Talk: When Life Is a Shipwreck: Key Passages in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth Night is a play about transitions and transitioning, about passages and passing. What skills, virtues, and capacities do the twins need to find their way along the shoreline of life, and back to each other? In this lecture, scholar and dramaturg Julia Reinhard Lupton examines key passages in Twelfth Night that illuminate the navigation of life changes and social bodies at the heart of Shakespeare’s most beautiful and sonorous romantic comedy.  Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine and Interim Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute. She also co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center and serves as Dramaturg for the New Swan Shakespeare Festival. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Dwelling and Thinking with Shakespeare. Her edited collections address topics such as Shakespeare and virtue, Shakespeare and hospitality, and Shakespeare and wisdom literature. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is a frequent teacher in the community. She is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and virtue.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and the Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment   

Image: Twelfth Night, New Swan Shakespeare Festival, University of California, Irvine, 2024