Amidst their "Rock Thy Brain" season, the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival (NJSF) will offer their 16th annual Shakespeare Colloquium, July 22 and 23. This year's focus, titled "Those Shakespeare Left in His Wake," will explore those contemporaries of the Bard, who some theorize actually composed a number of works ascribed to the prolific penner.

Beginning the weekend's events will be a keynote address by NJSF artistic director Bonnie Monte. Saturday's lectures will include "City Drama in Shakespeare's Day" by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Harry Keyishian and "The Violent Femmes of The Maid's Tragedy and The Changeling" by Montclair State University Professor Naomi Conn Liebler. Participants will be able to take in the Picnic Series performance of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens at 5 PM on Saturday.

On Sunday, a lecture by Shakespeare's Globe in London's Director of Education, Patrick Spottiswoode, titled "The Globe Explores the Elizabethan Writer's Universe." (The Globe's Stage Reading Series, which delved into the Elizabethan canon, sparked the theme of this year's Colloquium.) Following the lecture will be selection readings of plays-within-Elizabethan plays, including The Antipodes, The Mousetrap/ The Murder of Gonzago, The Roman Actor, Sir Thomas More, and The Spanish Tragedy. Concluding the day's events will be a discussion titled "From the Page to the Stage" which will be moderated by Drew University Professor Jeffrey Fiske.

All Colloquium events will take place at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in Madison, NJ. Registration is $40 per person. Admission to lectures, discussions, and the Picnic Series performance is free. To register, call Tara Clancy at (973) 408-3806. For additional information on the NJSF and all it's summer events visit www.njshakespeare.org.

* The NJSF opened the Rock Thy Brain season with The Forest. Now playing, through July 30 is Twelfth Night.Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco, plays August 8-27. Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra runs Sept. 5-30, followed by Romeo and Juliet September 5-30 and Othello Oct. 24-Nov. 19. The season concludes with Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.

The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival is located at 36 Madison Ave (Route 124) on the campus of Drew University in Madison. For ticket and travel information, call the box office at (973) 408-5600.

-- by Daniel Fischer
and Ernio Hernandez