WU-mester Event -- Shakespeare's Birthday

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For the WU-mester event I attended, it was simply our celebration for Shakespeare’s birthday. During the celebration event itself, I expected Dr. Sperrazza to talk about Shakespeare’s plays and how they affect us in a modern-day context, much like we have been doing in class this semester. I was pleasantly surprised that she did not do that or really talk about Shakespeare’s “greatness” at all, even though we were at a celebration for his birthday.

I really enjoyed Dr. Sparrazza’s presentation as a whole. I have yet to take English Lit 1, so I was rather uneducated on the author’s she discussed as a whole. First of all, I love hearing about early female authors due to the fact that they were all pretty badass. They were sneaky with their writing because of societal expectations almost forced upon them of being mothers, not to mention the restriction of education because of their gender.

Out of the three authors introduced in the presentation, my favorite was Margaret Cavendish. Her novel The Blazing World seemed to be way ahead of its time and, she kind of is “sticking it to the man” in a sense. Most women of the time wrote poems and while Cavendish did that too, they were about science, nature, and politics, topics that women usually did not discuss. She was doing all of this simply to “pass her time.” While there are hundreds of works written about utopian societies everywhere today, Brave New World and The Giver to name a few, Cavendish was the first noted woman to write in this type of genre.

The thing that stuck with me most about the Cavendish presentation was the comment made by English author Virginia Woolf. Woolf basically is a hater on everything that Cavendish did (not cool, Virginia). She states that Cavendish’s lack of education and undisciplined writing does not benefit the audience reading her work. I was extremely surprised by these critiques.

Overall, I really enjoyed Dr. Sperrazza’s presentation. I learned a ton of information about early female writers of the “Shakespearean” era that I had had been discredited for their accomplishments of the past. Even though we have the resources today to allow us to explore works of the three authors discussed, we are still very limited in the accessibility of the information, as well as the lack of in-depth knowledge or research done about the authors’ works.

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