarrassment’, there has never been a shortage of those eager to point out his shortcomings.
Two globetrotting Shakespeare enthusiasts, Ryuta Minami, one of Japan’s leading scholars, and Irish actor and director Ronan Paterson, with the help of some of our actors, demonstrate a few of the improvements suggested to Shakespeare ‘purely for his own good’. With contributors from a man named Looney to Thomas Bowdler, from Nahum Tate and David Garrick to Mark Twain, Norma Shearer and John Gilbert, these generous souls offer a repair kit for the poor, misguided Bard.
