For nearly 120 years, the Wagga Wagga Shakespeare Club has met monthly, leading them to claim the title of the world's oldest continuous Shakespeare reading group.
For more than a century, they've met every single month and today there are nine members gathered around two folding tables in a quiet room at the back of the Wagga Wagga library.
"I think it's important that we can show that we've got something, that no matter how big a city is, we were there first and longest," says Neryl Quilty, president of the Wagga Wagga Shakespeare Club.The group reads one speech at a time and the joy they get from reading together is infectious. They giggle and exchange wide-eyed glances throughout.
"Every child in my family, including my recent granddaughter, has been given a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare once they got to be a teenager," she says. Paul Edmondson, head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, says the oldest group in the world is the Shakespeare Reading Club from York in the UK, founded in 1881 as a women-only, private club.
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