Shakespeare in Love
Before the film, physician and Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Ross (author of Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough) will discuss Shakespeare's social background and the public health disaster that was early modern London.
Ross will address contemporary gossip about Shakespeare, including his involvement in a love triangle resembling that of the Sonnets that was rumored to have genitourinary consequences.
About the Film
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture and featuring an Oscar-winning script co-written by Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love follows the adventures of young Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), and up-and-coming playwright who has been disastrously struck by the bane of the writer's life—writer's block. His comedy Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter isn't going anywhere and the playhouse is under threat of closure. What Will needs is a muse, and she appears in the form of the beautiful and betrothed Lady Viola (Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow). The path of true love does not run smooth for Will, but the joys and tragedy of his own life find their way onto the page in a moving, witty and spellbinding tale.
About the Speaker
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.
