Shakespeare and Urban Comedy

About the lecture

In this module, we think about Much Ado About Nothing’s status as an urban comedy —a setting that was highly traditional for Classical comedy, but unusual for Shakespeare. In particular, we think about the impact of the city-setting on the action in the play, not least in relation to the circulation of rumour and slander.

About the lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.