webinar register page

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Life and Death of King John

Join Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute, as we launch Undiscovered Shakespeare: King John, the third installment of our annual virtual Shakespeare program. Over the course of three sessions (February 10, 17, and 24), we will immerse ourselves in another rarely performed play and reflect on it both as a point of departure for Shakespeare’s career and as a mirror for the times in which we live.

Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced. King John is one of only two plays by Shakespeare written entirely in verse (along with Richard II). In it, Shakespeare explores the use of political rhetoric to cloak self-serving ambitions during the reign of the king that saw the birth of the Magna Carta.