Shakespeare’s private life
Within the framework of the Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY), financed by the The Danish National Research Foundation, we welcome you to the international seminar on Shakespeare's private life.
The volumes about Shakespeare's literary production, his life and his identity could easily fill an entire library. The biographical studies of Lena Cowen Orlin, Professor of English at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, are of an entirely special kind in as far as they are not in any way based on the literary life of Shakespeare, but on his private sphere as documented in archives and town records. There is in other words no attempt to derive his private life from his work; there is in fact no mentioning of his works at all.
We are proud and happy to welcome you to this occasion to get better acquainted with life and privacy in the Elizabethan Era and the beginning of the Stuart Period on a case study about a man whose literary contribution is well known to us all.
Admission is free and registration is not required.
Lena Cowen Orlin
Lena Cowen Orlin is Professor of English at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. Professor Orlin is the author of Locating Privacy in Tudor London (2009) and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994). She is the editor of, e.g., The Renaissance: A Sourcebook (2009), Material London ca. 1600 (2000) and Elizabethan Households (1995).
For her interdisciplinary research into the material culture of private life in Shakespeare's time, Orlin has traveled throughout Great Britain studying historic houses and exploring manuscript archives for legal records, property documents, and family papers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.