(LENOX, Mass.) – Tina Packer, Shakespeare & Company’s founding artistic director, actor, writer — and one of the country’s foremost experts on Shakespeare — celebrates the publication of her new book, “Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company on Saturday, April 25, 2015, at 7:30pm. Admission is free.

“Women of Will” is a fierce and witty exploration — part master class, part brilliant analysis — of the women in Shakespeare’s plays that illuminates Shakespeare’s changing understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his deepest insights.

Packer has synthesized forty years of teaching, textual analysis, and stage experience into “Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays,” which charts Shakespeare’s evolution and his increasingly empathetic and nuanced portrayal of his female characters. It follows Shakespeare’s development from youth to enlightened maturity and explores the spiritual journey he undertook. Most importantly, Packer grapples not only with the language and the historical context of the plays but with them as they were and are actually performed. Packer posits that Shakespeare’s imagination, mirrored and revealed in his female characters, develops and deepens until finally the women, his creative knowledge, and a sense of a larger spiritual good come together in the late plays, making clear that when women and men are equal in status and sexual passion, they can — and do — change the world.