Tuesday, November 8 at 7 PM

Kennedy Center award-winning playwright and theatre producer Ron Song Destro will offer a lively examination of authentic Elizabethan primary source documents, plus additional narration by Sir Derek Jacobi, based upon years of research and a series of lectures Professor Destro has given at various venues, including Harvard University, City College of New York and Chautauqua Institution.

Siding with many of the world’s greatest authors, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James and Mark Twain, Destro sets out to disprove the traditional theory that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare came from the pen of the humble man from Stratford-upon-Avon. He proposes a different author, who used the name “Will Shake Spear” as a clever pseudonym. In addition to well-known writers, proponents of this theory include world-renowned theatre people such as Orson Welles, Leslie Howard, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Michael York, and former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London Mark Rylance, as well as several U. S. Supreme Court Justices. The theory is also the subject of the new film Anonymous.

Professor Destro's presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with award-winning Shakespeare author Hank Whittemore, and Shakespeare on the Sound Managing Director Emily Bryan.

Additional parking for evening and weekend Library programs on Thorndal Circle (behind Nielsen's).