This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s 1616 death, an event being commemorated worldwide. Rhodes College, through the bequest of Dr. Iris Annette Pearce, is observing Shakespeare’s quatercentennial by exploring the intellectual history of the year 1616 across the globe.
The 1616 symposium commences with a keynote lecture by Thomas Christensen, author of 1616: The World in Motion, on April 21. The lecture is sponsored by the college’s Communities in Conversation series. The symposium continues in Blount Auditorium all-day on April 22 with a series of brief lectures ranging widely across the liberal arts. The symposium concludes that same evening with the American premiere of Gareth Somers’ play “1616: The Secrets and Passions of William Shakespeare” in Hardie Auditorium.
Selected lectures will be published in The Hare, an online journal of Renaissance studies. As part of the symposium, Rhodes’ Barret Library will display 1616-related items from its special collections April 15-May 15.
The 1616 symposium is generously co-sponsored by various Rhodes programs and departments, the Associated Colleges of the South, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Confucius Institute at the University of Memphis.