Shakespeare’s Sisters

Winter 2012 P&P Poetry Class
Shakespeare’s Sisters

Six Tuesdays, January 17-February 28, 3:00—4:30 pm. NO CLASS FEBRUARY 14.

Price:
$130 ($110 member)  This class is fully enrolled. Please call the store or send an email to scoll@politics-prose to be put on the wait list. 

Please provide an email address in order to receive weekly communications from the instructors.

Optional tour of the accompanying exhibition at the Folger (February 3—May 4) will be arranged with participants.

Books:

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare’s Sisters, Folger Shakespeare Library, Bradford & Newlin, Ed.

Additional materials to be provided by instructors.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined a gifted sister of Shakespeare’s whose voice was never heard because women in her era were expected to be silent and obedient. Woolf went on to describe a complex of conditions which she thought made it nearly impossible for women to write in the age of Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s Sisters” will begin with some early women poets (including the middle-class Isabella Whitney, who was able to print and sell her ballad-type poems, and Aemelia Lanyer, the daughter of a court musician thought by some to be Shakespeare’s “dark lady”) whose work has survived despite almost insurmountable obstacles. The course will then trace the work of notable women poets through the centuries up to the present. The class will complement a concurrent Shakespeare’s Sisters exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Taught by Gigi Bradford and Louisa Newlin, based on their work for the Shakespeare’s Sisters course, exhibition and chapbook of the same name at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The chapbook contains new poems by Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Maxine Kumin and Linda Pastan, among others.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTORS:

Gigi Bradford is chair of the Folger Poetry Board and co-editor of the forthcoming Shakespeare's Sisters chapbook to complement the 2012 Folger Library exhibition and seminar of the same name. Louisa Newlin, a retired English teacher with a PhD. in Literary Studies from American University, co-taught with Gigi Bradford last spring’s course in sonnets at Politics & Prose. She created and taught for seven years the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Education Department’s “Shakespeare’s Sisters” seminar for high school students.