Shakespeare & Social Justice: Shakespeare's Tragedies by Robert N Watson

Join us for the launch of Shakespeare's Tragedies: What Makes Them Great by Robert N Watson!

This will be a lively discussion between Watson and emeritus lecturer Steve Dickey about the lasting power of Shakespeare's works and how their messages resonate today.

About the participants:

Robert N. Watson is Professor of English at UCLA, where he won the university’s top teaching prize. For years, hundreds of students filled Harvard’s biggest classrooms for his Shakespeare lectures. He has been a Fellow at Oxford and Cambridge, a Shakespeare commentator on NPR and the BBC, a poet in The New Yorker, and author of prize-winning books on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture.

An emeritus lecturer in the UCLA English Department, Stephen Dickey has taught, lectured, and published about Shakespeare, 16th century poetry, American interest in Shakespeare in the Civil War era, and Beat Generation literature. In 2016 he curated the Bard Goes West exhibition at the Los Angeles Central Library.

About the book:

A lively and provocative introduction to Shakespeare's five major tragedies, revealing their profoundly sympathetic and illuminating exploration of human experience.

Shakespeare's Tragedies illuminates the majestic beauties and subtle insights of the great playwright's greatest works. Building from a helpful introduction of each tragedy, and progressing to advanced new interpretations, Watson reveals what these famous plays offer us as we confront the heartbreaking aspects of life and the redeeming virtues of our flawed humanity.

Watson shows Romeo and Juliet providing dreamy romance, but also exploring the fears of sexual violence that Juliet must heroically overcome, in a play that marries comedy to tragedy, as love and death intertwine. Analyzing Hamlet's centuries-long worldwide fame, Watson shows how it speaks to our Information (and Disinformation) Age, and why the conventional understanding of the most famous six syllables in all of literature—"To be or not to be"—is misguided and even dangerous.

Tracing the intertwined roles of race, religion, and sexuality in Othello, Watson explores the deep psychological roots of villainy, and shows how the play articulates the tragic costs of believing that love (from a person or a deity) must be bought or deserved, rather than embraced as a miracle. King Lear amplifies those warnings, explodes many complacent certainties, and imposes an ending so multiply shocking that it was hidden for 150 years.

Watson demonstrates how the verbal details of Macbeth produce its psychological intensity and its relentlessly haunting aura, while also teaching environmentalist lessons and lamenting the inescapable double-bind of our ambitions, as individuals and as a species. The book concludes with a rousing advocacy for Shakespeare as an enduring force—across races, nations, genders, and generations—for understanding and justice.

The culmination of Robert N. Watson's distinguished career as a scholar and teacher, Shakespeare's Tragedies explains, in fresh, accessible, and moving ways, why multitudes have treasured this playwright's tragic masterpieces for centuries.