On Monday April 21, Easter Monday, Mayflower Bookshop hosts her annual commemoration of the Bard, on the day closest to his death date and (probable) birthday, April 23. Consisting of both commemoration and a lecture in our series Children’s Classics, we offer the following  programme:

16.00    Meeting point at Mayflower Bookshop

16.05    Walk to sonnet 30 lead by Leo van Zanen

16.10    Commemoration by Freek Bouricius (Mayflower Bookshop) and Leo van Zanen

16.20    Walk back to Mayflower Bookshop

16.30    Lecture by Wim Tigges on Children in Shakespeare

16.55    Performance of a scene from The Merry Wives of Winsor by the Mayflower Theatre Company

Shakespeare’s drama is far from child’s play or juvenile literature. Yet, as early as 1807 Charles and Mary Lamb as well as Thomas and Harriet Bowdler found it worth their while to prepare a number of plays for a youthful readership, by retelling them or cleaning them up. Shakespeare’s child characters often don’t end well: they may die, like the young princes in Richard III, or disappear from sight and suffer for a long time, like Marina in Pericles. However, sometimes they play a funny role, like the little grammar-school pupil William Page from The Merry Wives of Windsor — perhaps the youthful self-image of a certain William S. from Stratford Upon Avon…?