“The first time I read a play by Shakespeare, I was twelve and had a bad case of the flu. I’m convinced that this was the best possible introduction to a writer—and a historical period—whose difficulty is often downplayed by adherents of the Shakespeare-is-universal school of thought. Mildly delirious with a fever of 103, I wasn’t bothered by the fact that I couldn’t understand what half the characters were saying. I simply let the language carry me. It was a perfect reading experience, entirely free and entirely strange. I try to recapture my twelve-year-old giddiness in my classroom and my own reading and writing.”- Lina Wilder

• Shakespeare
• Renaissance Drama
• 20th-Century and postcolonial drama
• Performance studies

Lina Perkins Wilder teaches courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and the “early modern” period of English literature, as well as a Freshman Seminar, Literature and/as Memory, and other introductory courses.

Her course, Shakespeare In Performance, sets Shakespeare alongside parodies and re-writings of the plays, from Forbidden Planet to Benjamin Britten to Tom Stoppard to The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged). Before coming to Connecticut College, Wilder taught at Carleton College, where she developed a course on violence in Renaissance drama (including a class session with a fight choreographer) that she hopes to teach again soon.

She currently teaches these other courses: Shakespeare: The Late Plays, and a Freshman Seminar, Literature and/as Memory.

Wilder recently published “Toward a Shakespearean ‘Memory Theater’: Romeo, the Apothecary, and the Performance of Memory” in Shakespeare Quarterly (Summer 2005). She has also published an essay on The Rez Sisters, a play by the Native Canadian playwright Tomson Highway. Essays in progress examine the correlation between Bottom’s changing speech tags (the names that identify the speaker in a play script) in early editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his changing social roles, especially that of actor; the mutilation of Julius Caesar’s body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and other Renaissance texts; dead bodies and wax effigies in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi; and myth and (bad) memory in Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. Wilder has presented papers at conferences of the Renaissance Society of America, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

In addition to these essays, Wilder is currently at work on a book manuscript, “Shakespeare’s Memory Theater.”  “Shakespeare’s Memory Theater” emphasizes the structural effect on English drama of a new phenomenon in the early modern period: subjectivity.

Throughout Shakespeare’s plays, characters like Juliet’s Nurse, Romeo, Falstaff, Hamlet, Miranda, and Caliban step back from the action and recall things that the audience didn’t witness: an apothecary, an incident from youth, a play, an old jester. The independent characters created through such recollections seem familiar to us today because we’re used to thinking of characters in plays as “people” with their own past, inner lives, etc. But this would have been very new to Shakespeare’s audiences, who were more interested in disconnected displays of sadness, anger, or joy than in coherent character development. Theater critics of the period tried to restrain playwrights to the Aristotelian “unities,” arguing that a play should confine itself to one place, one action, and no more than twenty-four hours’ time. But the early modern English theater is a theater of excess above all: an excess of personality, an excess of space and time. “Shakespeare’s Memory Theater” shows how, through the medium of memory, Shakespeare’s plays mold such excess into a dramatic form of incredible depth and poignancy.

Wilder sometimes describes herself as a failed opera singer. But although she gave up her music career after graduating from the Eastman School of Music with a B.M. in voice performance, she continues to perform when she’s allowed. Her operatic roles include Venus in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (ca. 1682)—the role was apparently originated by Moll Davies, mistress of Charles II, but Wilder played it opposite her future husband, Steve—and Belinda in Dido and Aeneas (1689). She has also participated in staged readings of Lord Byron’s Marino Faliero and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country's Good and narrated a student film—and in class, she has been known to burst into song at the slightest provocation.

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