Dr. Scott Lucas
Professor of English, The Citadel
Scott Lucas is a Professor of English at The Citadel, where he has taught since 1998. He received his PhD from Duke University and is the author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation(University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). In addition he is the author of nearly twenty articles on a range of topics in Renaissance Literature and the English Reformation and he has given numerous scholarly papers at conferences around the world. While he has researched well-known authors like Shakespeare and Spenser, he has been a champion of lesser known authors of the period as well.
Laura Rose
Artistic and Education Director of Holy City Shakespeare
Laura Rose is an experienced stage and film actor, director, and educator. She earned an MA from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon (1993), where her studies included not only criticism and performance history but also acting workshops with the acclaimed coaches at theRoyal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Professor Stanley Wells, Co-Editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare (1986) and later Director of the Institute, advised her thesis, Teaching Shakespeare: Addressing Stereotypes and Prejudice in Othello and Taming of the Shrew. She is currently pursuing her PhD as a split location researcher, living part of each year in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her dissertation, supervised by Institute Director Professor Michael Dobson, examines the rhetoric of performance and productions of Richard III.
In addition to her scholarly activities Ms. Rose has performed Shakespeare and Jacobean roles at Holy City Shakespeare, The Shakespeare Institute, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, DC), the College of Charleston (Summer Shakespeare Project), Theatre/VERV, and St. Andrews College (NC). Locally, she has acted in productions for PURE Theatre, Footlight Players, and South of Broadway Theatre. She has starred or appeared in several films (including one screened at the Cannes Film Festival, 2004), guest starred in a History Channel television documentary, and played the lead in a television series pilot considered by the SyFy network. She has taught Theatre at Trident Technical College, the College of Charleston, and St. Andrews College, where she also directed.
“Women of Will” argues that to know William Shakespeare, you must know his women. Tina Packer, one of the country’s leading experts in Shakespeare and the founder of Shakespeare & Company, shows that the poet’s imagination develops and deepens until finally the women, his creative knowledge and a sense of a larger spiritual good come together in his late plays, making clear that when women and men are equal in status and sexual passion, they can — and do — change the world.
Packer shows that Shakespeare wrote the women of plays such as “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “The Comedy of Errors” as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no definable independent thought, virgins on the pedestal. As Shakespeare turns his attention to the extraordinary Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet,” Packer perceives a large shift. Suddenly, Shakespeare’s women have depth of character, motivation and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to present women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, embodying their voices, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active and sexual as any of his male characters. Packer, with co-star Nigel Gore, examines and performs.