ThoughtGallery.org > Female Suffering and Shakespearean Calculation: Edward Bond’s Bingo

Female Suffering and Shakespearean Calculation: Edward Bond’s Bingo

Edward Bond, one of the angry post-World War II British playwrights, did a play about Shakespeare’s retirement in Stratford entitled Bingo. In this talk, Jean E. Howard examines Bond’s critique of Shakespeare as a man who foresaw the suffering that unfettered capitalist practices would visit on his neighbors and his country, but who could not resist siding with those forces. Howard argues that Bond registered his critique by focusing on the women in Shakespeare’s family and on a vagrant woman whose corpse becomes the focal point for the play’s analysis of the imbrication of gender and class oppression.

Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history.  Besides editing six collections of essays, Howard is author of over fifty articles and several books, including Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (University of Illinois Press, 1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (Routledge, 1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin;  Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Marx and Shakespeare, co-written with Crystal Bartolovich (Continuum, 2012). She is also a co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (now in its third edition) and general editor of the Bedford contextual editions of Shakespeare. Her new book, Staging History: Forging the Body Politic, on the history play in twentieth and twentieth-first century American and English theater, is nearing completion.











When: Thu., Oct. 15, 2020 at 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Where: Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave.
212-817-7000
Price: Free
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Edward Bond, one of the angry post-World War II British playwrights, did a play about Shakespeare’s retirement in Stratford entitled Bingo. In this talk, Jean E. Howard examines Bond’s critique of Shakespeare as a man who foresaw the suffering that unfettered capitalist practices would visit on his neighbors and his country, but who could not resist siding with those forces. Howard argues that Bond registered his critique by focusing on the women in Shakespeare’s family and on a vagrant woman whose corpse becomes the focal point for the play’s analysis of the imbrication of gender and class oppression.

Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history.  Besides editing six collections of essays, Howard is author of over fifty articles and several books, including Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (University of Illinois Press, 1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (Routledge, 1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin;  Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Marx and Shakespeare, co-written with Crystal Bartolovich (Continuum, 2012). She is also a co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (now in its third edition) and general editor of the Bedford contextual editions of Shakespeare. Her new book, Staging History: Forging the Body Politic, on the history play in twentieth and twentieth-first century American and English theater, is nearing completion.

Buy tickets/get more info now