Latest news with #Cymbeline
Scoop
05-08-2025
- Health
- Scoop
Raising The Bar Serves Up Fresh Thinking In Auckland Pubs
Press Release – University of Auckland With 20 talks held across ten bars in Aucklands CBD on one night, Raising the Bar gives alumni and the general public a chance to directly engage with top academics from the University of Auckland, all while enjoying their favourite drop. Raising the Bar is back, pouring the University of Auckland's most fascinating and future-shaping research straight into bars across the inner city Among the topics on the menu at this year's event on August 26 are the power of urban design to create and connect communities, how cutting-edge science is personalising health treatment like never before, the science of safer drug use and why big tech's unchecked AI development is a code red for democracy. With 20 talks held across ten bars in Auckland's CBD on one night, Raising the Bar gives alumni and the general public a chance to directly engage with top academics from the University of Auckland, all while enjoying their favourite drop. 'At its heart, Raising the Bar is about making research real and relevant,' says Mark Bentley, Director of Alumni Relations and Development at the University of Auckland. 'These talks bring important ideas into everyday spaces, sparking conversations about health, technology, culture and more – conversations that extend far beyond the University.' Originally launched in New York in 2013, Raising the Bar is now a global initiative – and the University of Auckland has proudly brought the event to local audiences since 2017. This year's talks will be held at bars across Auckland's CBD, including in Wynyard Quarter, Victoria Park and City Works Depot. Each venue will host two sessions, starting at 6pm and 8pm, with punters free to move from one bar to another to catch their preferred talks. All talks are free, but with the event expected to sell out early registration is recommended. Visit to register your place now. This year's full line-up: Merryn Tawhai – Reimagining healthcare with human digital twins Rhys Ponton – From lab coats to late nights: the science of safer drug use Simon Young – Broken knees, bionic fixes and the rise of robot surgeons David Krofcheck – Out of this world: the smallest and most surprising liquid in the Universe Justin O'Sullivan – Swab, sequence, surprise! How science is personalising your health Mohsen Mohammadzadeh – Robo-rides and city life: what could go right…or wrong? Andrew Erueti – The limits of liberal equality and the future of Māori self-determination Christina Stringer – Closer than you think: migrant exploitation and modern slavery in Aotearoa Olaf Diegel – 3D printing the future Darren Svirskis – The quest to find a cure for spinal cord injury Claire Meehan: Not just jokes: how misogyny online is shaping teen culture Alexandra Andhov – Code red for democracy: when big tech becomes bigger than government Sophie Tomlinson – 'Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral': Shakespeare's Cymbeline Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere – We know animals are sentient. What does that mean for their legal status? Chris Ogden – Global authoritarianism: how to spot it and how to stop it Joel Rindelaub – Breathing plastic: Aotearoa's invisible pollution problem Antje Fiedler – Rewriting the playbook: how Kiwi businesses can thrive in a changing world Lee Beattie – Beyond buildings: urban design's power to create and connect communities Laura Burn – A human history of looking up: from stargazing to space lasers Tom Allen – A carbon fibre yarn: weaving fossil fuel roots into a sustainable future
Scoop
30-07-2025
- Health
- Scoop
Raising The Bar Serves Up Fresh Thinking In Auckland Pubs
Raising the Bar is back, pouring the University of Auckland's most fascinating and future-shaping research straight into bars across the inner city. Among the topics on the menu at this year's event on Tuesday 26 August are the power of urban design to create and connect communities, how cutting-edge science is personalising health treatment like never before, the science of safer drug use and why big tech's unchecked AI development is a code red for democracy. With 20 talks held across ten bars in Auckland's CBD on one night, Raising the Bar gives alumni and the general public a chance to directly engage with top academics from the University of Auckland, all while enjoying their favourite drop. 'At its heart, Raising the Bar is about making research real and relevant,' says Mark Bentley, Director of Alumni Relations and Development at the University of Auckland. 'These talks bring important ideas into everyday spaces, sparking conversations about health, technology, culture and more – conversations that extend far beyond the University.' Originally launched in New York in 2013, Raising the Bar is now a global initiative – and the University of Auckland has proudly brought the event to local audiences since 2017. This year's talks will be held at bars across Auckland's CBD, including in Wynyard Quarter, Victoria Park and City Works Depot. Each venue will host two sessions, starting at 6pm and 8pm, with punters free to move from one bar to another to catch their preferred talks. All talks are free, but with the event expected to sell out early registration is recommended. Visit the Raising The Bar website to register your place now. This year's full line-up: Merryn Tawhai – Reimagining healthcare with human digital twins Rhys Ponton – From lab coats to late nights: the science of safer drug use Simon Young – Broken knees, bionic fixes and the rise of robot surgeons David Krofcheck – Out of this world: the smallest and most surprising liquid in the Universe Justin O'Sullivan – Swab, sequence, surprise! How science is personalising your health Mohsen Mohammadzadeh – Robo-rides and city life: what could go wrong? Andrew Erueti – The limits of liberal equality and the future of Māori self-determination Christina Stringer – Closer than you think: migrant exploitation and modern slavery in Aotearoa Olaf Diegel – 3D printing the future Darren Svirskis – The quest to find a cure for spinal cord injury Claire Meehan – Not just jokes: how misogyny online is shaping teen culture Alexandra Andhov – Code red for democracy: when big tech becomes bigger than government Sophie Tomlinson – 'Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral': Shakespeare's Cymbeline Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere – We know animals are sentient. What does that mean for their legal status? Chris Ogden – Global authoritarianism: how to spot it and how to stop it Joel Rindelaub – Breathing plastic: Aotearoa's invisible pollution problem Antje Fiedler – Rewriting the playbook: how Kiwi businesses can thrive in a changing world Lee Beattie – Beyond buildings: urban design's power to create and connect communities Laura Burn – A human history of looking up: from stargazing to space lasers Tom Allen – A carbon fibre yarn: weaving fossil fuel roots into a sustainable future
Scroll.in
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
How to live through the end of the world: Read William Shakespeare's play ‘Cymbeline'
Written in 1611, Shakespeare's Cymbeline is a raw mess – full of feeling and as messy as life. The 18th-century man of letters, Samuel Johnson decried the play as a work of 'unresisting imbecility', a hotch-potch of incongruities. It's true that it's hard to even know what kind of play Cymbeline is. The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, presents it as the last of his tragedies. But it's also, all at once, a history play, a pastoral, a fairytale, a pantomime and a tragicomedy. Set in ancient Britain at the time of the birth of Christ, Cymbeline stitches together three plots. In one, Posthumus (the banished husband of Innogen, King Cymbeline's daughter) accepts a wager with Iachimo that the sleazy Italian will not be able to seduce his wife. In the second, after 20 years, King Cymbeline's abducted sons (and Innogen's brothers) are restored to him. And in the third, refusing to pay tribute to the emperor, tiny Britain picks a fight with the majesty of imperial Rome. In the age of anxiety What makes Cymbeline such a potent play for our own age of anxiety is how Shakespeare weaves a tale about the collapse of everything known, as connections dissolve, and lays out how we may discover ourselves anew in the radically altered world. Written late in his career, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare rips up all the ways he's been doing things and suddenly starts afresh. Here, some few years before his retirement, he foregoes the complex psychology of his great tragedies and opts for archetypes of fairytale and romance. But in striking out for this new artistic territory, he also turns to himself as his own best source. Like an ageing rock band contracted for one last farewell tour, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare's back playing the hits. Like King Lea r, Cymbeline is set in ancient Britain. Sneering Iachimo is Iago's ghost and Posthumus, a dollar-store Othello. Innogen is Shakespeare's last cross-dressing heroine, passing as a boy, a faded echo of witty Rosalind of As You Like It and sad Viola of Twelfth Night. There's fun in Rosalind and Viola's changed identities, but Innogen puts on boy's clothes to escape. Her father condemns her as disobedient for marrying Posthumus, and instead pushes her towards her step-brother, the fatuous bully Cloten. Innogen's time as a boy is joyless, as she learns that her beloved Posthumus wants her killed. She's a new person now, not Innogen, but 'Fidele'. Unmoored, adrift, she unwittingly finds her brothers, falls ill and mistakenly consumes a drug that puts her into a sleep so deep she appears to be dead. She wakes from this seeming death beside a headless body that she takes to be her murdered husband, but is in fact the villainous Cloten. Desperate with grief, she touches the flowers that have been strewn on the corpse, and smears herself with his blood. It's as stark a scene as Shakespeare ever wrote in its unstable unity of tender beauty and suffering. Innogen sighs: 'These flowers are like the pleasures of the world, This bloody man, the care on't,' and in that conjunction sums up the extremities of life and of this play. When a Roman soldier finds her, she tells him: 'I am nothing; or if not, Nothing to be were better.' Dying to live Politically, too, things are disintegrating. The play multiplies broken bonds, unpaid debts and contracts denied – including both the marriage contract, and the debt of tribute owed to Rome by Britain. Following Innogen's passage through suffering and figurative death, Posthumus undergoes the same process. He has already earned his name by outliving his parents. Reduced, like Innogen, to all but nothing, believed to be dead, but actually in prison, Posthumus receives a vision of his dead family and of forgiving Jove, the divine father of the Roman Gods. Love and social unity have died, but in this mystical scene, the possibility returns of renewal. Both Innogen and Posthumus must 'die' to live. Off stage, in distant Bethlehem, a nativity takes place that signals the death of the old Rome – but also the regeneration of all things. And so the story commits itself to the reconciliation achieved in wonder. This is a play where the word 'miracle' becomes a verb, just as Innogen and Posthumus, and old, foolish King Cymbeline himself come to understand how even the most distressed life may open to bliss. 'The gods do mean to strike me to death with mortal joy,' declares an amazed Cymbeline, as the play offers us a vision of that astonishing unity of suffering and redemption. We may doubt that such wonder could exist for us today. But Shakespeare's full look at the worst enables us too to imagine the sense of hopeful possibility found in his brilliant conclusion. It is a wonderful play.
Euronews
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Letter fragment suggests Shakespeare did not abandon his wife in Stratford
ADVERTISEMENT New research examining a fragment of a 17th century letter addressed to 'good Mrs Shakspaire' suggests that William Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was happier than previously thought. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1852, when he was 18 and she was about 26 and pregnant. The couple had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. For more than 200 years, it has been assumed that the English playwright left his wife in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon to pursue his career in London. The belief even inspired writer Maggie O'Farrell, who chronicled the unhappy relationship in her 2020 novel "Hamnet", about the death of Shakespeare's only son Hamnet at 11 years old. The forgotten letter, preserved by accident in the binding of a book in Hereford, England, appears to show that the couple lived together in London at some point between 1600 and 1610. It is the first written evidence supporting this claim. It alleges that Shakespeare was withholding money from a fatherless apprentice named John Butts. The author of the letter then asks Mrs Shakespeare herself for money. Related Shakespeare with northern accents creates social media furore after audience 'complaint' Why Shakespeare is totally overrated Director Jennifer Tang on theatre in 2025, gender-swapping and her 'slightly bonkers' Cymbeline 'First discovered in 1978, the letter's been known for a while, but no-one could identify the names or places involved or see any reason to think that the Mr Shakespeare in the letter was necessarily William rather than anyone else of the same name in the general period', said Professor Matthew Steggle of the University of Bristol, who published the research in Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare association. The scholar tracked down people and addresses mentioned in the letter to find out if the playwright and his wife could possibly have been in London at that time. 'In short - it's two steps', Professor Steggle explained. 'You identify the boy involved, and given that it's him and that fixes the date, then Shakespeare is much the best recorded candidate to be the London-based 'Mr Shakspaire.' The letter gives Shakespeare a previously unknown address in Trinity Lane, in central London. It also casts new light on Anne Hathaway's life. 'It seems to show her being involved with her husband's money affairs and social networks. So, it's a game-changer in terms of thinking about the Shakespeares' marriage', Professor Steggle said. The back of the fragment also contains a reply from Mrs Shakespeare, which would be the first ever recorded words from Anne Hathaway. The fragment of the letter is held at Hereford Cathedral Library.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Letter fragment suggests Shakespeare did not abandon his wife in Stratford
New research examining a fragment of a 17th century letter addressed to 'good Mrs Shakspaire' suggests that William Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was happier than previously thought. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1852, when he was 18 and she was about 26 and pregnant. The couple had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. For more than 200 years, it has been assumed that the English playwright left his wife in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon to pursue his career in London. The belief even inspired writer Maggie O'Farrell, who chronicled the unhappy relationship in her 2020 novel "Hamnet", about the death of Shakespeare's only son Hamnet at 11 years old. The forgotten letter, preserved by accident in the binding of a book in Hereford, England, appears to show that the couple lived together in London at some point between 1600 and 1610. It is the first written evidence supporting this claim. It alleges that Shakespeare was withholding money from a fatherless apprentice named John Butts. The author of the letter then asks Mrs Shakespeare herself for money. Related Shakespeare with northern accents creates social media furore after audience 'complaint' Why Shakespeare is totally overrated Director Jennifer Tang on theatre in 2025, gender-swapping and her 'slightly bonkers' Cymbeline 'First discovered in 1978, the letter's been known for a while, but no-one could identify the names or places involved or see any reason to think that the Mr Shakespeare in the letter was necessarily William rather than anyone else of the same name in the general period', said Professor Matthew Steggle of the University of Bristol, who published the research in Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare association. The scholar tracked down people and addresses mentioned in the letter to find out if the playwright and his wife could possibly have been in London at that time. 'In short - it's two steps', Professor Steggle explained. 'You identify the boy involved, and given that it's him and that fixes the date, then Shakespeare is much the best recorded candidate to be the London-based 'Mr Shakspaire.' The letter gives Shakespeare a previously unknown address in Trinity Lane, in central London. It also casts new light on Anne Hathaway's life. 'It seems to show her being involved with her husband's money affairs and social networks. So, it's a game-changer in terms of thinking about the Shakespeares' marriage', Professor Steggle said. The back of the fragment also contains a reply from Mrs Shakespeare, which would be the first ever recorded words from Anne Hathaway. The fragment of the letter is held at Hereford Cathedral Library.
