Draft Seminar Programme
1. Shakespeare on the Arab Stage
Rafik Darragi (Emeritus, University of Tunis, Tunisia)
Margaret Litvin (Boston University, USA)
This seminar aims to explore the diverse dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare that have flourished in the Arab world in recent years. In many Arab countries the prevailing artistic fashion favours original works rather than adaptations; Shakespeare’s reputation is that of a highly difficult source of inspiration. Yet many top Arab playwrights and directors have appropriated Shakespearean characters and/or plots. Their plays range from parody and pastiche to metatheatrical reflection, political satire, and even tragedy. Such work is gaining increasing prominence in the West: for instance, an “Arab” version of Richard III was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006 and later invited to help represent “Arab performance” at a festival in Washington, DC.
This seminar will build upon the questions sparked by the panel on Arab Shakespeare at the 8th WSC (Brisbane, 2006). Participants will be invited to focus on one or more Arab/ic plays and to analyze the intention behind the author/director’s treatment of Shakespeare. The ensuing discussion will aim to produce a typology or map of Arab Shakespeare appropriation, and to pinpoint some of the relevant paradigms for theorizing this young but growing sub-field. In particular, we will inquire whether – in view of Shakespeare’s perfectly naturalized status in some Arab theatre cultures and his “outsider” status in others – the paradigm of “intercultural appropriation” is a fruitful theoretical approach at all.
2. Four Hundred Years of The Tempest
Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University, USA)
Tobias Doering (University of Munich, Germany)
First performed ca. 1611, Shakespeare’s Tempest has flourished ever since, whether in the study, on the stage, or in writers’ and artists’ imaginations. In its four hundred year history, The Tempest has served as a multivalent cultural signifier, changing through the generations and from one area of the globe to another. As commentators have frequently noted, Shakespeare drew upon accounts of new world exploration in shaping his play; at the same time, The Tempest reflects the discourse of old world politics, drawing perhaps on the court history of Prague and the Bohemian succession. This seminar will provide the opportunity to explore any and all of these metamorphoses. Papers may focus on the text at the moment of production, on its transmission through editorial processes and changing interpretive and staging practices, or on contemporary re-readings. Our goal is to set changing Tempests within their historical, social and political contexts and to showcase the many ways Shakespeare’s last solo play is both a shaper and a receptor of cultural significance.
3. Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition
Michele Marrapodi (University of Palermo, Italy)
Robert Henke (Washington University, USA)
This seminar aims to place Shakespeare’s works within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of both classical and contemporary culture. The topics may range from a reassessment of Italian novellas, theatre, and discourses as direct or indirect sources, analogues, paralogues, and intertexts for the construction of Shakespeare’s poetry and drama to a reconsideration of other cultural transactions, such as travel and courtesy books, the arts, fencing, dancing, fashion, and so forth. The critical perspective of the seminar is to regard the pervasive presence of the Italian world in early modern England not only as a traditional treasure trove of influence and imitation but also as a potential cultural force of ideological appropriation, transformation, and opposition.
4. Shakespeare’s Plays in Print Outside Britain
Marta Straznicky (Queens’s University, Canada)
Lukas Erne (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
This seminar investigates the history of Shakespeare’s plays in print outside Britain. Recent work on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to early modern print culture has produced a wealth of new findings, but there has been little research on Shakespeare and print cultures outside Britain. Major work on global Shakespeare tends to examine appropriations and adaptations in performance, while studies that focus on translation are chiefly concerned with philology, linguistics, and semiotics.
This seminar draws together scholars interested in Shakespeare’s plays as books in any number of national or international settings. Possible topics include how translations negotiate the early printed texts, the international traffic in printed editions, or readership communities for Shakespeare’s plays in various historical and geographical contexts. Scholars interested in the cultural and political facets of Shakespearean appropriations might look into the variety of institutions (universities, libraries, courts, academies, theatres, etc.) in which Shakespeare’s cultural authority was constituted as a specifically textual property. Other topics might include the impact of Shakespeare translations on native literary cultures and vice versa, the relationship between reading and theatrical audiences for Shakespeare’s plays outside Britain, or the relationship of print culture to the history of theatrical adaptations in a given setting.
5. Magic and the Occult in Shakespeare
and his Contemporaries
Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Helen Ostovich (McMaster University, Canada)
To Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Prague was the home of magic, where Rudolf II had collected wizards and magi. This seminar welcomes papers which explore any aspect of witchcraft, magic or the occult in the plays of Shakespeare, either alone or in conjunction with one or more other Renaissance dramatists. Of particular interest are the relationship between magic and nature; the influence of specific individuals who were interested in magic; the relationship between magic and science; and the intersection of magic and discourses of race, gender, and nation.
6. Multitudinous Seas: The Ocean in
the Age of Shakespeare
Bernhard Klein (University of Kent, UK)
Steve Mentz (St. John’s University, USA)
This seminar explores the sea and its associated spaces, including ships, islands, beaches, and ports. It examines early modern oceans as “contact zones,” spaces of inter-cultural exchange, mutual recognition, unexpected alliances, and cross-cultural collaboration. Early modern oceanic vistas connect Shakespeare studies to a series of major contemporary discourses, especially globalization, post-colonialism, environmentalism, and technology studies. Participants might explore any of these fields; we would welcome, for example, global readings of first-contact narratives, environmental understandings of oceanic space in drama (“the sea-coast of Bohemia” seems apposite), post-colonial reconsiderations of the travel accounts published by Hakluyt and Purchas, or readings of the cultural impact of such technologies as the Mercator projection, the navigational chart, or the Portuguese carrack. The seminar also emphasizes that the early modern sea represented arguably the first truly international space. Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609) inaugurated the sense of the ocean as more-than-national, a space of freedom and mutability that challenges orderly systems of thought. Recognizing the current critique of an “Atlantic studies” that relies too strongly on Anglo-American narratives and sources, we seek participants who will define a more plural and truly global transoceanic world.
7. Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Bob White (University of Western Australia, Australia)
Dympna Callaghan (Syracuse University, USA)
Although neglected until the Romantic age, Shakespeare's Sonnets have ever since then generated not only endless biographical speculation but also complex theories of subjectivity, identity, and gender, amongst a host of other thematic approaches. This seminar invites contributions on any aspect of the sonnets, though it is hoped the emphasis will lie on studies of reception and on challenging critical explication, rather than biography for its own sake.
8. Culinary Shakespeare
David B. Goldstein (York University, Toronto, Canada)
Amy L. Tigner (University of Texas, Arlington, USA)
This seminar explores questions of food and eating in Shakespeare. The study of food in our period has evolved far beyond the practice of pointing out representations of food in Shakespeare, to the development of a complex network of questions about what it means to eat, and to make decisions about eating, in both the Renaissance and modern contexts. Most recently, analyses of food in Shakespeare have taken place largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority. This seminar seeks to extend those lines of inquiry, while exploring alternative ways of conceiving eating in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Issues that participants address might include the relationship between eating and Renaissance attitudes toward trade, exploration, and conquest; the aesthetic and political ramifications of changes in English diet; transformations in philosophical and practical ideas about health, the body, and desire; relations between contemporary and early modern perspectives on food; links between the materiality of food and the intellectual practices of writing and representation; the explosion of cookbook writing in the Tudor and Stuart periods as it relates to the evolution of the drama; how eating functions in performance; and the role of ethics in Shakespearean eating.
9. Shakespeare and the Visual Arts
Shormishtha Panja (University of Delhi, India)
Clare McManus (Roehampton University, UK)
This seminar invites papers on the influence of Shakespeare on the visual arts and their influence on his works, both dramatic and poetic. Papers may deal with instances of ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s works; they may analyse Shakespeare’s contribution to the ut pictura poesis tradition; they may discuss the ways in which Shakespeare’s approach to the verbal medium mirrors the Renaissance artist’s approach to painting and sculpture. Can one see any similarities between Alberti’s notion of istoria or Vasari’s concept of disegno and Shakespeare’s aesthetics? Is there any evidence of the great paragone or competition between poetry and painting, initiated by Leonardo da Vinci, in Shakespeare’s works? What are Shakespeare’s views on the problems of artistic representation and how are they analogous to theorists and art historians like Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Vasari? Alternatively, papers could also deal with how Shakespeare’s works have influenced the visual medium, whether it be in the form of illustrations to Shakespeare’s plays or frontispieces to his published works.
10. Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies: Uses, Adaptations, and Appropriations
Kent Cartwright (University of Maryland, USA)
Fernando Cioni (University of Florence, Italy)
This seminar approaches the topic of Renaissance Shakespeare / Shakespeare Renaissances by exploring the uses of Shakespearean romantic comedy, with adaptations and appropriations understood as important means for establishing use-value. The romantic comedies seem less obviously appropriated for political purposes than do the histories or tragedies. Indeed, the association of comedy with pleasure, laughter, and festivity may discourage considering its sociological effects – as if pleasure were beyond ideology. On the other hand, it hardly makes sense to turn the romantic comedies into crypto-tragedies.
Thus, a consideration of how Shakespeare’s romantic comedies are adapted, appropriated, and used raises a number of questions. To what uses are romantic comedies put as they are adapted for different historical ages and for different nations and locales? What aspects of the “Renaissance Shakespeare” tend to survive in staging traditions, and what aspects consistently suffer excision or undergo transmutation? Further, what aspects of the adaptations themselves become habitually repeated and complicated, and to what effect? What happens to genre in the process of adaptation and appropriation? As romantic comedies are adapted to local or historical situations, what interests or ends do they serve? What makes Shakespeare’s romantic comedies useful for adaptation? Can we identify particular eras or locals or circumstances around which adaptations or appropriations tend to cluster, with the impression of a Shakespearean revival or “ “renaissance”?
From a generic point of view, the seminar invites discussion, further, about how the pleasure of a specific comedy might be described and what effects might be associated with it? Indeed, how might we theorize pleasure? What are the implications of Shakespeare’s tendency to imbed uncertainties, doubts, and unresolved details within the arc of comic resolution? How might the effects or uses of Shakespearean romantic comedy be compared with, say, the uses of Renaissance Italian comedy? (Here and above, Louise George Clubb’s notion of “theatergrams” may be helpful.)
In terms of adaptation or appropriation, the plays that are most frequently the object of such transmutation are probably The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant, The Comedy of Errors, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This seminar welcomes new ideas about these plays, and it also encourages participants to explore the less frequently adapted comedies.
11. Shakespeare and Early Modern
Popular Culture
Paola Pugliatti (University of Florence, Italy)
Janet Clare (University of Hull, UK)
The late twentieth-century saw a move towards the study of Shakespeare as part of a popular theatre tradition. Robert Weimann’s pioneering book Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters was published in Berlin in 1967 although it did not reach a wider audience until 1978 when it was translated into English. The same year, Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe appeared and was similarly recognized as a pioneering work. Crucially, Burke raised fundamental issues on the very meaning of ‘popular’ and on the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ culture in early modern European cultural formations. Both Weimann and Burke had a deep influence on later writings, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet, it could be said that their respective influences have remained discrete: following Weimann, there has been work on early modern English theatre such as Michael Hattaway’s Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982) while other scholars have responded to the theoretical issues raised by Burke, expanding his suggestions to reach other cultural contexts.
A further influence has been Bakhtin’s work and particularly his writings on carnival and the carnivalesque which has produced insightful studies of festivities, carnival and misrule (M. Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, 1985; F. Laroque, Shakespeare et la fête, 1988; Engl. Trans.: Shakespeare’s Festive World, 1991). More recently, studies have appeared reappraising the links between the theatre and ‘the popular’ and demonstrating a revival of interest in the subject. This is notable in a study by Mary Ellen Lamb (The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, 2006) and in a collection of essays edited by S. Gillespie and N. Rhodes (Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, 2006). It is still the case, however, that literary theorists have developed their ideas on the subject working mainly within the category of the literary and written while researchers in the field of popular culture have failed to make use of results achieved in the field of literature. The latter, in particular, have paid comparatively little attention to the debate within post-modern literary studies on the concept of “canon”: an idea which inevitably implies a distinction between “centre” and “periphery” (what is “normative” and “canonical” is inevitably implied in any definition of the “metamorphic” and “marginal”). Indeed, the very idea of “canon” and its potential connections with the category of the “popular” offers this seminar a framework for an enlivened study of Shakespeare within early modern popular culture.
The seminar invites papers on the many ways in which in Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate their engagement with early modern popular culture. Further, we would welcome papers that explore the intertwining of the popular with different, more socially privileged or elite manifestations of contemporary culture. It also invites a general reconsideration of traditional distinctions between elite and popular culture (or ‘hegemonic’ and ‘subordinate’, in Gramsci’s definition); issues which still wait to be satisfactorily discussed and ‘tried’ on a significant and considerably “canonical” literary corpus.
12. Shakespeare, War, and the Conditions of Performance
Tina Krontiris (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece)
Irena Makaryk (University of Ottawa, Canada)
This seminar is interested in exploring Shakespeare in extremis: the way that the extreme conditions created by war affect the interpretation, performance, and reception of Shakespeare's plays. Participants in the seminar are invited to address, among other topics, the following:
- performing Shakespeare at the front;
- performing Shakespeare under war censorship;
- the relation among place, reception, and interpretation during wartime - translating Shakespeare during wartime
- gender, race, class, and genre in wartime conditions
Using as a starting point Raymond Williams's theorization of place and occasion of cultural events, the seminar will ultimately attempt to address the question of whether, or to what extent, such theorization can hold in wartime, when material, cultural, and social conditions change (sometimes radically, as during WWII), as do the significations attached to such theatrical conventions as stage-space, props, costume, and seating space for audience.
13. Shakespeare on the International Screen: Macbeth
Sarah Hatchuel (Université du Havre, France)
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Université de Montpellier III, France)
Victoria Bladen (University of Queensland, Australia)
How can we account for the fact that a play that is so tightly linked to one particular nation (Scotland), has been adapted to so many diverse cultures? This seminar invites papers on screen versions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which has inspired filmic adaptations in a stunning number of countries all around the world: Australia (dir. Geoffrey Wright, 2006), India (Maqbool, dir. Vishal Bharadwaj, 2003), Japan (Throne of Blood, dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957), Madagascar (Makibefo, dir. Alexander Abela, 1999), the United States (dir. Orson Welles, 1948), or the UK (dir. Trevor Nunn, 1979; dir. Jeremy Freeston, 1997). This transnational appeal of Macbeth is also reflected in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film production which was financed by Denmark, Germany, the US, Finland and France.
A variety of approaches will be welcomed in this seminar. The papers may examine, among other aspects:
- how the play is (textually, aesthetically, ideologically, etc.) transformed when directed for the screen;
- what each adaptation reveals about the (sometimes postcolonial) culture in which it is set;
- how Shakespeare’s playscript (or plot) interacts with national ideologies and representations;
- how the screen versions have been influenced and shaped by previous theatre productions;
- how the female characters (Lady Macbeth, the three witches) are represented in various cultures;
- how the magical aspects of the play interrelate with the magical aspects of film.
14. “Must I remember?” Trauma and Memory in Early Modern England
Rebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University, USA)
Margaret Healy (University of Sussex, UK)
As he recalls his mother’s affection for his deceased father, Hamlet suffers from a memory that he cannot dislodge: “Let me not think on't,” he concludes, but he continues to reiterate his pain in multiple forms. Shakespeare’s plays and poetry contain many forms of narrative trauma, reviving time and again for public consumption the national, personal, and imaginary dramas of suffering. This seminar seeks papers that explore the some aspect of the following: trauma in the plays, poetry, and/or prose of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within and outside of London’s drama scene; texts that bear the less overt marks of personal, social, national, religious, or authorial trauma; the implications of representing and viewing trauma. Papers may be broadly theoretical or particularized readings.
15. Global Spin-Offs
Richard Burt (University of Florida, USA)
Lingui Yang (Donghua University, Shanghai)
Yukari Yoshihara (University of Tsukuba, Japan)
This seminar investigates the ways in which Shakespeare has been translated into “Shakespeares,” making the line between “proper” and “improper” Shakespeare hard to determine and defend. We will consider the entire whole range of “Shakespeares,” from “conventional” adaptations to “oppositional” ones, from reverential re-creations of canonical Shakespeare to “bastard” appropriations, in a variety of mediums from stage/movie spin-offs to non-stage pop spin-offs (TV, videogames, comics, advertisement etc.), produced all over the world, in the age. Global Shakespeare spin-offs show us that Shakespeare has always been "Shakespeares," mediatized and subject to dislocation, decontextualization, and fragmentation.
The seminar will explore questions such as: What theoretical models of culture, media, adaptation, and performance Shakespeare's reproduction and adaptation help us to understand global Shakespeares? What do we mean by ‘global’ Shakespeare spin-offs? Does it indicate that he is at every corner of the global village? Or, is his cultural capital “global” as is the capitalist system in the late 20th century and in the new millennium? How do non-English spin-offs, especially those with affinities with pop and youth culture, differ “dumbed-down” Shakespeares rewritten in the idiom of mass culture in the United States? Do these “rip-offs” simply use Shakespeare as a marketing gimmick, or do they offer, stranger kinds of work?
16. Shakespeare and Crime
Bettina Boecker (Shakespeare-Forschungsbibliothek München, Germany)
Nadia Bishai (King’s College London, UK)
Beyond its immensely popular stagings of crimes like murder, theft and prostitution, Shakespeare’s theatre was linked to the criminal in other significant ways. Situated in the notorious Bankside district, the Globe physically embodied the fine, and often permeable, line separating acting from legally punishable offences, accentuating the disturbing similarities between thespians and malefactors; actors bordered on the criminal, while criminals were, after their own fashion, performers. Shakespeare’s theatre thus is never without a degree of complicity in its representations of criminal deviance; wherever the early modern stage treats of the illicit, the immoral or the illegal, it also treats of itself. This association among the theatrical and the criminal extends far beyond the Globe, though, to include other cultural practices, most famously, judicial punishments. From the stocks to the scaffold, the punitive measures meted out to offenders were dramatic and immediate, highlighting the bodies of the criminals, their spectacular performances and the audience who witnessed them. Against this backdrop of the multiple, multi-faceted interrelations between theatre and crime in early modern England, the seminar explores (1) the uses and functions of crime in Shakespearean drama, and (2) the plays' dialogues with, and interrogations of, contemporary discourses on crime and criminality.
17. Shakespearean Players in Early
Modern Europe
Pavel Drábek (Makaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)
M.A. Katritzky (The Open University, UK)
The seminar invites papers dealing with the culturally influential presence of the English travelling players in Europe 1584-1700. Papers may consider topics such as individual players or troupes, transnational contacts between English and German, French or other European players, and/or the specific repertoire of the actors. Theatre-historical, historical, literary and historiographical approaches are welcome
18. The Body-Mind in Shakespeare’s Theatre
Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago, New Zealand)
Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
The last decades in Shakespeare scholarship has been dominated by a desire to return “the body” to Shakespeare's theatre. New readings of embodiment have greatly enriched historical, theoretical, and performative approaches to Shakespeare, overturning the hegemony of character-based and psychological readings of the plays (and, indeed, the purely literary focus on the plays as texts for interpretation) by examining relationships between the Elizabethan theatre (as a physical space and a socio-geographical location), the audience, the play text, and the performance (which incorporates the actor’s body as much as the lines on the page). Yet it may be an opportune moment to wonder whether the recent return to 'the body' in early modern scholarship risks placing too great an emphasis on the body, at the expense of concern with the mind. Does the new work on embodiment offer a way of reconceiving the early modern mind in relation to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage? Approaches to the topic may include, but are not limited to, cognitive approaches to Shakespeare, phenomenology, distributed cognition, early modern conceptions of mind-body relationships, and studies of mind and body in performance or in text.
This seminar builds upon the increasing interest in Shakespeare and embodiment, seeking to extend these concerns to a renewed attention to the relationship between body and mind. Post-structuralist thought has tended to avoid discussions of mind in the belief that such approaches are necessarily universalizing and transhistorical. Instead, critical readings have focused on the materiality of the body and of objects. While these approaches have produced important re-readings of Renaissance culture, it is our view that a re-assessment of the role of the mind may be able to deepen and enrich our accounts of embodiment and material culture. Two respondents have agreed to work with the members of our seminar: Dr. Gail Paster of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Professor John Sutton, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University.
19. Expectations, Experience, and Experimentation in Shakespeare’s Theatre
Roslyn L. Knutson (University of Arkansas, USA)
Per Sivefors (Gotland University, Sweden)
What did audiences in Shakespeare’s theatre expect from the experience of playgoing, and how might their satisfaction be determined? This seminar seeks to explore the ways early modern audiences received satisfaction in relation to their anticipation and experience of theatre visits, including such diverse factors as the physical/tactile experience itself; expectations grounded in the kind of play being attended; and the idea of theatre as a commercial or “purchased” event. Seeking to expand current lines of research on playgoing as a cultural phenomenon, the proposers here welcome papers on audience satisfaction and the ways in which audiences assessed their overall theatrical experience, with particular focus on the physiological and sensory aspects of being a playgoer; the relative appeal of a diverse repertory that offers both familiar narratives and generic experimentation; and the general context of rising consumerism in Shakespeare’s time.
20. “Glocalizing” Hamlet in Performance: Geo-politics and Media-discourses in New Millennium Europe
Nicoleta Cinpoeş (University of Worcester, UK)
Lawrence Guntner (Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany)
In 1977, the“ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET” in Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine announced: “I am not Hamlet. I don’t play a part anymore. My words no longer meaning anything to me... My drama no longer takes place.” In the 1980s, a time of political upheaval, Shakespeare’s ubiquitous Dane proved to be a most protean figure, readily adapting himself to the national stages of Eastern and Western Europe. In the 1990s, still floating on the heady tide of long desired political change and good will, the play was instrumental in recovering lost history and in telling previously censored stories.
In the first decade of the new millennium, much has changed in Europe: massive migration, pan-European Neo-Nazism, a new and active Moslem self-awareness, and the resurgence of Russia are just a few items on the historical agenda. In response to this new context Hamlet is no longer a vehicle for recovering, or creating, a national cultural memory but has become a trans-national, multi-cultural, “glocalized” site for positioning both play and protagonist between quickly changing geo-political developments and local events. This relocation has frequently been paired with the inclusion of various other media discourses in the performance space once reserved for traditional theatre acting.
At the Magdeburg Chamber Theatre (2000), for example, Hamlet was cast as a local rapper and his poetic blank verse reduced to snippets from four speeches. At the Dramatiska Teatern in Malmo, Shakespeare´s Hamlet was ‘reborn’ as Mohamlet (2006), a play geared to the Swedish Arab Islamic community, while at the Teatro Nacional Sao Joao in Porto, Um Hamlet a Mais (2006) was characterized by a dialogue between the theatre performance of gender and the medial amplification of that performance. At Teatr Polski in Wroclaw, Hamlet (2006) focused on Ophelia, sexually abused by her father and her brother and eventually strangled in a bathtub by Horatio while the projected backdrop of forest life underwent disturbing computer distortions. At the Odeon Theater in Bucharest, Hamletmachine (2007) lent Hamlet and the play’s search for meaning epic proportions with scenographic paraphernalia that stood in crass contrast to the paucity of Muller’s text, while at the Radu-Stanca Theater in Sibiu (2008), the play was transformed into science fiction reminiscent of The Matrix. At the Staatstheater Stuttgart (2009), Hamlet became agit-prop: Old Hamlet a Nazi army officer, Fortinbras a young Fascist skinhead, while Polonius was a woman and Gertrude a man.
Prompted by such examples, this seminar invites an exploration of how twenty-first century European performances of Hamlet have attempted to empty and refill the signifiers “Hamlet” and “Europe” with contemporary signification. More specifically, it aims to examine the use of multiple performance formats with which professional and amateur as well as school and festival stages are “glocalizing” Hamlet so that Hamlet’s “words” still “mean” something and his “drama” still takes place today.
Some issues and questions for papers and discussion
Does Hamlet, the quintessentially political play, still have a political agenda at a time when borders and identities, national, sexual, and political, are shifting?
How media technologies have redefined the signifier “Hamlet”, as play and character, as well as what performance means in the twenty-first century?
What is the role of Hamlet’s dramatic language, especially in the multi-lingual performances that have become popular in contemporary multi-lingual Europe? Or has his “story” been displaced by a theatre of images and special effects?
How have traditional gender roles been questioned, re-cast and redefined in contemporary Hamlet productions?
21. Civil War in Shakespeare, His Contemporaries, and His Successors
Mihoko Suzuki (University of Miami, USA)
Miki Suehiro (Senshu University, Japan)
This seminar will investigate literary representations and political analyses of civil war in late sixteenth- to late seventeenth-century England. Shakespeare examines civil war in his two tetralogies, Roman plays and Macbeth. Marlowe and Chapmanproduced plays concerning civil war; non-dramatic contemporary writers who wrote about civil wars include Samuel Daniel, Ann Dowriche, and Elizabeth Cary. We will focus on this notable interest in civil wars, ancient and contemporary, in Shakespeare’s time, and the relation of their representation to the English political situation.
We also encourage consideration of plays, histories, and memoirs written during the English Civil Wars (Thomas May, Abraham Cowley, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson), Restoration plays on civil war (Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Nathaniel Lee), and Shakespeare adaptations in the 1670s and the early 1680s (John Crowne, Nahum Tate). How does the trauma of actual civil war and the threat of another—in the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis—impact these representations? Questions to be considered by the seminar include: the proper form and ends of the polity; political legitimacy and authority; the relation between state and family— rebellion against the father, fratricidal rivalry, and women as subjects in both family and state; the relation between self and other in civil wars; the relation of civil war to foreign war; comparison of ancient and modern civil wars; the difference gender makes in representations of civil war.
22. Global Shakespeare
Richard Wilson (University of Cardiff, UK)
José Manuel González (University of Alicante, Spain)
The 2011 World Shakespeare Congress in Prague provides an apt opportunity to reconsider the implications of the name Shakespeare gave his own theatre. The 400th anniversary of the first recorded performance of The Tempest also offers an appropriate occasion to examine the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays and poems engage with an emerging global economy. His wordplay on “the great globe itself” suggests that Shakespeare was fully conscious of the potential of “this under globe” as a model for this first global moment of international and multilateral exchange, and intended his own writing to “compass the globe”. Yet his texts are haunted by anxieties about “th’affrighted globe” and “this distracted globe” that hint at awareness of the limitations of a “globe of sinful continents”. So, to what extent was Shakespeare invoking a world culture when he called his playhouse the Globe? What were the assumptions “hid behind the globe” when Shakespeare named his stage? After 400 years of translation and reproduction in “states unborn, and accents” then unknown, what are the limits to Shakespearean universality? How does the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones and the reduction and removal of barriers between national borders affect the appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare to the different cultures and spaces? And how do we read and see Shakespeare texts as they travel across time to different places, especially in relation to the seminar transnational focus?
“Global Shakespeare” will aim to revisit these questions in the light of Jacques Derrida’s comment that these works offer a virtual ideal for a global community: “Here the example of Shakespeare is magnificent. Who demonstrates better that texts loaded with history offer themselves so well in contexts very different from their time and place of origin, not only in the European twentieth century, but in Japanese or Chinese transpositions?” But Derrida then asked, “Is it possible to gather under a single roof the apparently disordered plurivocity” of the world’s Shakespeare reproductions: “Is it possible to find a rule of cohabitation, it being understood this house will always be haunted by the meaning of the original?” Between these theoretical parameters, “Global Shakespeare” will therefore also aim to reflect on the tension between historicist and reception-based criticism in contemporary Shakespeare studies, and the extent of what Robert Weimann has called Shakespeare’s “commodious thresholds”.
Possible themes to be explored therefore include universality, translation, toleration, hospitality, trans-national performance, multinational cinematic adaptations, protectionism, cultural taboos, religious fundamentalism, the global dispersal of the playwright’s work via the internet, the imaginative and intellectual construct of “the great globe itself”, and the collapse of the global and the local into the “glocal”.
“Global Shakespeare” invites participants to address these topics or other issues relating to Shakespeare and globalization. The seminar would be initially based upon circulated research papers, but which would also introduce significant texts to enable a full discussion of the ways in which ‘Global Shakespeare’ is experienced and produced.
23. Shakespeare and Renaissance Forms
Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen, Norway)
Susanne Wofford (New York University, USA)
We propose a seminar that would focus on Shakespeare’s knowledge of Renaissance forms from diverse artistic media as well as from different countries. We purposely leave the term ‘Renaissance Forms’ general to include painting, music, philosophy, emblems and other visual images but also acting traditions, lazzi from the commedia dell’ arte tradition, theatergrams, staging traditions and other specifically theatrical conventions that travel from the continent and elsewhere onto the Shakespearean stage. Our aim is to explore through exchange of papers the ways in which an international perspective can help us to understand how Shakespeare’s drama incorporates a diversity of Renaissance forms, of art, of thought, and of drama, from the many Renaissances in the different parts of Europe and beyond.
24. Shakespearean Metamorphoses:
Intermedial Transactions
José Roberto O’Shea (Federal University of Santa Catarina / Brazil)
Anna Stegh Camati (University Andrade, Brazil)
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Shakespeare’s continuing passage across different genres, media, histories, and geographies affects at each turn his cultural status and authority. Working with contemporary theories of adaptation and/or intersemiotic translation, this seminar will explore the negotiations and shifts of meaning involved in the process of cross-media transfer among drama, performance art, opera, cabaret, puppetry, musical theatre, film, and television. Poststructuralist and other translation discourses have challenged the notion of “fidelity” with a variety of arguments. Each new incarnation or version or appropriation is a complex arena, whose deformations have potential life and meanings of their own. Since each medium has its own specific configurations, various resistances may manifest in the process of metamorphosis through acts of mediation, interpretation, and repetition. We seek papers that raise practical and theoretical issues related to cross-media transformations, including the blurring of generic boundaries, hybridization, and explorations of the particular ‘grains’ of subsuming genres, including digital and other arts and media. Together, we hope to investigate the migration of Shakespeare’s texts through a sequence of media, and to explore the changes in authority, resonance and use the plays undergo along such a circuit.
25. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece
Dieter Mehl (Emeritus, University of Bonn, Germany)
John Roe (University of York, UK)
This seminar proposes to take a fresh look at Shakespeare's two narrative poems: ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. A great deal of new work has been done on these two poems in a number of critical editions and challenging critical studies. We invite participants to explore these texts in ways that we hope will lead to informative discussion: questions of gender and/or of love, desire and rape; the relation of these poems to other plays and poems of the time or to other works by Shakespeare; the larger historical and/or political context; the reception of these poems in art, music and translation or in different periods; the material text and its readership; the poems in performance.
26. Counter-Shakespeares: Performing the “Jacobean” Today
Pascale Aebischer (Exeter University, UK)
Roberta Barker (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Kathryn Prince (Ottawa University, Canada)
In 1996, Susan Bennett, in Performing Nostalgia, noted a flurry of late twentieth-century revivals of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that employed dissident politics and alternative aesthetics in opposition to the conservative, nostalgic, “heritage” Shakespeare predominant in Britain at that time. Do the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries remain politically charged, and is their disruptive potential relevant outside of a British (or even merely English) context? This seminar will probe and expand the opposition between Shakespeare and “counter-Shakespeare” to question what is at stake in the production of Shakespeare’s contemporaries from national, global, historical, aesthetic, generic, and theoretical (or other) perspectives. We will investigate how “the Jacobean” has been interpreted and exploited, analyze the interpretive frameworks applicable to Jacobean comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies, and assess the relationship between performance and criticism – including, for example, whether the criticism can explain why certain plays have had multiple revivals while others have been ignored. We also invite participants to consider the impact that the “Jacobean” revival has had on contemporary genres, such as film, TV, novels, and computer games.
27. 2000-2009: A Decade of Shakespeare
in Performance
Sonia Massai (King’s College London, UK)
Beatrice Lei (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Looking forward to Prague and to 2011 we encourage contributors to take part in a retrospective of Shakespeare in the “Noughties”. What were the defining moments of Shakespeare in performance during the first decade of the 21st century? And to what extent was the world map of Shakespeare in performance redrawn during this ten-year period? For the purpose of this seminar, performance is understood in the broadest possible sense - i.e as performative practices cutting across media, traditions and conventions. Our interest lies primarily in interrogating rather than surveying the field: how do we recognise “defining” performances of Shakespeare? how do we read them? to what extent do different Shakespeares depend on different ways of experiencing performance?
28. Shakespeare and the Quotidian: Transcending Times, Transcending Cultures
Aimara da Cunha Resende (President Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos, Brazil)
Michael Anthony Ingham (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
This seminar focuses on the way popular beliefs, entertainments, and attitudes found in Shakespeare's plays re-create commonplace cultural forms and expressions such as religious and agricultural rituals. How are these quotidian practices represented on the early modern stage by actions and properties?
Appropriations of quotidian practices -- from food preparation to medicine to the use of tools -- give ballast to what is “for all time” in Shakespeare. Participants are invited to approach this topic from any one of several directions. How do quotidian references determine meaning in a particular Shakespearean play or group of plays? How have later adaptations -- on the stage, in film, in electronic media -- dealt with these specifics of early modern culture? Do such adaptations affect the reception of Shakespeare's plays globally or in local performances.
Contributors are also welcome to suggest other strategies for exploring Shakespeare and the quotidian.
29. Shakespeare’s Ireland, Ireland’s Shakespeare
Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade do Porto, Portugal)
Clare Wallace (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
This seminar will explore the mutual consequence suggested by the chiasmus in its title. It responds to a growing critical interest in textual relations involving “Elizabeth’s other isle” (Highley 1997) and the work of Shakespeare and other Early Modern authors. It aims to extend this recent interest by welcoming papers both on representations of Ireland and the Irish in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, and on the afterlife that the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has encountered in Ireland.
Critical designs that bear on Shakespeare’s Ireland and Ireland’s Shakespeare have often invoked the discourses that are proper to comparative literature, studies of intertextuality, canon-formation, and postcoloniality. The resulting insights emphasise the tensions between a centre of power and a territory whose closeness has enhanced rather than hindered its validity as a defining other. The seminar will therefore welcome papers that highlight how productive Shakespeare’s work (the “centre of the canon” – Bloom 1994) can prove for the study of historical dynamics that have shaped the cultural and political traditions of Britain and Ireland. Further, the analogies provided by postcolonial and subaltern studies allow for the dynamics that characterise Shakespeare and Ireland to be brought to bear upon relations involving other cultures.
30. Shakespearean Practice, Shakespeare Industry and Indigeneity
Alan Filewod (University of Guelph, Canada)
Klára Kolinská (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)
This seminar brings together scholars and theatre artists from around the world to examine problems of Shakespearean performance and indigenous cultural production. Taking as its starting point Yvette Nolan and Kennedy Cathy MacKinnon’s aboriginal reworking of Julius Caesar in Death of a Chief at Native Earth Productions in Toronto in 2008, the seminar investigates how Shakespearean performance serves both to legitimize and delegitimize indigenous cultural production in societies marked by histories of colonialism and displacement.
In Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, Alan Filewod (session co-chair) argues that the Shakespeare industry in Canada restages a history of cultural invasion and racial surrogation. “Shakespeare,” considered as a culturally neutral site of humanist commonality, marks an “absent authentic” that reinforces Anglophone hegemony in an increasingly pluralist society. At the same time it secures the structure of critical and aesthetic value that regulates the institutional theatre sector. In this model of historical development, Shakespearean practice has functioned as a marker of cultural accession by which minoritized and non-Anglophone theatre work achieves critical legitimacy.
The seminar proposes to gather scholars and artists, familiar with or engaged in Shakespearean practice in ‘settler-invasion’ cultures (Australia, Canada and New Zealand) and ‘imperialized’ cultures (Caribbean, South Africa, India) to investigate, in both practical and theoretical terms, how this process of accession functions to produce and mark indigeneity. In this context, indigeneity refers not simply to ‘aboriginal’ subjectivity but as well to racial and social categories marked and confirmed as embodied in the process of performance. Possible questions for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:
How is contemporary Shakespearean practice related to indigenous cultural production?
Does Shakespearean practice produce indigeneity?
What are the issues involved, and what are the practical implications?
What is the position of Shakespearean productions informed by indigeneity in the larger context of the tradition of Shakespearean practice?
31. Evidence, Trial, and Proof: Post-Reformation Legal Thinking and Theatrical Representation
Barbara Kreps (University of Pisa, Italy)
Jason Rosenblatt (Georgetown University, USA)
Inter-personal conflicts and problems of knowing what--in lay parlance--may be considered “facts” are common to the narratives of both law and theatre. Indeed, theatrical plots are frequently based on adversarial events that reputedly or actually took place, representing genres of social disruption that the legal community studied and debated in the exercise of their profession. The epistemological issues common to law and theatre are grounded, externally, on the perspectives of spectatorship; internally, such concerns generate psychological questions and involve the very real problem of penetrating the human mind to arrive at any reliable insight into the individual's perceptions and behavioural motivation.
This seminar welcomes all phases of evidence-gathering and notions of proof: cognition and responsibility (including early modern theories about perception and behaviour); categories of evidence; the issues contended and the proper venues for pleading or hearing them within the various court jurisdictions available in early modern England; convictions (both popular and legal) about what constitutes proof; the semiotics of representation in the courts and/or in the theatre.
32. What was Shakespeare Really Like? A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance in Shakespearian Biography?
Paul Edmondson (The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, UK)
Paul Franssen (University of Utrecht, Netherlands)
Shakespeare’s life is back in the limelights. This renewed surge raises some questions. How can we begin to understand what Shakespeare was really like? What might we say of his personality, his method of work, his world perspective? What has characterised Shakespearean biography in the new millennium? What discussions surrounding the life story have come to be expected, and on what grounds? Which biographies are thought to have innovated and why? Where is the borderline between serious biography and fiction? Can fiction make a meaningful contribution to Shakespeare studies, or not? If so, on what conditions?
This seminar is seeking to welcome participants who are willing to look afresh at what we might begin to say about Shakespeare's life, and especially his personality, in the context of Shakespearean biographies and landmark Shakespearean “biographical moments” of the last decade (for example, the Cobbe “life” portrait of Shakespeare). Papers are invited on life-writing, how Shakespeare's work has been related to his life, new 'discoveries', and innovative biographical writing; and also on the contribution of fictional works to the dissemination of knowledge (or disinformation) about Shakespeare’s life.
33. Shakespeare and Children's Literature
Velma Richmond (Emeritus, Holy Names College, Oakland, USA)
Susanne Greenhalgh (Roehampton University, UK)
Children's literature can properly be identified as “Shakespeare Renaissances” because it creates new life in works derived from “Renaissance Shakespeare” and inspires subsequent adult encounters. This seminar invites participants to consider the multiple ways in which over centuries Shakespeare has been retold / adapted for children in stories, performances, cartoons, film, toys, and pedagogy. Social, political, and religious implications are possible ways to explain that “infantalization” is not an adequate response to children's versions of Shakespeare.
34. Shakespearean Stagings in
Post-Communist Europe
Emil Sirbulescu (University of Craiova, Romania)
Nikolai Zakharov (Russian Academy of Science, Russia)
Theatre in Romania had always been a space of spiritual resistance. The way the liberating messages were transmitted is one of the inexplicable paradoxes of totalitarian societies. December 1989 meant a total change of situation for the theatre as institution and as space for creation. But the political events following the “revolution” did not fulfill the expectations. As a consequence, the audience left the theatre and caused a very serious crisis solved only in recent years. The workshop addresses such questions as: How do different appropriations of Shakespeare in former Communist countries resemble or contradict pre- and post-Iron Curtain situation in Romania? How did changes in the funding basis affect company structure and resources for the physical realisation of Shakespeare on the stage? Can we talk of a “split” audience – part of which prefers the performances of the repertoire theatres and the other part affording the more expensive performances of private companies? Are there any forms of censorship still manifest in the selection of one play or another, or is it only the financial aspect that prevails? Obviously, the questions above are only tentative. Any proposals addressing the main topic will be seriously considered.
35. “Nothing if not critical”: International Perspectives on Shakespearean
Theatre Reviewing
Paul Prescott (University of Warwick, UK)
Peter J. Smith (Nottingham Trent University, UK.)
Janice Valls-Russell (IRCL, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France)
This seminar will bring together an international array of academics, journalists, broadcasters, theatre practitioners and students to debate the current state/s of Shakespearean theatre criticism across the globe. The Shakespearean theatre review is a key site for the local and global circulation of knowledge and opinion. Despite its cultural and economic importance, its impact on reputations, box offices, and the circulation of Shakespeare in wider culture, the activity of theatre reviewing is rarely placed under sustained scrutiny. Papers might address the following issues/questions:
- The comparative strengths and weaknesses of Shakespearean reviewing – amateur, journalistic, or academic – across a range of different cultures.
- The function of the review in selling, circulating and memorialising Shakespearean performance in your national theatrical climate.
- The medium – online, newspaper, academic journal, radio – and implied audience of the review.
- The impact of reviewing on performance practice.
- What do theatre practitioners want from reviews?
- What might different traditions of theatre criticism learn from each other?
- How do Anglophone reviewers read non-Anglophone Shakespeare and vice-versa?
36. Shakespeare after REED
Sally-Beth Maclean (University of Toronto, Canada)
Lawrence Manley (Yale University, USA)
During the past thirty years the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has published documentary evidence of entertainment in the English provinces in a series of volumes that have contributed to reassessment of professional theatre in the Elizabethan era. This seminar invites papers that explore recent developments in Shakespearean studies stimulated by fresh archival research and/or REED initiatives in the following areas:
- patronage of theatre in all its forms
- acting companies: repertory, provincial touring and London careers, financing
- convergence of medieval and Elizabethan dramatic style and genre
- theatrical spaces: building types, material conditions
- digital applications: research databases, performance texts, data visualization
A variety of approaches will be welcomed and need not be restricted to Shakespeare alone, but rather can be applied more broadly to the period of his lifetime.
37. Plants and Gender in Early
Modern Literatures
Jennifer Munroe (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia, Canada)
While scholars of Shakespeare have employed the methods of ecocriticism with great success in recent years, much of this scholarship, with few notable exceptions, tends to examine the rich relations between Shakespeare’s works, early modern English subjects, and animals. In this seminar, however, we ask participants to focus their work specifically on representations of plants in Shakespeare’s writings as well as in their adaptations by writers from England, Europe and/or the Americas. Since ecocriticism stresses that one’s connection to a specific place at a specific time influences one’s sense of the natural world, we aim to broaden the scope of our ecocritical inquiry to interrogate how the material relationship between plants and early modern people and their representation in Shakespeare (or those texts that adapt and/or revive his works) informs the construction of masculinity, femininity, and national identity. This seminar thus considers the particular import of gender in the ways early modern human beings understood, expressed, and experienced the plant kingdom in material as well as metaphorical terms; and it also pushes beyond England’s shores to make room for scholars to pose these questions of texts from continental and colonial traditions. Essays that are comparative in focus are, of course, encouraged.
Anticipated questions:
- How might an understanding of plants in material, not just in symbolic, terms in texts by Shakespeare afford us a sense of their relationship to literary production that may be different for men and women in different areas of the early modern world?
- How might the relationship between humans and the vegetable kingdom be expressed and/or understood through the performance of gender in particular in these texts?
- Is the way humans experience plants—through practice as well as through the imagination—always inherently gendered? How is that gendering racialized and/or politicized in texts by Shakespeare?
- How does the geographic specificity of the spaces where plants are grown, used, and represented inform and perhaps determine a plant’s meaning?
38. Shakespeare as Intertext
Melissa Croteau (California Baptist University, USA)
Eleni Kyriakou Pilla (Northern Arizona University, USA)
[A]ny text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.—Julia Kristeva
This seminar will examine the ways in which Shakespeare—his texts, his life, his likeness—is alluded to and represented in diverse texts or artifacts and the motivations and significance of such intertextual play. Papers may investigate Shakespeare's influence around the globe in non-literary arts: music, painting, statuary, architecture, dance, etc. Papers on artifacts of popular culture, such as advertising, souvenirs, tchotchkes (e.g., Shakespeare bobble-heads, coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc.) also are welcome. Of course, myriad literary intertexts exist, including novels, plays, and innumerable works of poetry. Media intertexts also abound, and contributors to the seminar may focus on film, television, or commercials. In keeping with the theme of this seminar, most papers will take a cultural studies approach. Whether one calls this type of quotation intertextuality, transtextuality, or heteroglossia, the focus is to explore the ways in which Shakespeare, in various guises, is in dialogue with other texts, sundry genres, and heterogeneous environments. This pursuit allows us to “(re)evaluate’ Shakespeare ‘by means of comparison, counter-position and contrast” (Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Context).
39. Shakespeare and Minority Linguistic Communities: Whose Renaissance?
Dirk Delabastita (University of Namur, Belgium)
Roshni Mooneeram (University of Nottingham Ningbo, China)
This seminar takes up the conference theme of Shakespeare and renaissances by focusing on Shakespeare in translation in minority linguistic communities. Crucially, the idea of „minority“ languages and cultures is a relative one. During the English renaissance and in the early stages of Shakespeare’s international reception, English itself would have counted as a minority language abroad. When the Empire and its language conquered large parts of the globe, positions of power and centrality underwent radical shifts and Shakespeare often became the powerful voice of a majority language. Studying the various roles that translations and adaptations of Shakespeare have played in minority linguistic contexts against the wider background of these power shifts can therefore inform Shakespeare studies in a very relevant manner.
It seems fitting to us at a World Shakespeare Congress which seeks to explore the Renaissance/s to use, as a starting point, David Damrosch’s theorization of world literature as a double „elliptical refraction of national literatures“ (What is World Literature, 2003, p. 283). This seminar is interested in exploring the dialectic between the impact of translations/adaptations of Shakespeare on the renaissance of the target languages and cultures as much as it considers the contribution of those works to Shakespeare’s renaissance in the 21st century.
Whilst the seminar invites contributions mainly from scholars who have studied the circulation of Shakespearean texts in translation in the past and the present, it also welcomes contributions from practising translators who have had to deal with linguistic minority issues and who have developed a critical and self-critical discourse about their experience. Participants in the seminar are invited to address, among other topics, the following:
- submission and/or subversion: textual strategies and the political impact of translations, adaptations and rewritings of Shakespeare in minor/minority languages
- Shakespeare, a contentious tool for language teaching and language planning
- translating Shakespeare, or not, within immigrant communities
- translating Shakespeare into Creole languages, „emergent“ languages, „threatened“ languages, dialects, etc. across the five continents
- Shakespeare and the deaf and blind communities abroad
