Canon Club

All events take place at the Mercantile Library (or zoom), on the 12th Story, from 6 – 7:30 pm, unless otherwise noted.

Season subscription only: $60/members, $75/nonmembers. Register via ticketing or call 513-621-0717. Descriptions from Dr. O’Leary below

August 31st: Movie Night in the Stacks: King Lear.

**This event will run longer than discussion meetings: 6-9:00. We will provide some snacks.

It’s back: movie night in the stacks! We’ll kick off our season by gathering together to watch a production of King Lear in the stacks. I’m still picking which production and will update you when it’s been chosen. Viewing this will help set us up to see Cincy Shakes’ production in September and to discuss the play in October.

October 12th: King Lear

The Cincinnati Shakespeare Company is opening their season with King Lear, which runs September 9-October 1. I urge you to go see the play, and I look forward to discussing the text with you in October. Lear is a truly great, truly heart-rending tragedy, one that feels new and newly sorrowful to me every time I read it. After reading Shapiro’s Year of Lear last season, we have more context for this discussion, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

November 9th: Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Continuing our interest in reading adaptations alongside the Shakespeare texts that inspired them, and concluding our autumn of Lear, we’ll read Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres. Winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this novel updates Lear, setting it in a rural American farming empire and taking an unflinching look at growing up with a terrible father. It’s a stunning, revelatory engagement with Shakespeare’s text. (There’s also a very good 1997 film adaptation of the novel, should you be interested.) Content Warning: this book depicts pass sexual abuse of children.

January 25th: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

After a full autumn of Lear, it’s important to lighten things up a bit, and so we turn to that biting social satirist and comedian, Oscar Wilde. The Cincinnati Shakespeare Company is staging Alice Scovell’s humorous sequel, The Rewards of Being Frank, January 27-February 18, so we all agreed it would be fun to revisit Wilde’s original. This is one of my favorite comedies, and I think we’ll have fun looking at it as an inheritor of some of the early stage social comedy we see in the early modern plays we’re looking at for the rest of the season.

March 15th: The Taming of the Shrew

I hope to see you all at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, March 3-25. Right in the middle of the run, we’ll meet to discuss this epic battle of the sexes comedy. It’s a play I struggle with—how to balance the inherent misogyny and violence with the comedy. Is it a play that can be successfully staged in 2023? I believe so, but it’s a challenge to be sure.

April 26th: John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, or The Woman’s Prize

Just a few days after Shakespeare’s (birth?)day, we’ll meet to read what is undoubtedly one of my favorite early modern plays: John Fletcher’s hilarious sequel to Taming of the Shrew—The Tamer Tamed. Written in 1609-10, it imagines Petruchio as a widower on the eve of his second marriage to a lovely young biddable woman who suddenly decides to wreak vengeance on the famous wife tamer. Inspired in part by Lysistrata, this romp is a barrel of laughs and, coincidentally, inspired my dissertation!

May 10th: As You Like It

April 7-29, the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company is staging a production of As You Like It that emphasizes the play’s musical elements. This is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays, and I’m curious to see how CSC’s production expands on that aspect of the text. Hopefully you’ll all have the chance to see the production and join us to discuss the text in our final meeting of the season.