Stratford Literary Festival 2024

University of Birmingham and the Stratford Literary Festival

The College of Arts and Law are sponsoring the Spring and Autumn Stratford Literary Festival for 2024. The Festival is one of the most significant literary festivals in the UK, attracting thousands of people a diverse and exciting programme of talks.

Professor Tiffany Stern will be speaking alongside historian Richard Schoch at the Spring Festival, and tickets are now available via the link above right. Details on the event can be found below.

We will have more speakers at the Autumn Festival, and will update this page as and when they are confirmed!

Shakespeare: A window onto his Life and Legacy

Shakespeare’s Birthplace remains one of the most visited sites in the UK despite not writing any of his plays there, and there being nothing inside that once belonged to the man himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself. 

Tiffany Stern, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, will discuss how we invented a sequence for Shakespeare’s plays as a substitute for biography. Raising questions about play order, she will also ask how much we really know about Shakespeare's life.

Tiffany's latest Cambridge book, Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology, is just out. Why not order it? 

And her latest Arden book, Rethinking Theatrical Documents, is open access and you can read it free here.