Panjwani was born in India and raised in Dubai and Kuwait. At 18 years old, she moved to the United Kingdom, where she became a British citizen. She is now a Shakespeare expert who has contributed her research to journals and film festivals and has been invited to deliver talks at prestigious institutions, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Oxford. She is also host and creator of the podcast Women and Shakespeare and author of the book Podcasts and Feminist Shakespeare Pedagogy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), both of which include work from Fordham students. She is currently working on a new introduction for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. 

For the past eight years, Panjwani has served as an adjunct faculty professor at Fordham London. In addition to teaching a Shakespeare course there, Panjwani teaches at Boston University and New York University. 

In a Q&A with Fordham News, Panjwani explained why Shakespeare’s work is important to the average person and how she involves Fordham students in her scholarly work. 

How did you become interested in Shakespeare? 

I grew up watching Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare. I also had a fantastic teacher—a fellow woman of color, Dr. Amina Alyal, who made me feel like people like me could own Shakespeare. 

Why is Shakespeare important to the average person? What can we learn from him? 

When most people think of him, they imagine an old, balding, middle-aged, historical, costumed guy on a pedestal who is not relevant to their lives. This is what some of my students imagine before they come to my class. But that is not how we teach Shakespeare here. In London especially, there are multiple histories of Shakespeare. You of course have the Globe, a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which has been putting on plays since 1977. You have the British Asian company, Tara Arts, which has been doing Shakespeare since before then. There is also a Black theater company called Talawa Theatre, which has been doing Shakespeare since 1991, when they put on Antony and Cleopatra. All of these intersecting histories are important to note. I think students also realize how diverse people’s histories intersect with Shakespeare when they see a woman of color in London teaching them Shakespeare. 

But apart from these several legacies, I also think that Shakespeare is important for the average person because of the conversations that his work enables. A couple of weeks ago, my class went to see an amazing queer adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Shakespeare and Race Festival is opening at the Globe very soon. And our students want to have these conversations: How is Shakespeare relevant to our lives? So we talk about how he is making an appearance in social justice issues, in agency, in issues about gender that are happening today. My focus is always on what Shakespeare can do for us, what he has done for us, and how we can shape Shakespeare to talk about what is important for us today.

What is your favorite Shakespeare play? 

That is such a difficult question for me because there are many favorites, depending on my mood. My current favorite is A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it is overlooked quite a lot. People think it’s a silly play with fairies, but there are actually deeply embedded issues of consent to be explored there, as well as queerness.

In my Shakespeare course, the plays l teach vary according to what is being performed around London. This semester, we studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Hamlet. We also saw a queer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production of The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe, and engaged with a Bollywood movie of Romeo and Juliet in the seminar.

What do you love about Fordham London?  

We have a great community here, including Vanessa Beever, senior director of Fordham London; Mary Bly, chair of Fordham’s English department; our great support staff; and colleagues who make time for each other, despite being adjuncts.

Mary has been a part of this community for a long time, even though she is based in New York. She herself visited our campus to teach the Shakespeare course. Although this was around 8 years ago, she has a great grasp on what Fordham London students need. She has given me feedback on the course and assignment design from time to time. She is also a guest speaker on my podcast Women and Shakespeare.

I have especially found great leadership and collaborative support from Mary and Vanessa. It’s great to see women in these leadership roles because women are often not included in the rooms where decisions about their future are made. It’s a breath of fresh air for my students to see them in these positions, and it gives me hope to be working in an institution that respects women. 

You create podcasts about Shakespeare with your students. How does that work? 

My podcast Women and Shakespeare invites experts, local playwrights, academics, novelists, and actresses—the culture makers of the U.K.—to talk about how Shakespeare is used to amplify the voices of women today and how women are redefining him and his work.

One of my guests, Kathryn Pogson, talked about issues of consent in Richard III and how these are relevant today. Another guest, Doña Croll, told us how she imagined Cleopatra as a sharp political operator as opposed to just sexy and sultry and how the treatment of Cleopatra by the Romans can be compared to the way in which the British press treated Meghan Markle. So they provide nuanced perspectives not only on women characters, but also on how Shakespeare’s plays are pertinent to issues today.

On my podcast, students have a chance to be researchers, interviewers, or producers. They also receive credit on the podcast. I think it’s a very meaningful way for the students to engage with local culture makers. I firmly believe that to be a global citizen, you have to learn how to be a local elsewhere, and this helps them to not only meet local culture makers and learn from them, but also to co-create a resource that is useful for themselves and their communities. I also think this is a great way of decolonizing education because you’re not going somewhere with just the aim of what you can take from them, but also the aim of what you can give back to your academic and social communities. 

What do you hope your students take away from your course? 

Anyone can harness Shakespeare’s cultural power and bring it back to their communities. Shakespeare need not be inaccessible—his work should be made to work for everyone.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

All of those attributes are on display in The Tragedy of Macbeth, director Joel Coen’s bewitching, nightmarish film adaptation of Shakespeare’s proto-psychological crime thriller with Washington in the title role.

The film, shot in black and white on stark, expressionistic sets, casts a spell from the start: We hear the rustling wings of three black birds as they ascend and “hover through the fog and filthy air” of medieval Scotland. Washington’s Macbeth, a war hero, emerges from the fog and, emboldened by a witch’s prophecy, colludes with his wife (played by fellow Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) to assassinate King Duncan and claim the throne.

The film, to be released in theaters on Christmas Day and via AppleTV+ in mid-January, had its premiere across the street from Fordham, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, during the 59th New York Film Festival in September. At a press conference following the screening, Washington, a 1977 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, reflected on his Fordham roots.

“This is a fascinating journey for me,” he said. “I went to school a thousand feet from here and played Othello at 20.”

It’s a theme that came up again on December 15, when Washington was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Right away, the host prompted the actor by sharing a picture of him in his first big role: the title character in a fall 1975 Fordham Theatre production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.

“I was a junior. I thought I was supposed to act mean and be serious,” Washington said.

“Do you have any advice for this kid right here, because he seems pretty confident already?” Colbert asked.

“Ignorance is bliss,” Washington replied, smiling. “That was the first leading role I ever played, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I would go out and peek and look at the audience, you know, count [the people], see if my mom was out there.”

Washington’s mother, who died earlier this year at age 97, was indeed there, he added. “Every night.”

Colbert then listed several of the Shakespeare plays in which Washington has been seen on stage and screen, including a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Coriolanus (1979), the film Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and a Broadway production of Julius Caesar (2005), and asked him how he prepared for his first experience with the Bard.

“After I did The Emperor Jones, I played Othello at Fordham University as well,” Washington said. “At the Lincoln Center library, they had records of the plays, so they had Olivier’s Othello. … I put the headphones on, ‘Oh, my lord,’” he said in a comically high-pitched theatrical voice, to laughter from the audience. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll sing it like this and make it happen, and people seemed to like it.”

Watch Denzel Washington’s December 15 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

From Oct. 1 to 4, hundreds of alumni, family, and friends—from as far as Germany—tuned in for an expanded series of virtual events that drew on some of the best-loved Homecoming traditions, like the 5K Ram Run and tailgate parties, and included a “pub” trivia competition, updates on academic and student life amid COVID-19, and a tribute to the 50th anniversary of a Fordham football milestone.

In addition to joining panels and discussions sponsored by the Office of Alumni Relations, Fordham graduates took to social media, where thousands viewed Homecoming Instagram stories and tweets shared via the @fordhamalumni accounts, and others used the #FordhamHomecoming20 hashtag to post their own messages, including pictures of pets and kids decked out in Fordham gear.

A Forum for FCLC

Things kicked off on Thursday evening with a panel discussion featuring two relative newcomers to the Fordham College at Lincoln Center community: Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., who became dean of the college in August 2019, and Tracyann Williams, Ph.D., who joined FCLC as assistant dean for student support and success last February.

Fordham University Alumni Association Advisory Board member Samara Finn Holland, FCLC ’03, moderated the discussion, during which the deans shared their observations about FCLC students.

“They are an amazing bunch of people,” Auricchio said. “These are students who are not only intelligent and motivated, but they’re really just decent, kind, wonderful human beings.” She recalled several instances of students greeting her when they saw her around the city.

Auricchio noted that political science, economics, and psychology are the three most popular majors among current FCLC students, and the fashion studies minor is growing particularly quickly. She said her office is focused on four areas: connecting to neighbors, enriching courses, enhancing research, and globalizing the curriculum.

Both she and Williams addressed the unique challenges faculty and students face during the pandemic, and Williams noted that part of her job is to help students acknowledge their feelings of disappointment that it’s not a typical academic year, and doing what she can to assist them.

“I am very much interested in always asking students what their needs are and not deciding for them,” she said.

Having worked at other New York City universities before arriving at FCLC, both Auricchio and Williams shared what they think makes Fordham so special.

“I feel as though it’s a unique place where students can come be part of a deeply caring, close-knit community that will support them and help them as they branch out into the city,” Auricchio said. “And to me, it’s just the best of both worlds.”

Pub Trivia at Home

Alumnus Tim Tubridy, FCRH ’99, and his brother, James Tubridy, co-owners of DJs @ Work, hosted a virtual pub trivia session on Friday night. Attendees were invited to answer 10 Fordham-themed questions, either individually or as teams.

The first question of the night delved into a bit of the University’s architectural history: “For what church were the stained-glass windows in the University church intended?” Father McShane delivered both the question and answer (St. Patrick’s Cathedral, when it was located on Mulberry Street), joking that he’d been imagining Jeopardy! theme music playing as he gave contestants time to respond.

Other fun facts unearthed during the Q&A included how many books are housed in the Fordham libraries (more than 2 million), how many acres the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses encompass (8 and 85, respectively), and how many live ram mascots have lived on campus (28).

At the end of the hour-long session, three teams were tied for first place with a whopping 20,000 points each.

A Virtual 5K Ram Run

While the 5K Ram Run is usually held at Rose Hill during Homecoming weekend, this year, alumni were invited to run, jog, or walk a five-kilometer trek of their own and to share photos on social media. Runners were also encouraged to share their finishing times by taking screenshots of their running apps, and the Office of Alumni Relations will be sending prizes to those who submitted their times.

Justin LaCoursiere, FCRH ’12, posted a photo from Central Park and said, “Fordham Homecoming looks a little different this year, but I’m still taking part in some fun [virtual]activities, like the Annual 5K Ram Run.”

Academic and Student Life Amid the Pandemic

On Saturday morning, a panel of Fordham administrators and faculty discussed the continued uncertainty of COVID-19, its impact on current and prospective Fordham students, and how they’re working to build and strengthen a sense of community under the circumstances. The conversation was moderated by Michael Griffin, associate vice president for alumni relations.

J. Patrick Hornbeck, professor of theology, secretary of the Faculty Senate, and special faculty advisor to the provost for strategic planning, said that soon after Fordham canceled in-person classes and shifted to a virtual format this past March, faculty began planning to avoid such abrupt disruptions for the fall semester. That’s how Fordham developed its flexible hybrid model, which mixes online and in-person learning.

“We would provide opportunities for students to learn and for faculty to teach in several different modalities,” he said. “The idea was, we did not know how things were going to go week-by-week and month-by-month. How could we deliver [a Fordham education]regardless of the way the pandemic would play out?”

During the panel, Patricia Peek, Ph.D., dean of undergraduate admission, said that some of the changes implemented this year, such as virtual guided tours and information sessions, could become permanent to help make Fordham more accessible in the long term.

“I think, even when we’re fully on the ground, we will now always have virtual events because they’re providing so many opportunities and access for students,” she said.

Clint Ramos, head of design and production for Fordham Theatre, noted that the shift “was especially challenging for theatre because our education … is really experiential and a lot of our pedagogy is founded on the ability to gather.” But he said the program has met these challenges head-on, pointing to opportunities for creativity, like a collaborative effort he initiated with theater programs at Princeton, Georgetown, SUNY Purchase, and UMass Amherst. The One Flea Spare Project allows students to virtually attend classes at other universities and collaborate with each other on projects on multiple platforms based on themes in One Flea Spare, a 1995 play by Naomi Wallace set in a plague-ravaged London during the 17th century.

Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion, spoke about creative ways in which students have tried to maintain a sense of community, whether or not they’re studying on campus. This has included hosting socially distanced outdoor events, such as a “silent disco” on the plaza at Lincoln Center or a musical performance from the Coffey Field bleachers at Rose Hill, for an online audience and a limited number of students in person.

He also said that the pandemic has sharpened students’ focus on social justice, in particular the calls for racial equality that were revitalized this summer.

“Energy that usually is exhausted on other things was nailed into Black Lives Matter in a way where folks who have privilege are just realizing, ‘Hey, these things are happening,’ whereas folks on the margins have always experienced these things.”

Matos said this has spurred action at the University, including an anti-racism plan from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. And he said the offices of student and multicultural affairs are continuing to offer a variety of programming to keep students engaged. One of the benefits of having virtual or hybrid events is that more students can attend.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for someone to have to choose one campus or the other or we may be offering something on one campus and not the other,” he said. “But virtually, now people can attend in any capacity.”

Shakespeare and Pop Culture

Shakespearean scholar Mary Bly, Ph.D., chair of Fordham’s English department, led a mini-class titled “Pop Romeo & Juliet” on Saturday afternoon. Attendees were encouraged to watch Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet, prior to the class, during which Bly delved into the afterlife of the teen duo and their famous star-crossed love.

“Sociologists have made a pretty reasonable case for the argument that Romeo and Juliet actually changed the way we think about love in the Western world, which is very interesting,” Bly said.

Joined by English professor Shoshana Enelow, Bly discussed the idea of cultural capital, looking at how the characters of Romeo and Juliet have survived and how they’ve been transformed in modern adaptations, other films, music, and advertisements. She and Enelow drew parallels to West Side Story, the Beatles, and even a Taylor Swift music video, inviting attendees to write in impressions and examples of their own using Zoom’s Q&A feature.

An Afternoon with Athletics

Fordham sports fans attended two athletics-focused virtual events on Saturday afternoon, including a conversation between Ed Kull, interim director of athletics, and Head Football Coach Joe Conlin.

While the football season, along with those of other fall sports, has been pushed back to spring 2021, winter sports like basketball are planning to get started in late November. Kull highlighted some of the work that has been done to facilities during the pandemic, noting that not having students around for games has allowed several projects to be completed earlier than expected. Among the upgrades that players, coaches, and fans will now find are a new floor for the Frank McLaughlin Family Basketball Court in Rose Hill Gym, renovations to the strength and conditioning and team medicine spaces, and new offices for football staff.

As his team prepares to play in the spring, Conlin discussed the changes to workouts and practices they’ve had to adopt in the time of COVID-19, including health monitoring, socially distanced weight training, and wearing masks under their helmets during practice. Although he and his staff are not allowed to recruit high school players in person this year, they have been talking to recruits over Zoom and reviewing videos to assess their strength and athleticism.

“It’s been challenging at times, but it’s also been a lot of fun,” he said of this new way of doing things on and off the field. “We’ll continue to make it work for as long as we have to.”

Kull noted that out of the 44 seniors across spring sports whose final season was interrupted by cancellations last spring, 19 have decided to come back for a fifth year of eligibility.

Later that afternoon, the Tubridy brothers returned to host a virtual tailgate party that featured a welcome from Father McShane, trivia, performances by the Fordham band from the Coffey Field bleachers, and video updates from departments and groups like the Fordham University Alumni Association, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and the Mimes and Mummers Alumni Association.

Kull and Conlin also returned for a pre-recorded video from the gravesite of Fordham graduate and NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, an appropriate lead-in to the tailgate’s final portion: a roundtable discussion with nine players from Fordham’s 1970 football team, which defeated Georgetown 50 years ago during that year’s homecoming game, just weeks after Lombardi’s death.

Moderated by WFUV’s Emmanuel Berbari, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, the players recalled the dominant ground game displayed by the Rams in their 39-17 win over the Hoyas, led by Eric Dadd’s 235 rushing yards and three touchdowns. Kevin Sherry, GABELLI ’70, who played offensive tackle, noted that Georgetown had beaten Fordham the previous year, and the Rams were looking for revenge.

Perhaps an even greater motivation for the team was the emotional pregame scene, when Lombardi’s widow, Marie, his brother Joseph, and the remaining members of Fordham’s “Seven Blocks of Granite” offensive line from Lombardi’s playing days honored the Fordham and NFL legend, who had died of colon cancer on September 3. The 1970 season also marked the return of varsity football to Fordham.

Peter “Pino” Carlesimo, FCRH ’71, the team’s starting quarterback, was among the panelists. “I think the importance of the game can be summed up very easily when I when I looked at that film and I saw my uncle Pete [Carlesimo, FCRH ’40, Fordham’s athletic director at the time] escorting Mrs. Lombardi off the field and tears coming down her eyes,” he said. “It was probably the biggest game I played in my career.”

Closing with Centeredness and Prayer

On Sunday morning, Carol Gibney, associate director of campus ministry for spiritual and pastoral ministries and director of spiritual life, leadership, and service, led a session focusing on “integrating Ignatian spirituality with the practice of yoga.” During the 45-minute practice, Gibney used breathwork to break down the word “grace,” infusing the ideas of gratitude, reflection, affirmation, centeredness, and enthusiasm and excitement into the yoga flow.

The virtual—but still communal—Homecoming weekend came to a close with a livestream of Mass from University Church, concelebrated by Father McShane and Damian O’Connell, S.J., alumni chaplain.

—Additional reporting by Kelly Kultys and Sierra McCleary-Harris

For Lind, a 2005 Fordham Theatre grad, the Shakespearean role is somewhat of a homecoming. One of her first plays was a middle-school production of Twelfth Night in which she and her twin sister, Christina Bennett Lind, FCLC ’05, played twins Sebastian and Viola. And in 2010, she appeared in both of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park productions—as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and as Jessica, daughter to Al Pacino’s Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice. But while those two characters were wide-eyed ingénues, Lind’s Desdemona is more complex.

“What’s been really interesting doing this production is that Desdemona is often thought of as naive, that she’s blind to the dangers she’s entering upon, and she’s so pure that the accusation of infidelity shatters her,” Lind says. “I think on closer look [at the text], she makes a lot of choices that aren’t innocent, with full knowledge of the risks she’s taking. She disappoints and breaks her father’s heart. She lies sometimes to Othello [about losing the handkerchief, for example]. She’s not a saint. She’s bold. And she really has a lot of opportunities to be surprising.”

Lind’s interpretation has pleased reviewers—The New York Times said it “was a pleasure to see a Desdemona so full of verve and increasing, chin-raising indignation. Ms. Lind has given us an unblushing bride who appreciates her own worth,” while assuring audiences that her “love for Othello is never in doubt.”

It has also resonated with theatergoers, including Rachael Hilliard, GSAS ’18, who recently earned a Ph.D. in English at Fordham, completing her dissertation on the intersection of Shakespeare, new media, and performance. “Desdemona can so easily fade into the background,” Hilliard says, “a Venetian ornament to adorn her father’s house, then Othello’s. Lind’s Desdemona, though, is feisty and even playful with Othello. Even in her (spoiler alert) death scene, she fights tooth and nail for another breath: This is no dying swan scene.”

Despite the inevitable ending, Lind’s portrayal is the perfect Desdemona for the current moment, when a greater awareness for women’s diverse voices and experiences has entered the mainstream—including through the #MeToo movement, which Lind has supported. “I often think of women as having muzzles on, the kind they give to really violent dogs,” Lind says. “What’s been a great change to watch is seeing women taking the muzzles off a little. I think that’s the biggest change we could have made as women. So many things have been taken away from us out of the fear to speak out, or the fear of being punished, which has happened in so many cases.

“I’ve noticed that there’s a little bit more respect for what experience a particular woman is having now,” Lind says. “I feel proud to be a part of a lot of conversations that were being had. It’s taught me a lot about really listening more closely to people who have no power.”

It’s something Lind has been doing for a long time through her acting, and what drew her to the profession in the first place—communicating different human experiences. It’s also why she found her philosophy minor at Fordham so helpful. “I don’t think I knew the value of it until I graduated, but it is so informative for my acting and my artistic perspective, for figuring out the basics of making ideas articulable,” Lind explains. “It gave me a real respect for asking the right questions.”

Those questions are particularly important when Lind is acting in a period piece, as she did recently for her starring role in TV’s Turn: Washington’s Spies and in her work in Shakespeare in the Park. It’s something that allows her to see the tragedy of Othello in a more complex way.

“It can be frustrating as a modern woman to feel the injustices of the social restrictions of the time period so deeply,” Lind says. “But Desdemona gets to express how unjust the world can be to her, and to Othello as well. I think the tragedy of the play is that we get to see the potential of what that couple could have been. I think they’re equals in a big way, and it’s such a tragedy to see that fall apart.”

Lind was grateful for the opportunity to take on such a complex role, and to return to the Delacorte, the outdoor theater that’s home to the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park.

“It’s challenging in lots of ways—there are airplanes and raccoons and stuff that you don’t have to deal with at normal theaters,” she says. “But it’s magical. There’s a real supernatural quality about the park. It’s fun and unexpected. And it’s one of the best experiences that I think you can have as an actor in New York—it’s a real thrill to work there.”

Othello ends its run on June 24. This season of Shakespeare in the Park continues with Twelfth Night, running from July 17 through August 19.

Ask anyone about their work in a forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and chances are very good that they’ll explain that they’re working on “The Scottish Play” instead.

On Thursday, Nov. 10 at noon, Clare Asquith, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, will explore the origins of the widely-held superstition that misfortune will befall anyone who speaks the name of the play aloud, at a lecture at the Rose Hill campus.

Asquith, the author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (Public Affairs, 2006) and an expert on Catholic elements in Shakespeare’s plays, will discuss the idea that the causes behind the “curse” are rooted in Catholicism, and that the Bard and his compatriots were uneasy about performing the play from the very beginning.

Her appearance, part of the St. Edmund Campion Institute’s Hobart-Ives lecture series, will take place in Walsh Library’s Flom Auditorum, on the Rose Hill campus. Asquith is no stranger to Fordham, having delivered the inaugural Hobart-Ives lecture in 2013.

For more information, visit the institute’s website.

“In the last years of Elizabeth’s rule people believed something was rotten in England—though perhaps not rotten enough to justify regicide,” as in Hamlet, “a play inordinately preoccupied with king-killing,” said Marotti, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Wayne State University.

In his lecture “Shakespeare, Tyrannicide, and the Papal Deposing Power,” Marotti laid out the prominent religious and political struggles of late 16th-century England and discussed how they informed Shakespeare’s plays.

“William Shakespeare repeatedly dramatized king-killing and the planning of king-killing,” Marotti said, a dangerous act in a country that could stretch the definition of treason to include even thinking about the death of a monarch. “Perhaps this is one reason why the act itself often takes place offstage, instead of being presented vividly onstage for absorption in the memory and imagination of spectators.” Regicide is depicted or alluded to in many of the bard’s plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, with threats to nobles in Henry IV, Part 1 and The Tempest.

William ShakespeareIn Richard II, for example, Shakespeare depicts a weak monarch, King Richard II, who is succeeded by a strong leader, King Henry IV. Henry takes the crown following an onstage assassination “prompted by a clear signal from the new king that [Richard] needed to be killed—though Henry pretended he had expressed no such wish,” said Marotti.

Richard II was written and performed during an especially tumultuous time in England, when assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth abounded. It was also a time of great tension between Catholics and Protestants. In 1570, Pope Pius V issued Regnans in Excelsis, a papal bull formally excommunicating the Protestant queen, declaring her a heretic and absolving her subjects of any allegiance to her.

Marotti said that the papal bull was “an extreme case of [the Catholic Church]using the power the papacy claimed it had,” the power to exert both religious and political influence in England. But it was “a watershed event” for the country, contributing to “the nascent historical narrative of England as a fundamentally Protestant nation threatened by international Catholicism.”

When Pope Gregory XIII came to power in 1572, he tried to ease the bull’s harsh effects on English Catholics, who feared retaliation from authorities. Marotti said that Catholics were urged by the papacy to continue practicing their religion, but, if possible, should work to overthrow, or even kill, the queen as a “heretical tyrant.”

The queen was haunted by worries of assassination. Religious fanaticism in the late 16th century brought about the deaths of several European rulers: Henry III and Henry IV of France and William of Orange. But killing a reigning monarch, because it was both morally wrong and sacrilegious, said Marotti, required compelling political and theological justification.“On neither side was toleration or religious pluralism a desirable policy since all conceived of church and state as inextricably bound,” Marotti said.Where did Shakespeare’s sympathies lie? Recent scholars conclude that it’s impossible to determine whether he was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic based on his writings, said Marotti, but the plays do show sensitivity to his religiously mixed audiences.

“He consistently avoided crude religious or political propagandizing,” Marotti said. “Political resistance, regicide, and tyrannicide were for him good dramatic materials, but they led him to explore their human, social, moral, and religious dimensions and to engage his audience in this effort.”

Four hundred years later, Marotti said, the playwright’s words continue to test theatergoers’ moral imagination.

“The prompts are Shakespeare’s; the conclusions we reach are ours.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Department of English, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. It marked Marotti’s first time back on the Rose Hill campus since 1961, when he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He spent part of the day touring the campus and meeting with students at the University and at Fordham Preparatory School, his high school alma mater.

“I spent eight years here and they did leave an indelible mark on me,” he said before his lecture in Tognino Hall. “I learned how to study, how to work hard, and those qualities …. have stayed with me since that time.”

— Rachel Buttner

Asquith said she derived inspiration for her talk, “Shakespeare and the Image of Holiness,” while her husband was a diplomat in Russia during the Cold War. She noticed anti-communist allusions being directed into classic plays, such as in the works of Anton Chekhov.

Despite her 20th-century inspiration, Asquith said that if scholars of Shakespeare approached his texts “by looking forward from the Middle Ages rather than backward from the 21st century” they would find a similar subtext—in this case a coded commentary on Catholics living under the tyranny of England’s Reformation.

“Shakespeare wrote at a time when the subject of religion was prohibited on the stage in England,” said Asquith. 

Nevertheless, touches of “Catholic holiness” pop up in the most unexpected ways, she said. She noted that Shakespeare often used the “discarded language of medieval piety,” which was associated with Catholicism and was banned.

Citing certain scenes in his plays that “can only be described as the actual experience of holiness itself,” Asquith argued that Catholics could not fail to recognize ritualized motifs in the language. She cited, for example, the final act in The Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and Jessica repeat the phrase “In such a night,” which Asquith noted occurs the same number of times as the very similar phrase Haec nox est in the Exultant prayer.

Asquith argued that examples of holiness were not merely decorative, but were “insistent pointers to what lies within … a buried layer of meaning in which the concept of holiness takes on physical forms and is actually embodied in certain characters.”

“‘Divine’ Desdemona (wife of Othello) has distinctive Catholic attributes, and is associated not just with the chaste bride of Christ, but with the figure of Mary, the mother of God,” she said. 

Asquith said Cassio’s praise of Desdemona has the distinct ring of the rosary: “Hail to the lady!/And the grace of heaven/Before, behind thee, and on every hand,/Enwheel thee round!”

Desdemona is not alone among the “peerless brides” representing Christ’s Church in Shakespeare’s plays, she said. She found six, including Lavinia in Titus Adronicus, whose chopped-off hands and cut-out tongue parallel the mutilation of the statues of the Virgin, which were vandalized in much the same manner at the time.

In closing, Asquith shifted her attention from Shakespeare’s plays to his Sonnet 124, in which he “commits unequivocally and personally to this timeless, universal figure of holiness.” She gave a line-by-line analysis of the time-centric poem, with a particular concentration on the temporal quality of England, which had already seen four heads of state change the course of religion in the previous forty years.

“If my dear love were but the child of state / it might, for fortune’s bastard, be unfathered,” she read from the poem’s beginning. Asquith said it was Shakespeare’s way of observing that the religion of a temporal state can only be temporal. 

“Perhaps, given the occasional presence of red-hot political poems like these . . . it is not surprising that the sonnets ran to just one edition,” she said, also noting that the sonnets had been published by Thomas Thorpe, a controversial figure who held “shadowy connections with the leader of the English Jesuits.” 

“However harmless the portrayal of the beautiful, holy, universal bride may seem to us now, when Shakespeare staged [his characters]for the court, he was playing with fire,” she said.
The Hobart-Ives lecture series focuses on contemporary Catholic thinkers in a pluralistic society.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s_ZzUM1EIho

LDA is a fully accredited, 14-week intensive theatre programme at the Fordham University London Centre in Kensington Square (located at Heythrop College, University of London). March 1 is the application deadline for Fall 2011. The most up-to-date application forms are available at: www.fordham.edu/LDA. Completed forms can be emailed to [email protected].

That would be Heather Lind and Christina Bennett Lind (both FCLC ’05), who played twin siblings Sebastian and Viola in their eighth-grade production of the comedy.

No jest, though. Heather and Christina are twin sisters, and this past summer, they earned big roles on stage and screen. Heather performed in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice. And Christina is playing Bianca Montgomery on ABC’s long-running daytime drama All My Children.

Heather earned her roles last spring, while completing her M.F.A. in acting at NYU, and began three months of intense rehearsals for the plays, which ran in repertory in June and July at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

“You start to think in iambic pentameter,” says Heather, who performed opposite Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice. “But I feel lucky to be consumed by it. You don’t get a chance to do Shakespeare that often, and to work here [at the Delacorte]has always been a huge dream.”

In Los Angeles, Christina made another kind of debut, as the daughter of Erica Kane, the character played by daytime legend Susan Lucci, MC ’68. New to L.A. and the realm of soap operas—“a whole alien universe of beautiful people”—Christina’s experiencing some of the fan frenzy that follows, mostly “tweets with bits of encouragement” or free advice, like “‘you should be meaner to David,’” a character on All My Children.

Raised in Guilderland, N.Y., the twins embraced the arts from early on. Their father is a painter and an educator at a museum and their mother is a ballet and nursery school teacher. Both sisters dreamed of being in New York and together chose to enroll in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where they majored in theatre performance and studied abroad—Christina in Orvieto, Italy, and Heather at the London Dramatic Academy.

“There was never any fallback plan,” Christina says.

The two tight-knit sisters also share an amiable case of sibling rivalry.

“There’s always a sense of competition and mutual respect,” Heather says. “It’s been easier to cheer each other on when each person is having their own successes. We’re very lucky.”

– Rachel Buttner