An entirely new version of the comedy directed and abridged by Laura Engel.

The Play:

In 1801 Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Agnes Berry embarked on a remarkable collaboration staging a performance of Berry’s comedy Fashionable Friends as an amateur theatrical production at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Damer and Berry starred in the play as the titular fashionable friends; Damer played the seductive and sly Lady Selina and Berry the sentimental and clever Mrs. Lovell.

A touchstone of murder mysteries and historical intrigue, tactical warfare and political coups, poison looms large in our cultural imagination. An invisible agent of death, it might be hiding anywhere, stashed in a secret agent’s suitcase or mixed into a murderous martini.

Author and critic Garth Greenwell and TYR senior editor Maggie Millner will read from their work and discuss writing as desire. Moderated by TYR’s Editor-in-Chief, Meghan O’Rourke.
Presented as part of The Yale Review’s Spring Festival.
Co-sponsored by the Yale English Department, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.

Scott Mandelbrote, Director of Studies in History and Perne Librarian at Peterhouse, Cambridge, will discuss the discovery of Isaac Newton’s notebook from the late 1670s, by John Wickins, Newton’s friend and contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge. This talk will discuss how the notebook was acquired for the Cambridge University Library, its significance for their collections and the study of Newton’s career in the history of science, and how the book trade uncovers new historical knowledge and importance of collecting for institutions.

Women have been involved in the printing and production of books in what became the United States since Elizabeth Glover established a press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 forced her to flee the United States, Mary Ann Shadd, an African American woman, founded and published The Provincial Freeman, an antislavery newspaper, in 1853 in Ontario, Canada.