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Shakespeare in Phoenix: Folios, Forgeries, and a Frankenfragment

Thanks to the generosity of Alfred Knight, the Phoenix Public Library owns a substantial, and valuable, set of Shakespeare’s texts from the 1600s as part of the Rare Book Room. But who was Knight? Why and when did he collect Shakespeare? And are the books his will left to ‘the people of Phoenix’ entirely what they seem?

This talk will highlight some of the gems in the Alfred Knight Collection – and some of their mysteries. We’ll also look at the sometimes murky world of book selling and collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries!

Presented by Professor Jonathan Hope

Professor Hope is a specialist in Shakespeare’s language, the history of English, and computer text analysis. He came to ASU and Phoenix from Glasgow, Scotland five years ago. His most recent work has tried to debunk two myths about Shakespeare: that he invented thousands of words, and that he did not know or care about the Copernican revolution in astronomical theory.