Like an Old Tale Still
Guest Speakers

Stephen Greenblatt, is the founding father of the "New Historicist" criticism, general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (April 2006), and once saluted by The Guardian Unlimited as "the world's most influential Shakespearian for a quarter of a century." Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt is a central figure in literary criticism generally and Renaissance studies in particular. Most recently, he authored the critically acclaimed, best-selling Will of the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), (a National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize finalist) which Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker hailed as "the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read." Holding Masters in Philosophy from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from yale, Dr. Greenblatt has lectured at universities in Berlin, Florence, Kyoto, Oxford and Peking and is an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow and a former president of the Modern Language Association. In addition to editing the Norton Anthology - "one of the most successful college texts ever published," according to Amazon.com.- Dr. Greenblatt has had several brushes with pop fame, including serving as an expert consultant on the 1998 hit Shakespeare in Love.

Andrew Hartley has established Willing Suspension Productions (a company dedicated to the staging of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama) while completing his graduate and doctoral degrees from Boston University. He also taught at the University of West Georgia for nine years, where he was also Resident Dramaturg for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival. He is the editor of the performance journal Shakespeare Bulletin and the author The Shakespearean Dramaturg (Palgrave, 2005) as well as numerous articles in his discipline. A populist at heart, Dr. Hartley is also a writer of thrillers, the first of which, The Mask of Atreus, will be published worldwide in 2006. He is a Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Joseph Haj was recently named the producing Artistic Director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC. He has directed and performed Shakespeare at major theatres across the country including the New York Shakespeare Festival, The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. In 1996 he directed maximum-security prisoners in a production of Henry the Fifth. in 1991, the New York Times and the Village Voice profiled Mr. Haj's workshops with Palestinian and Israeli actors in the West Bank and Gaza. In addition to the above, Mr. Haj has directed or acted in productions at the Alley Theatre in houston, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and in Paris, Berlin, Edinburgh, Salzburg, Venice and Japan. recent television appearances include "24", Charmed, Crossing Jordan, and JAG. In 2000, he was one of only three theatre artists selected for an NEA/White House Council for the Arts Millennium Grants, and in 2003 Mr. Haj was awarded an NEA/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Grant for Directors. He has an MFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Maurice Hunt is a Research Professor of English and Chair of the English department at BaylorUniversity. He is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespear's Romance of the World (1990), Shakespeare's Labored Art (1995), and "The Winter's Tale": Critical Essays (1995). He is also editor of several works in the MLA Teaching World Literature series, including Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest" and Other Late Romances (1992) and Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" (2000). His most recent works include Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (2004), and he is the editor of the in-progress Shakespeare New Variorum edition of Cymbeline. In addition, he has published over one-hundered journal articles, mainly on Shakespeare and other early modern English playwrights. Dr. Hunt recieved his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Russ McDonald was a Professor of English at UNC Greensboro from 1992-2004, and is now at Goldsmith's College, University of London where he is a Reader of Renaissance Literature. After earning his masters and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. McDonald taught Shakespeare at Mississippi State University, the University of Hawaii and the University of Rochester. He is the author of sveral vital works on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare's Late Style (Cambridge, 2006); Look to the Lady: Sarag Siddons, Ellen terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2001), and Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (2001). his Bedford Companion is widely used in undergraduate courses in the United States and Greeat Britain. In 2003, he was selected as the "North Carolina Professor of the Year" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and support of Education. He also won the University of North Carolina Board of governors' Award for Distinguished teaching. Dr. McDonald spent the 2004-2005 school year in London on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.

Alan C. Dessen, Peter G. Phialas Professor of English (emeritus) at U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of eight books, four of them published by Cambridge U.P.: Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984); Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1995); Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions (2002); and (co-authored with Leslie Thomson) A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (1999). Between 1994 and 2001 he was the Director of ACTER, now AFTLS (Actors from the London Stage). For roughly twenty years he has been writing about current productions of Shakespeare's plays in Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Bulletin.

Andrew Hartley has established Willing Suspension Productions (a company dedicated to the staging of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama) while completing his graduate and doctoral degrees from Boston University. He also taught at the University of West Georgia for nine years, where he was also Resident Dramaturg for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival. He is the editor of the performance journal Shakespeare Bulletin and the author The Shakespearean Dramaturg (Palgrave, 2005) as well as numerous articles in his discipline. A populist at heart, Dr. Hartley is also a writer of thrillers, the first of which, The Mask of Atreus, will be published worldwide in 2006. He is a Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Kirk Melnikoff is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the editor of The Shakespeare on Film Newsletter which is published as a part of Shakespeare Bulletin and has published articles in Mosaic, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Studies in Philology, and Pedagogy. He has recently finished editing a collection of essays on Shakespeare's contemporary Robert Greene entitled Writing Robert Greene and is currently working on a book thatexplores the role of Elizabethan stationers like Richard Jones, Edward Blount and William Ponsonby in the production of the sixteenth-century category of "English literature." He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from Boston University.

Molly Best Tinsely left the civilian English faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy eight years ago and moved to Ashland, OR, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she reviews theatre and writes plays. Her full-length work "Fission" was named runner-up for Seattle's best new play in 2005 by The Seattle Times. She is also a widely published fiction writer, and her story collection Throwing Knives won the Oregon Book Award in 2001.

Julie York Coppens is the theatre critic for The Charlotte Observer

Like An Old Tale Still: Shakespeare’s Late Plays

Schedule (see separate document)
Guest Scholar and artist bios

Academics and theatre practitioners interested in registering or receiving more information may contact Bethany Prestigiacomo beprestigiacomo@davidson.edu, 704-894-2115

For More Information
Please contact Bethany Prestigiacomo, Director of Artist Residency Programs, Davidson College via email (rscdavidson@davidson.edu) or phone at 704-894-2115.