Palm Beach Atlantic University hosts its annual President’s Distinguished Scholar Lecture in October with Dr. David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967.
Dr. Bevington’s lecture titled “The Battle Between Compassion and Envy in As You Like It” is free and open=”open” to the public Monday, Oct. 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the University’s DeSantis Family Chapel, 300 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach.
Dr. Bevington will discuss the role of Christian compassion in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, as well as the play’s answer to Jacques’s famous “All the World’s a Stage” speech.
The lecture will follow a two-weekend run of the Palm Beach Atlantic University Theatre Department’s production of As You Like It. The performances will take place Oct. 4-6 and Oct. 11-13 in the University’s Fern Street Theatre. For information, visit www.pba.edu/performances.
Dr. Bevington’s studies include From “Mankind” to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968) and Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (1985). He is also the editor of Medieval Drama, Houghton Mifflin (1975); The Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 paperback volumes (1988), currently being reedited; The Complete Works of Shakespeare, sixth edition (Longman, 2009); the Oxford Henry IV, Part I (1987); the Cambridge Antony and Cleopatra (1990); and the Arden 3 Troilus and Cressida (1998).
He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions and a senior editor of the Revels Plays, as well as senior editor of The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2002). His latest books include Shakespeare (2002, second edition, 2005); How to Read a Shakespeare Play (2006); This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007); Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008); Shakespeare and Biography (2010); Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011); and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, in seven volumes, with Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson as fellow senior editors (2012).
Dr. Bevington earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard University. He served as an instructor at Harvard from 1959 to 1961, and afterward he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia as an assistant professor. He became a full professor in 1966, and he later served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago for a year before becoming a professor there. He was named the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities in 1985.
In addition to his public lecture, Dr. Bevington will speak at chapel and in classes at Palm Beach Atlantic. He also will give a free lecture on the topic “The Debate about Courtly vs. Country Values in Shakespeare’s As You Like It” at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21.
