Twilight Talks: John Keats Encounters the Shakespeare Folio

Join Associate Professor Emily Rohrbach of Durham University as she explores Romantic poet John Keats's creative encounter with his predecessor Shakespeare, focusing on the young poet’s engagement with Shakespeare through his facsimile copy of the 1623 folio.

In that book, Keats inscribed an original poem in the space left by the printer between the end of Hamlet and the beginning of King Lear.

John Keats wrote in the early nineteenth century, a time of lively, intersecting historical currents: the rise of literacy rates, the emergence of the professional writer and a hostile reviewing culture, and what one historian has called ‘the industrial revolution of the book’.

This talk will explore the significance of Keats’s inscription by hand in the Shakespeare volume, as the young author sought to imagine his place ‘among the English poets’.