Speakers and Lectures

Professor Katy Stavreva will present “Patching the Peace with ‘the Billingsgate Seed’: The Public Penance of Unquiet Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries.” This lecture will explore the last speech of Shakespeare’s famous “shrew,” Katharina Minolta, as dramatic equivalent to the public penance, a punishment meted out by ecclesiastical courts from the era to convicted scolds. Katharina’s rhetorical and physical performance exceeds its regulatory constraints in multiple ways.