book reading: Juliet's Nurse by Lois Leveen AB'90
...for those of you who miss the humanities piece of an Ivy League education, hopefully this event and book will be of interest. Juliet's Nurse imagines the 14 years leading up to the events in Shakespeare's most famous play.
Fourteen years before Juliet met Romeo . . .
Juliet's Nurse, a new novel from critically acclaimed author and historian Lois Leveen (Harvard AB'90), imagines the 14 years leading up to the events in Shakespeare's most famous play. Lois will be giving a talk about the history behind the book on 10/28 at 7 pm at Broadway Books (1714 NE Broadway St, Portland, OR 97232). The event is free and open to the public. Juliet's Nurse is being published Simon & Schuster and is available in print, audio, and ebook format at all major bookstores. Details below, and you can learn more and read reviews at www.loisleveen.com
Celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth with this revelatory new take on the world's best-known love story: Juliet's Nurse combines a prequel to Romeo and Juliet with a fresh vision of the events in the play, all through the eyes of Juliet's ever-present wet nurse, Angelica, who tells a passionate tale of the deepest love in Verona – the love between a grieving woman and her precious milk- daughter.
Who has the greatest number of lines in Romeo and Juliet, after the title characters? Juliet's wet nurse, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona's ruling class. What did Shakespeare see in her? Author and historian Lois Leveen's new novel is the vividly imagined, utterly intriguing answer to this question.
About the book: Angelica is mourning her own day-old infant when she must leave her loving husband to enter the household of the wealthy Cappelletti family to care for their newborn baby Juliet. Angelica takes immense comfort in nurturing Juliet, but she soon finds herself embedded in the rivalries and jealousies of the powerful Capelletti, where sweet, 10- year-old Tybalt, cousin to Juliet, serves as her one ally. But fourteen years later, when the Cappelletti family's darkest secrets erupt across five momentous days of passion and loss, Angelica must confront her own deepest grief to find the strength to survive.
Weaving in rich historical details of life in medieval and Renaissance Italy, Juliet's Nurse takes us beyond the tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet into a very different story, revealing the love, loss and resilience that is the heart of human experience.
About the author: Award-winning historian, author, and former college professor LOIS LEVEEN holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard, UCLA, and USC. She traveled to Verona, Italy, to research JULIET'S NURSE, as well as apprenticing herself to an urban beekeeping group in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, to write accurately about the life cycle of hives. Lois has given talks in Finland, France, and throughout the US about the historical research behind JULIET'S NURSE, and about how she approached challenging themes of teen violence, suicide, and plague epidemics in adapting Shakespeare for contemporary readers.
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2014/09/lois_leveen_on_shakespeare_the.html