Shakespeare Reimagined: Hamnet

Join us for a post-screening discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) and physician and Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Ross (author of Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough), and Brandeis Prof. Ramie Targoff (author of Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance). Moderated by Bryn Boice, Associate Artistic Director, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. 

Academy Award®-winning writer/director Chloé Zhao returns with the powerful story of love and loss that likely inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece Hamlet. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel of the same name, Hamnet follows William Shakespeare (Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal, Aftersun) and his wife Agnes (Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley, Women Talking) from their early courtship to their unimaginable loss, and how their all-consuming grief influenced the writing of a masterpiece. With immersive and textured cinematography, Zhao’s latest work is an emotional testament to the healing power of art. 

About Stephen Greenblatt 

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize) and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He was named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi, and is a fellow of the British Academy. 

About Dr. John Ross 

John J. Ross is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has a strong interest in literature, the medical humanities, and the history of medicine, and has written a book about writers, their illnesses, and their calamitous treatments, entitled Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2012). He is also one of the editors of Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2017), the major textbook of hospital medicine, now in its second edition. 

About Ramie Targoff 

Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, professor of English, and co-chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About Bryn Boice 

Bryn Boice is an award-winning director, educator, actor, and producer, as well as CSC’s Associate Artistic Director and Director of Education & Training. Also for CSC, Bryn helmed Universe Rushing Apart: Blue Kettle & Here We Go – two Caryl Churchill one-acts – which garnered her the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director, Large Theatre. Other recent Boston-area credits include: The Sound Inside and The Children (both Elliot Norton nominated for Outstanding Production, Speakeasy Stage); The Book of Will, Into the Breeches! (Elliot Norton nom. for Direction and Production, Hub Theatre Company); Tall Tales from Blackburn Tavern, Gloria (Gloucester Stage); The Half-Life of Marie Curie (The Nora Company); Admissions (The Gamm Theatre); Last Night at Bowl-Mor Lanes (Greater Boston Stage Company); an all-female production of Julius Caesar for Actors’ Shakespeare Project; and a number of Apprentice Repertory Company and Stage2 productions for CSC. For more information visit www.brynboice.com