25 September 2025 - 25 September 2025
5:30PM - 6:30PM
Museum of Archaeology
Free and all welcome
Join Associate Professor Emily Rohrbach of Durham University as she explores Romantic poet John Keats's creative encounter with his predecessor Shakespeare, focusing on the young poet’s engagement with Shakespeare through his facsimile copy of the 1623 folio. In that book, Keats inscribed an original poem in the space left by the printer between the end of Hamlet and the beginning of King Lear.
The image shows part of a page from Keats’s copy of Shakespeare on which he inscribed a sonnet.
John Keats wrote in the early nineteenth century, a time of lively, intersecting historical currents: the rise of literacy rates, the emergence of the professional writer and a hostile reviewing culture, and what one historian has called ‘the industrial revolution of the book’.
This talk will explore the significance of Keats’s inscription by hand in the Shakespeare volume, as the young author sought to imagine his place ‘among the English poets’.
Free and open to all. Please book via Eventbrite or by calling Palace Green Library on 0191 334 2932.
Associate Professor in English Literature 1660-1832
Emily Rohrbach (PhD, Boston University) teaches and writes about British and transatlantic Romanticisms, narrative theory, literature and historiography, aesthetics and politics, the poetics of time, and the materiality and literary imagination of the codex book.
Palace Green LibraryPalace Green Durham DH1 3RN
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