Frances Dolan's guest appearances

Frances Dolan

CMRS Lecture Series

That Shakespeare Life

Robert Greene

Christopher Marlowe

Catherine de Medici

Chris Johnston

Robert Henke

Matt Lodder

Richard III

Elizabeth I

Jeremy Smith

Peter Wilson

Scott Farrell

Jonathan Willis

John Taylor

Laurie Johnson

John Fletcher

OwlTail

From Merry Wives of Windsor, to Measure for Measure, Alls Well That Ends Well, and others, the role of marriage plays a big role in Shakespeare’s plays, determines the action, defining the characters, and living on several assumptions about the marriage institution. But what are those assumptions, exactly? As a modern audience member, what do we need to know about marriage in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and how has it changed over the last 400 years? Will these changes impact how we receive Shakespeare’s stories?Here to help us find the answers to these questions and explore the history of marriage, Shakespeare’s own marriage to Anne Hathaway, and what we can take away from the displays of marriage in Shakespeare’s plays, is our guest Frances Dolan.  Frances is a Distinguished Professor English at UC Davis, Her work focuses on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In 2004-5, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library and the Folger Library), and the Monticello College Foundation. In November of 2018, she led a Folger Weekend Seminar on Agriculture in the 16th century, and she is the author of the article, “Shakespeare and Marriage” for UCDavis that we have invited her here to speak with us about today. 

<p>From Merry Wives of Windsor, to Measure for Measure, Alls Well That Ends Well, and others, the role of marriage plays a big role in Shakespeare’s plays, determines the action, defining the characters, and living on several assumptions about the marriage institution. But what are those assumptions, exactly? As a modern audience member, what do we need to know about marriage in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and how has it changed over the last 400 years? Will these changes impact how we receive Shakespeare’s stories?Here to help us find the answers to these questions and explore the history of marriage, Shakespeare’s own marriage to Anne Hathaway, and what we can take away from the displays of marriage in Shakespeare’s plays, is our guest Frances Dolan.  Frances is a Distinguished Professor English at UC Davis, Her work focuses on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In 2004-5, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (at the Newberry Library and the Folger Library), and the Monticello College Foundation. In November of 2018, she led a Folger Weekend Seminar on Agriculture in the 16th century, and she is the author of the article, “Shakespeare and Marriage” for UCDavis that we have invited her here to speak with us about today. </p>

Episode 40: Frances Dolan on 16th Century Marriage

As part of an explosion of agricultural experimentation and innovation in seventeenth-century England, many “improvers” turned to composting as both an “ancient practice” and “newly born.” The composting practices they advocated resembled the very particular practices that characterized early modern reading, remembering, and writing. In comparing composting, commonplacing, and composition, amendment and revision, I hope to draw attention both to the importance of soil amendment in early modern English agriculture and to the ways it generated writing and modeled what writing might be. Focusing on early modern agricultural treatises, this talk will consider the compost pile as an archive, a commonplace book, an occasion of writing, and a pungent figure for assembling and ripening the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment—that is, for the work of early modernists today.

Frances Dolan, "Compost / Compositions"