Gardens and places of pleasure in Shakespeare’s London

7. Dezember 2018 19:00

Paula Henderson

Paula Henderson is a lecturer and writer on British architecture and garden history.
She has degrees in art history (University of Wisconsin, B.A., University of Chicago, M.A.) and a Ph.D. in architectural history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London.
Her first book, The Tudor House and Garden: architecture and landscape in the 16th and early 17th centuries (Yale University Press), won the prestigious Berger Prize for outstanding contribution to the history of British art for 2005. Since then she has published numerous books and essays on the history and design of gardens.
Paula has appeared on (and advised) several BBC television programmes on historic gardens. She regularly organizes courses and study trips for the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has also lectured for many major London museums and academic institutions in Britain and the United States.

William Shakespeare lived in London from the 1580s to circa 1613, a period considered a ‘golden age’ in England and in London itself. While the city had become overcrowded, increasingly squalid and plague-ridden, London was also the epicentre of wealth, opportunity and fashion. Courtiers and aristocrats, aware of the benefits of royal patronage and the amusements of the metropolis, acquired grand mansions, which they complemented with fine gardens and orchards, filled with native and ‘outlandish’ plants. Nearby were smaller, but sometimes no less ambitious, merchants’ houses, as well as more modest dwellings and tenements, where tradesmen, artisans and immigrants lived.
This lecture considers a period when London was as much a garden as it was a city.