Ithaca College

The IC chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, will sponsor its annual faculty lecture on Tuesday, April 21, at 5:30pm in Business 104.  Christopher Matusiak, Assistant Professor of English, will present a public lecture entitled "Was Shakespeare 'not a company keeper'?  A Seventeenth-Century Biographical Puzzle."

Scholarship on the life of Shakespeare properly began on a summer day in 1681 when the antiquarian John Aubrey tracked the stage-player William Beeston to his north London house to gather information for the biographical anthology Brief Lives. The son of one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the aging Beeston would impart information that has since informed every modern biography of the playwright, with one anecdote proving especially tantalizing to scholars. Among Aubrey’s helter-skelter manuscript notes, scrawled above Shakespeare’s name and then crossed out, are the words: “the more to be admired [because] he was not a company keeper, wouldn’t be debauched, & if invited to writ[e] he was in pain.” Many now regard this textual remnant as the most revealing passage ever written about Shakespeare the man, and from it modern scholars have spun a variety of colorful narratives about the playwright’s personality and experience. But does it properly apply to him? This lecture explores archival findings that complicate the matter by suggesting that the ‘company-keeping’ anecdote refers to a different man altogether—namely Aubrey’s old informant, Beeston.

All are welcome to attend.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Dan Breen at dbreen@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-1014. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.