The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival is pleased to bring back Classics in Context, an educational seminar to increase the audience’s enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare and his plays.

Classics in Context seminars provide theatre-goers and educators with an entertaining overview of Shakespeare’s world and works, focusing on the current NCSF Main Stage production.

Classics in Context seminars are for everyone!

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Registration Fee:
$30 per person

Matinee Performance Ticket:
Registration for Classics in Context does NOT include a ticket to attend the 2:00PM performance of The Tempest.  Please reserve the seat(s) you prefer by contacting the High Point Theatre Box Office at 336-887-3001 or www.highpointtheatre.com.

CEU Credits:
Educators needing renewal credits may receive up to 0.6 CEUs.  The state will accept this credit if approved by your local school.  Please indicate the need for CEU credits upon registration.

Where:
NCSF Spirit Center 
807 West Ward Avenue
High Point, NC 27260


Location Map
Driving Directions


Questions? Contact NCSF:

info@ncshakes.org 
336-841-2273

Click here to register now
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Classics In Context

Join us Sunday, September 26, at our Spirit Center campus for an insightful look at The Tempest from two distinguished scholars.  Dr. Bethany Sinnott from Catawba College and Warren Wilson College’s Dr. David Bradshaw will give two distinctly different overviews of the play.

10:30 – Arrival
10:40 – Welcome
10:45 to 11:40 – Session I
11:45 to 12:30 – Lunch (provided)
12:30 to 1:25– Session II
1:25 – Conclusion

Participants are encouraged to read The Tempest before attending.

TheTempestArtwork.jpegSession I
The Tempest in Context.”
Dr. Bethany Sinnott

Shakespeare’s last complete play and the one least dependent on other sources, The Tempest has long held a special place in the hearts and minds of Shakespeare fans. Dr. Sinnott’s talk will view the play in the context of Jacobean England, the Romance genre, and Shakespeare’s other works.

Session II
"'The rarer action': Forgiveness and Reconciliation in The Tempest."
Dr. David Bradshaw

Playgoers might best approach the multivalent richness of The Tempest by considering how, in this most famous of the romances, Shakespeare adapts and reaffirms the Christian principles of grace and forgiveness that figure so strongly in earlier comedies.  Professor Bradshaw will explore how merciful charity and hope-filled faith distinguish Prospero’s actions as well as Shakespeare’s dramatic art.


Bethanny SinnotBethany Sinnott has a B.A. in English from Duke University, an M.A. in English from Northwestern University and received her Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill. She has been on the Catawba College faculty since 1969. During that time she has held several administrative posts including Director of the School of Humanities, Chair of the English Department, and Director of the Honors Program. She received the Swink Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching in 1979, the Sears Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership in 1991 and the Outstanding Teacher Award from the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English in 2000. Her Shakespeare related activities include: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Center for Renaissance and Shakespearean Staging” 1995; Royal Shakespeare Company workshops or academic symposium at Davidson College 2002, 2005  and 2007; conference paper for the Ohio Shakespeare Festival 2001; various seminar papers for annual Shakespeare Association of America meetings. She has regularly lectured in the NCSF’s Classics in Context series since 2003 and for the Elizabeth Bard’s Weekend 2004-2006. At Catawba she has served as dramaturg or language advisor for several Shakespeare productions and has directed three faculty staged readings of Shakespeare plays.


David BradshawDavid Bradshaw teaches classical and British literature at Warren Wilson College.  Since 1984 he has worked with NCSF as advisor, scholar-in-residence, and lecturer.  A five-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities who has twice been honored for his teaching and scholarship by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bradshaw has also been selected as Outstanding Teacher in Appalachia.  The subjects of his scholarly publications include Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster and Shakespeare’s great successor John Milton.   He is also a classicist, and he has published on Homer and Sophocles and also on Virgil.  The Voice of Toil, his anthology of primary nineteenth-century documents concerned with attitudes toward work, has received considerable praise, and his most recent publication on Cardinal Newman is the forerunner of the book on which he is now working, a study of religious autobiography in the Victorian period titled Epiphanies of Eternity, Ecstasies in Time.  A truly dedicated friend of NCSF, he has, for more than 25 years now, given some of his best energies to inaugurating, developing, and serving in programs such as the Classics-in-Context lecture series.