All Program Dates
October 23, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET
October 30, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET
November 6, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET
November 13, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET
November 20, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, August 22, for Rosenbach members on Friday, August 29, and for the general public on Friday, September 5. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
In its combination of comedy and tragedy, Percy Bysshe Shelley saw King Lear as “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world,” but many readers and playgoers have found the play too bleak and painful to endure (so much so, that for 150 years, playgoers could only experience the play through a revision that ended happily). Yet for all its political, familial, and existential darkness, King Lear is also a play of striking beauty and humanity. In this course, we will explore the complexity and depth of this extraordinary text, with close attention to issues related to language, kingship, old age, gender, and more. Ideally, the course will be quite interactive, relying on class participation and free-flowing conversations that center on particular themes and passages. Every time we meet, we will practice a variety of reading techniques that will enable participants to begin experiencing King Lear (and eventually all of Shakespeare’s plays) more deeply and effectively on their own, recognizing the playtext not only as a narrative story but also as a poetic script that was meant to be performed out loud.
Sponsors
Our King Lear course with Jim Casey is sponsored by Kit Marlowe.
Instructor
Dr. Jim Casey is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipient, Past President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (2019), and co-editor of the collections Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (2017) and Shakespeare and Comics (2024). Before retiring from full-time teaching in 2020, he taught more than 100 graduate and undergraduate courses over more than 20 years. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published peer-reviewed essays on such diverse topics as fantasy, monstrosity, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, pedagogy, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation theory, digital humanities, old age, comics, film, anime, masculinity, grief, the supernatural, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. His current projects include Shakespeare and Science Fiction, co-edited with Brandon Christopher, and Fantasy Literature through History. This is his fifth time teaching for the Rosenbach, following courses on Shakespeare and the Fantastic, Hamlet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.