Today is the Feast Day of Joan of Arc, a historical figure who has inspired a number of plays, including Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Jane Anderson's Mother of the Maid, and my own Dark Night of the Soul.
History has always been an inspiration for dramatists, and this Saturday another history-inspired play of mine, Snip o' the Shears, will have a staged reading at the Hamilton Grange branch of the New York Public Library.
Snip o' the Shears is based loosely on accounts of Betsy Ross, the Philadelphia-based upholsterer who according to legend sewed the first modern flag of the Uniter States. She will be portrayed this Saturday by Rebecca Ana Peña. Rachael Langton is directing the reading.
Later this summer, I'll be presenting a paper on plays inspired by historical slave revolts. I'll be discussing J.H. Amherst's The Death of Christophe King of Hayti, as well as W.H. Murray's Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack. This will be at a conference by the British Association for Romantic Studies in Glasgow.
That conference will be in July, and then in August I'll be giving a paper online for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on Felicia Hemans' historically inspired play The Vespers of Palermo. Hemans was literally writing about a massacre that occurred in medieval Sicily, but the 1823 play was also referencing the recent turmoil of the French Revolution.
George Gordon Byron wrote dramas inspired by history as well, and this fall I will be speaking on a panel at the annual Curran Symposium, co-sponsored this year by the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Byron Society of America. The roundtable I'll be on will discuss Red Bull Theater's staged reading of Byron's Sardanapalus, about the ancient Assyrian king.
That's a long ways off yet, but I hope you can join me for the reading on Saturday. After that, I'll be off to a conference in Dublin... but more on that later!
