Richard Schoch and Tiffany Stern Shakespeare: A window onto his Life and Legacy

Shakespeare’s Birthplace remains one of the most visited sites in the UK despite not writing any of his plays there, and there being nothing inside that once belonged to the man himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself. Tiffany Stern, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, will discuss how we invented a sequence for Shakespeare’s plays as a substitute for biography. Raising questions about play order, she will also ask how much we really know about Shakespeare's life.