In collaboration with the C.S. Lewis Fellowship, the Humanities Forum will be hosting Sarah Waters, Assistant Professor of Language and Literature at Sterling College, This Friday (3/21) at 3:30pm in Ruane 105. This talk will uncover the deeply personal reasons why Shakespeare was a critical touchstone in Lewis’s own story through examining Lewis’s engagement with Shakespeare in select works.
“I am driven to literary examples because you, the reader, and I, do not live in the same neighbourhood” – so declares Lewis in his discussion of Affection in The Four Loves. Only a phrase before, he had referenced a Shakespeare play and its titular character. As this talk will show, Lewis frequently turns to Shakespeare as a frame of reference, in significant ways. Outlining some key areas of Lewis’s Shakespeare scholarship, this talk will explore the different ways Lewis engaged with Shakespeare in his wider writings, especially his apologetics, as we uncover some of the deeply personal reasons why Shakespeare becomes a critical touchstone and a key player in Lewis’s own story.
Sarah Waters is an expert in Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis. She regularly speaks internationally and also publishes on both of these writers, sometimes separately and sometimes together. She is currently working on a book on Lewis and Shakespeare, a chapter on Lewis’s work on Shakespeare for the new Routledge Companion to C.S. Lewis as well as an ever-growing handful of side projects including work on the Inklings and Shakespeare; female grief and voice in Shakespearean drama; and a number of publications emerging from some new discoveries she has made at the archives.
