Apr 14
Coolidge Corner Theatre Brookline, MA
TicketsDr. John Ross
Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Shakespeare in Love— Public health in the time of Shakespeare
Program Description
Physician and Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dr. John Ross (author of Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough) discusses Shakespeare's social background and the public health disaster that was early modern London. Ross will address contemporary gossip about Shakespeare, including his involvement in a love triangle resembling that of the Sonnets that was rumored to have genitourinary consequences.
Film Synopsis
The world's greatest ever playwright is young, out of ideas and short of cash, but meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays.
A romantic comedy for the 1990s set in the 1590s, Shakespeare in Love imaginatively unfolds the witty, sexy and timeless tale behind the creation of the greatest love story ever told. A young Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is out of cash and ideas, he meets his ideal woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) and she inspires him to write one of his most famous plays.
Photo credit: Miramax
About the Speaker
John J. Ross is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has a strong interest in literature, the medical humanities, and the history of medicine, and has written a book about writers, their illnesses, and their calamitous treatments, entitled Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2012). He is also one of the editors of Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2017), the major textbook of hospital medicine, now in its second edition.