Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: L106.

Leader / Organisatrice

Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

Participants

1. Chloe Preedy, University of Exeter (UK)
   Fortune’s Breath: Rewriting the Classical Storm in Marlowe and Shakespeare
2. Paul Frazer, Northumbria University (UK)
   Marlowe and Shakespeare Restaged: Influence, Appropriation, and ‘Mobility’ in Thomas Dekker’s Drama
3. Roy Eriksen, University of Agder (Norway)
   Working with Marlowe: Shakespeare’s Early Engagement with Marlowe’s Poetics

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Chloe Preedy, University of Exeter (UK)
Fortune’s Breath: Rewriting the Classical Storm in Marlowe and Shakespeare

The shared prominence of the storm in Dido, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest is often realted to the Aeneid, and interpreted through a framework of empire-building and colonial discourse. However, the prophetic and literary antecedents of the Virgilian tempest hint at an alternative interpretation, raising questions about the nature of theatrical authorship, the authority of professional dramatists, and literary fame. I also consider the plays’ related representation of flight and aerial command, analysing the extent to which mastery of the theatrical air becomes linked to a more enduring and powerful vision of authorship.

2. Paul Frazer, Northumbria University (UK)
Marlowe and Shakespeare Restaged: Influence, Appropriation, and ‘Mobility’ in Thomas Dekker’s Drama

Scholarly attention to appropriations of both Marlowe and Shakespeare has flourished in recent years, yet their immediate influence over early modern theatrical culture has been relatively neglected. The early extant (sole-authored) plays of Dekker show intimate intertextual borrowings from both Marlowe and Shakespeare; I explore these, probing moments of arrogation, homage and dramatic hybridity and considering in particular the resonant connection between literary appropriation and ‘movement’. When Dekker apes Marlowe and Shakespeare, he often does so in ways that reflect the mobile propensities of actor, acting troupe, and play-text, at a time of heightened English interest in the passage of bodies and texts.

3. Roy Eriksen, University of Agder (Norway)
Working with Marlowe: Shakespeare’s Early Engagement with Marlowe’s Poetics

Among Elizabethan and Jacobean dramtic poets, Shakespeare alone fully grasped the implications and potential of Marlowe’s poetic practice. Marlowe had used the rhetorical term ‘one Poem’s period’ to refer to a finished poetic composition, and Shakespeare followed him in the sustained use of verbally patterned speeches. But although Shakespeare was the dramatist who most consistently adopted the ‘mighty line’, or as Touchstone put it, ‘his saw of might’, he also distanced himself from and felt free to parody his contemporary’s neo-platonising poetics and some of its magniloquent results, not least in Tamburlaine the Great.

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: TBA.

Leader / Organisatrice

Nathalie Rivere de Carles (France)

Participants

1. Timothy Hampton, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
   Delay, Deferral, and Interpretation in Renaissance Peacemaking
2. Joanna Craigwood, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (UK)
   Diplomacy and King John
3. Nathalie Rivere de Carles, Université Toulouse Le Mirail (France)
   Mutual disarmament and the politics of appeasement in Shakespearean drama

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Timothy Hampton, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Delay, Deferral, and Interpretation in Renaissance Peacemaking

This paper will explore the importance of the manipulation of time in> Renaissance diplomatic theory and in the representations of diplomacy in literature. I will begin with Machiavelli’s diplomatic dispatches to the Florentine /Signoriato stress the ways in which the famous Machiavellian concepts of virtue, and of acting at the right moment are played out in his practical negotiations. Then I will look at several slightly later theorists of diplomacy, notably Montaigne, Hotman, and Gentili to consider the ways in which they discuss diplomatic delay. In particular, I will be interested in how delay is related to the problem of the interpretation — both of actions and texts. I will conclude with some analysis of theatrical representations of timeliness and delay in the work of two often-compared dramatists, Shakespeare and Corneille.

2. Joanna Craigwood, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (UK)
Diplomacy and King John

Drawing on both diplomatic and dramatic examples, this paper will examine the performance of political relations and identity though acts of diplomatic address and naming. The main focus of the paper will be the reproduction — and interrogation — of these legitimizing processes of naming within two dramatic renderings of the life of the medieval King John. This paper investigates relational political identity in these doubled ‘performative spaces’ of stage diplomacy and dramatically re-enacted diplomatic ritual. It argues that Shakespeare’s Life and Death of King John (c. 1596) and the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John (c. 1589) that served as its source both imagine legitimate English sovereignty emerging (paradoxically) from diplomatic illegitimacy or bastardy within the Catholic European diplomatic family.

3. Nathalie Rivere de Carles, Université Toulouse Le Mirail (France)
Mutual disarmament and the politics of appeasement in Shakespearean drama

Whether deadly or leading to an artificially peaceful deadlock, the strategy of ‘mutual disarmament’ is a common feature to both conflict and its diplomatic avoidance. The choreographic nature of the act as well as its paradoxical use as a form of resolution are parts and parcel of the diplomatic office, but it is also an essential feature of the stage representation of the agon and its deflation. Mutual disarmament in single combat or in geopolitical feuds implies the development of paradoxical forms of appeasement. The figure of the ambassador, his verbal and written words are the very weapons leading to a mutual disarmament. They participate in the dramatic deflation of the agon in plays such as Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline. The paper will examine how the ambassador and his material environment are progressively turned into operators of political and dramatic appeasement.

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V115/V116.

Leader / Organisatrice

Marisa C. Hayes, Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne (France/USA)

Participants

1. Sidia Fiorato, University of Verona (Italy)
   From Verbal to Visual Aesthetics: Remediating Shakespeare Through the Dancing Body
2. Lorelle Browning, Pacific University (USA)
   Adapting Shakespeare’s Rhythmic Structure to Movement
3. Freya Vass-Rhee, PhD, University of Kent (UK)
   Hamlet and the Creation of William Forsythe’s Sider

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Sidia Fiorato, University of Verona (Italy)
From Verbal to Visual Aesthetics: Remediating Shakespeare Through the Dancing Body

In the transition from linguistic to visual aesthetics, the dancing body becomes the medium for narration, and therefore an active participant in the creation of meaning. The body takes on the shape of the character’s thoughts, and, at the same time, moves beyond words themselves and expresses unconscious feelings. It thus interacts with the written word in an interdisciplinary dialogue in the effort both to tell stories and to reflect on the telling of those stories. My paper will focus on the choice of dance movements for Shakespeare’s verses in the main scenes of balletic renderings of Romeo and Juliet.

2. Lorelle Browning, Pacific University (USA)
Adapting Shakespeare’s Rhythmic Structure to Movement

Since the late 19th century, when the Departments of Rhetoric crowned Shakespeare as “the greatest poet in English,” criticism of Shakespeare’s plays has primarily been focused on “words, words, words” and critical concentration on historical and biographical aspects of the plays has been replaced by analysis of the content and patterns of his language. Yet as performance art—written for artists, not readers—I argue that the language and structure of the scripts were crafted to create rhythms that imitate their sense in performance, rhythms that are the equivalent of a score in music, providing an essential accompaniment to the language and action.

3. Freya Vass-Rhee, PhD, University of Kent (UK)
Hamlet and the Creation of William Forsythe’s Sider

A humorous chance occurrence during a rehearsal session catalyzed choreographer William Forsythe’s choice to use the soundtrack of a filmed version of Hamlet as the sonic substrate for a 2011 work that would be titled Sider. The film’s soundtrack, however, is not audible to the audience but only to the performers, who hear it through earphones. This paper tracks the 7-week process of devising Sider, revealing how the text, narrative and dramaturgy of Hamlet resonated with and extended the production’s unconventional starting points, yielded visuo-sonic compositional impulses, and reflect Forsythe’s career-long interrogation of theatrical economies of meaning.

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Ruth Morse (France)

Participants

Chair: Indira Ghose, Université de Fribourg (Switzerland)

1. Ruth Morse, Université Paris-Diderot (France)
   Earths
2. Russ McDonald, Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK)
   Come Into the Garden, Bard
3. David Schalkwyk, director of Global Shakespeare, Queen Mary University of London / University of Warwick (UK)
   Land and Freedom

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Ruth Morse, Université Paris-Diderot (France)
Earths

The commonly quoted phrase ‘this earth, this England’, in John of Gaunt’s famous dying speech, is so familiar, so resonant, and so worn out by the twentieth-century’s wars, that there seems no more to say about it. And yet a close examination of the semantic field of earth, not just there but throughout Shakespeare’s work, offers a nuanced variety of connotations and implications that invite us to rethink its appearances in a variety of contexts. This paper explores this earth rather than that earth; as that living human body, or this dead one; elemental, as followed by air, fire and water; or grossly bound upon the wheel of desire.

2. Russ McDonald, Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK)
Come Into the Garden, Bard

The English earth itself becomes a valuable element in understanding the Elizabethan attraction to form in writing and the other arts. The consolidation of a few major poetic structures in the late sixteenth century, is accompanied by an increased devotion to ‘composition’ among artists and craftspeople generally. The new Elizabethan garden—along with the discourse attending it—offers a laboratory for studying many of the same values that poets were discovering and exploiting: contrast, balance, symmetry, repetition, and the creative disruption of those features. This paper addresses the intersections between gardening and other arts in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign.

3. David Schalkwyk, director of Global Shakespeare, Queen Mary University of London / University of Warwick (UK)
Land and Freedom

Thinking about ‘this earth’ in the immediate aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death returns me to the so-called ‘Robben Island Shakespeare’, a one-volume edition smuggled into the prison in which the black political prisoners chose and signed lines that were important to them at the time. In their previous lives, they were abstracted from the land, never a subject about which Mandela spoke; rather, he emphasized questions of work in it, the freedom to move across it, to live on it. It is a reminder how complex are the metonyms and metaphors of ‘the land’.

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30

Room: Vendôme.

Leader / Organisatrice

Marthe Dubreuil (France)

Participants

1. Philippe Adrien, stage director (France)
2. Marielle David, Pédopsychiatre psychanalyste (France)
   Roméo et Othello, «Objet ou sujet de la passion?»
3. Marthe Dubreuil, actress and stage director, Psychologue clinicienne psychanalyste (France)
   Shakespeare, aux limites du genre
4. Thémis Golégou, Université Paris 7 (France)
   Ophélie, «le signe éternel» de la fin
5. Christian Hoffmann, Université Paris 7 (France)
   Le désir d’Hamlet
6. Alain Vanier, Université Paris 7 (France)

Description

Le panel propose une approche psychanalytique de certains des héros shakespeariens, à partir des concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, de Freud à Lacan: Le complexe œdipien, deuil et mélancolie, désir et relation d’objet, fonction paternelle. Le metteur en scène Philippe Adrien complètera cette approche en racontant comment sa connaissance de la psychanalyse a pu, ou non, modifier son regard dans ses mises en scène de Shakespeare.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Tuesday 22 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Panel B: Wednesday 23 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisateur

Kang Kim, Honam University (S-Korea)

Participants

Panel A:

1. Renfang Tang, University of Hull (UK)
   From Shakespeare’s Text to Chinese Stage: Performance-oriented Translation of Measure for Measure
2. Pawit Mahasarinand, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand)
   Shakespeare in Contemporary Thailand: Macbeth in Thai Politics and Othello in Thai Premier League
3. Thea Buckley, University of Birmingham (UK)
   Appropriating Shakespeare in South Asia: Cases of the Malayalam Films

Panel B:

1. Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba (Japan)
   Transvestites in Shakespeare and Manga Adaptations of Shakespeare
2. Kang Kim, Honam University (S-Korea)
   Graphic Shakespeare in Korea: From Literature to Pop Culture
3. Lipika Das, IIIT Unitary University-Odisha (India)
   The Effects of Western impact on Odia literature through Shakespeare Translations

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Renfang Tang, University of Hull (UK)
From Shakespeare’s Text to Chinese Stage: Performance-oriented Translation of Measure for Measure

English-Chinese translation of Measure for Measure produced by Ying Ruocheng for stage performance. Skopos theory, which focuses on translation as an activity with an aim or purpose, is adopted as the paper’s theoretical basis. The paper advocates that drama translation should take the performance aspect and the target language audiences’ reception into serious consideration. Through example analysis, the author concludes that Ying’s translation exemplifies the applicability of Skopos theory in the field of drama translation, which helps to realize the performability of his text.

2. Pawit Mahasarinand, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand)
Shakespeare in Contemporary Thailand: Macbeth in Thai Politics and Othello in Thai Premier League

In this non-colonial Southeast Asian country, Shakespearean plays have generally been regarded as foreign literary masterpieces and their productions, many of which are literary translations, are considerably scarce and never part of popular culture. This paper’s study of two Shakespearean adaptations in 2012—Ing Kanjanavanit’s Shakespeare Must Die and New Theatre Society’s A Match of Jealousy, however, shows attempts to finally make the Bard “Our Contemporary”. The former, an independent film still being banned in Thailand, showed a theatre company’s staging of Macbeth which resulted in their massacre. The latter, a theatre production, put Othello in Thailand’s professional football league.

3. Thea Buckley, University of Birmingham (UK)
Appropriating Shakespeare in South Asia: Cases of the Malayalam Films

Shakespeare gets a Mollywood redux, in three Malayalam-language films showcasing the unique myths and ritual arts of Kerala, India. Director Jayaraaj 셲 national-award-winning Kaliyattam (1997) reinterprets Othello astheyyam-fire-dancer; his Kannaki (2002) recasts Cleopatra as snake-temple-priestess; V. K. Prakash 셲 Karmayogi (2012) transforms Hamlet into kalaripayattu warrior-cum-avenging-god. Kerala 셲cinematic Shakespeare is mediated through an Asia-centric perspective: Jayaraaj cites Kurosawa as inspiration, while Prakash rewrites Hamlet holy-martial-arts-blockbuster-style. In commandeering Shakespeare for popular media, together they explode any myth of cultural ownership.

4. Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba (Japan)
Transvestites in Shakespeare and Manga Adaptations of Shakespeare

Manga (Japanese graphic novels) has been keen to make use of gender bender motifs in Shakespeare’s works with transvestite characters, including such case as Aoike Yasuko’s super queer Sons of Eve, where a sissy Romeo makes love to a drag queen (his Juliet) and Shimura Takako’s Wandering Son, where a girl born in the body of a boy performs Juliet. This presentation will argue that both manga with transvestites and Shakespeare’s gender bending plays challenge the conventional dichotomy of female/male, by focusing on the fact that gender is something that can be performed, played and cosplayed.

5. Kang Kim, Honam University (S-Korea)
Graphic Shakespeare in Korea: From Literature to Pop Culture

The presence of Shakespeare in a condensed imaginary world of cartoons and comic books is a fairly recent phenomenon in Korea. Shakespeare in comic magazines or cartoon books has been a rare subject, despite of the introduction of modern style comics from Japan. Comics were mostly regarded to be a product of lowbrow sub/culture. Most Koreans took Shakespeare only as a genuine icon of the dramatic imagination. My presentation will be focused on a brief history of comic book adaptations of Shakespeare in Korea and examine the socio-cultural context in which how these adaptations are commercially made and educationally being circulated.

6. Lipika Das, IIIT Unitary University-Odisha (India)
The Effects of Western impact on Odia literature through Shakespeare Translations

I will make an attempt to throw some light on the effects of Western impact on Odia literature taking into account three Odia translations of Shakespeare produced over fifty years from 1908 to 1959. These few Shakespearean translations in Odia deserve cultural significance and worth the critical attention. Most of them have been undertaken by inconspicuous translators, and might have possessed a meager readership. But, they do not deserve negligence as they reflect the evolution of modern Odia society and qualify the Shakespearean appropriations with growing social and ideological concerns. They reveal changing responses to Shakespeare by the changing contemporary contexts in Odisha.

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: L109.

Leader / Organisateur

Roy Eriksen (Norway)

Participants

1. Michael Alijewicz, Queen’s University Belfast (Ireland)
   Birnam Wood Moves on the Stage: Reading Probability and Architecture in Macbeth
2. Lois Leveen (USA)
   Putting the ‘Where’ into ‘Wherefore Art Thou’: Urban Architectures of Desire in Romeo and Juliet
3. Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
   Shakespeare, Architecture and Privacy
4. Melissa Auclair, University of Toronto (Canada)
   Coming into the Closet: Spatial Practices and Imagined Space in Shakespeare’s Plays

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Michael Alijewicz, Queen’s University Belfast (Ireland)
Birnam Wood Moves on the Stage: Reading Probability and Architecture in Macbeth

This paper demonstrates how early modern architectural plots throw relief on the ghostly umbra in Macbeth’s staging. Comparing architectural designs to the play draws out the visual multiplicity Macbeth’s performance and in turn, the play reveals that early modern architecture’s ostensibly clean lines actually blur in a range between conditional language and visual image. Framed in this way, planning necessarily becomes a multimedia visual-narrative form. A critical payoff of this analysis is that sensitive readings of probability become necessary in order to grasp urban spaces. Physical structures matter, but the potential contained in plans and edifices also influences Shakespearean performance.

2. Lois Leveen (USA)
Putting the ‘Where’ into ‘Wherefore Art Thou’: Urban Architectures of Desire in Romeo and Juliet

Act II, scene ii of Romeo and Juliet is the most famous scene in Shakespeare, and perhaps all of English-language drama. But the vernacular popularity of ‘the balcony scene’ is complicated by the fact that not only is there no balcony in the play, there was no balcony per se in all of Shakespeare’s England. Drawing on architectural history, this paper examines the spatial and textual lacuna of Juliet’s balcony as a locus for emerging intersections of gender, desire, and the tensions between privacy and public display in the Renaissance city.

3. Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
Shakespeare, Architecture and Privacy

The notion of early modern privacy has been much debated in recent years. Scholars like Philippe Ariès, Mark Girouard, William Hoskins or Alice Friedman relate architectural innovations to a new search for privacy. Cultural materialism provides a fresh perspective on these issues. Lena Orlin in particular questions “the notion that personal privacy is something desirable” (Locating Privacy in Tudor London, OUP, 2007, p. 9). Bearing what precedes in mind, I would like to examine a few examples taken from Shakespeare’s plays to see how he relates house, domesticity, surveillance and the division of spaces between public and private.

4. Melissa Auclair, University of Toronto (Canada)
Coming into the Closet: Spatial Practices and Imagined Space in Shakespeare’s Plays

This paper explores how early modern masculinity faces the emergent space of the closet, whose space for the public figure undermines his authority, yet must nevertheless be defended like a kingdom. By considering a selection of Shakespeare’s histories and comedies, I interrogate how specific spaces make new types of behaviour possible. This is architecture without architecture: on stage, how do individuals ‘act out’ a space when none of its physical features are present? How does this space define the characters’ behaviour? Finally, how do changes in the space of a home change the individual’s relationship to their larger public world?

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Wednesday 23 April 2014, 9h-10h30

Panel B: Wednesday 23 April 2014, 16h-17h30.

Room: V107.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Clara Calvo, Universidad de Murcia (Spain) and Coppélia Kahn, Brown University (USA)

Participants

Panel A:

1. Andrew Murphy, University of St. Andrews (UK)
   Radical Commemorations: 1864 Chartists and 1916 Rebels
2. Monika Smialkowska, Northumbria University (UK)
   Reluctant Commemorators: Rudyard Kipling’s and Thomas Hardy’s Contributions to Israel Gollanz’s A Book of Homage to Shakespeare
3. Nely Keinänen, University of Helsinki (Finland)
   Commemoration as Nation-Building: The Case of Finland, 1916

Panel B:

1. Richard Schoch, Queen’s University Belfast (Ireland)
   Genealogies of Shakespearean Acting
2. Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire (UK)
   Remembrance of Things Past: 1851, 1951, 2012
3. Nicola J. Watson, Open University (UK)
   Gardening with Shakespeare

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Andrew Murphy, University of St. Andrews (UK)
Radical Commemorations: 1864 Chartists and 1916 Rebels

The tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death happened to coincide exactly with the separatist uprising staged in Dublin at Easter weekend in 1916 – generally seen as the foundational moment of Irish independence. This paper explores the Shakespearean connections of some of the activists who took part in the uprising and examines these Irish cultural networks within the greater context of political appropriations of the poet stretching back to the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee, which was closely involved in celebrations of the tercentenary of the poet’s birth, in 1864.

2. Monika Smialkowska, Northumbria University (UK)
Reluctant Commemorators: Rudyard Kipling’s and Thomas Hardy’s Contributions to Israel Gollanz’s A Book of Homage to Shakespeare

When Israel Gollancz invited Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy to contribute to his commemorative volume for the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary, they questioned whether celebrating Shakespeare during the war was appropriate. In the end, Hardy agreed but Kipling refused to write a tribute, allowing only a reprint of his 1898 article on The Tempest. This paper explores the negotiations between the editor and the two writers, investigating the reasons for their respective positions and the impact of the pieces which Gollancz eventually published. In doing so, it interrogates the interactions between commemorating the past and the contingencies of the historical moment in which these commemorations occur.

3. Nely Keinanen, University of Helsinki (Finland)
Commemoration as Nation-Building: The Case of Finland, 1916

This paper examines the curious life of a poetic tribute to Shakespeare by the Finnish poet Eino Leino. The version published in The Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916) ends with a searing call for freedom of speech; the version Leino published in his political/literary journal as part of a 1916 Shakespeare commemorative issue is missing the final three lines; and these same lines have been meticulously cut out of one copy of Homage in the Finnish National Library. These versions show how minority cultures use “Shakespeare commemoration” for their own purposes but also the ways their efforts to voice dissent are thwarted.

4. Richard Schoch, Queen’s University Belfast (Ireland)
Genealogies of Shakespearean Acting

To what extent has Shakespeare in performance been regarded as a living archive, an embodiment and preservation of past performances? To what extent has performance been regarded as the opposite: a source of novelty and innovation that spurns its own past? Is acting Shakespeare a matter of commemoration or, alternatively, dismissal? Contrasting case studies of the Restoration actor Thomas Betterton (c. 1635-1710) and the Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving (1838-1905) demonstrate that both the commemorative tradition and its opposite have dominated concepts of theatrical excellence at different moments. Each tradition enjoyed a period of dominance, revealing the theatre’s changing perspective on itself.

5. Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire (UK)
Remembrance of Things Past: 1851, 1951, 2012

This paper examines the re-contextualisation of Shakespeare in three major festival celebrations of British culture: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain 1951, and the London Olympics of 2012. In all three we find Shakespeare repositioned in relation to the disciplines of engineering, design and technology. Three case studies explore how Shakespeare is simultaneously celebrated as a cornerstone of British culture, and brought into intimate relation with the scientific and technological priories of the festivals. These re-contextualizations also bring Shakespeare into connection with some key themes of contemporary Shakespeare studies, including internationalism and popular participation.

6. Nicola J. Watson, Open University (UK)
Gardening with Shakespeare

When and why did the idea of making Shakespeare gardens develop, and what has plausibly constituted a ‘Shakespeare garden’? Garrick’s celebration of Shakespeare as ‘Warwickshire Will’ led to claims for an organic relation between Shakespeare’s genius and the English countryside. Eventually, a concept of the ‘Shakespeare garden’ emerged from the Arts and Crafts movement in gardening. Many such gardens were realised in Stratford, then exported to the USA and developed in more hostile environments. The history of Shakespeare gardens provides a context for understanding the projected redevelopment of New Place and its garden for the 2016 anniversary.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Panel B: Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada) and James Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)

Participants

Panel A: Shakespearean Levinas

1. Bruce Young, Brigham Young University (USA)
   Maternity, Substitution, and Transcendence: The Feminine in Shakespeare and Levinas
2. Kent R. Lehnhof, Chapman University (USA)
   Disincarnating God: Theology and Phenomenology in King Lear
3. Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada)
   The Peace of Empires and the Empire of Peace in Shakespeare and Levinas

Panel B: Levinasian Shakespeare

1. David Goldstein, York University (Canada)
   Blindness and Welcome in King Lear
2. James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
   Money, Sociality, Justice: The Levinasian Third and The Merchant of Venice
3. James A. Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
   Time and the Other in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Bruce Young, Brigham Young University (USA)
Maternity, Substitution, and Transcendence: The Feminine in Shakespeare and Levinas

The “feminine” as symbolic and ontological category has overlapping, contrasting, and mutually illuminating uses in Shakespeare and Levinas. Levinas associates the feminine with welcome, mystery, and the “absolutely other” of eros. Later, he radically reinterprets the idea, linking it with the extreme vulnerability of “maternity” and substitution. Shakespeare’s female characters—objects of eros, sources of wisdom and reproof, figures experiencing or bringing about transformation and rebirth—parallel Levinas’s understandings of the feminine. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s quasi-resurrections echo Levinas’s reference to resurrection as a disruption and recommencement making possible the “infinity of time” and thus the transcendence of relationship with the other.

2. Kent R. Lehnhof, Chapman University (USA)
Disincarnating God: Theology and Phenomenology in King Lear

This paper draws on the difficult philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to discuss the complicated religiosity of King Lear. My overarching argument is that in Shakespeare’s play, as in Levinas’s philosophy, transcendence does not occur as we commune with God but as we approach our neighbor. The only epiphanies we can expect in this life are a wholly human affair–but they are no less transformative for all that.

3. Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada)
The Peace of Empires and the Empire of Peace in Shakespeare and Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas begins Totality and Infinity by noting how his contemporaries privilege war over peace: “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?” Levinas’s contrasting belief in a radical and primordial peace informs his entire philosophy and hence his many but scattered references to Shakespeare. Such peace may seem contradicted by almost all of Shakespeare’s works, and certainly by a contemporary criticism dedicated to uncovering relations of power. I shall argue, nevertheless, that even the struggles within Shakespeare’s plays remain grounded in primordial recognition of the Other.

4. David Goldstein, York University (Canada)
Blindness and Welcome in King Lear

For Shakespeare, the face is a symbolic site of ethical and epistemological crisis. Is the face a mask or a mirror, a screen or a window? King Lear explores the question of the face from a perspective similar to that of Emmanuel Levinas. A Levinasian lens helps us to conceive of the play’s famous concerns—seeing, blindness, disguise, and service—in a fresh way. Shakespeare plumbs the region between the self and obligation to others, revealing a dramatic but incomplete transformation from service to hospitality. King Lear conjures the beggar’s face as the avatar of this struggle toward welcome.

5. James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
Money, Sociality, Justice: The Levinasian Third and The Merchant of Venice

Levinas is one of the few philosophers for whom, as he writes, money has “dignity as a philosophical category.” In this paper, I take up Levinas’s conception of the sociality of money and its relation to ethics and justice in a reading of the famous courtroom scene from The Merchant of Venice. My contention is that a Levinasian conception of money helps clarify the complex relation between ethical asymmetry and juridical equality in the scene. My hope is to illuminate Shylock’s claim to, and desire for, a formal equality before the law, an equality founded on unknowable difference.

6. James A. Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
Time and the Other in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

In Time and the Other Levinas worked to counter Heidegger’s ecstatic theory of time as “being-for-death,” by focusing on the movement of time as revealing the “ungraspable” nature of death. For Levinas, it is this phenomenological time that constitutes the alterity of the other person as immanent. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s characters confront what Levinas describes as death’s “ungraspable” nature. The ungraspable nature of death allows Levinas to develop a phenomenology that is enacted in the temporality of sociality. I will argue that Shakespeare offers a surprisingly similar phenomenology of time and the other in Cymbeline.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Wednesday 23 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Panel B: Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Yilin Chen, Providence University (Taiwan) and Ryuta Minami, Shirayuri College (Japan)

Participants

Session A: Theoretical Perspectives on Manga and Animation Shakespeares

Chair: Ryuta Minami (Shirayuri College, Japan)

1. Yilin Chen, Providence University (Taiwan)
   Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman”: A Striking Absence of Gertrude and Her Sexuality in the Taiwanese Graphic Novels of Hamlet
2. Ma Yujin, University of London (UK)
   A Brief Study of the Readership of Chinese Shakespeare Manga
3. Ryuta Minami, Shirayuri College (Japan)
   Global Dissemination of Fragments of Shakespeare in Japanese Anime (Animation Films)

Session B: Practitioners’ Perspectives on Shakespeares and Manga

Chair: Yilin Chen, Providence University (Taiwan)

1. Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba (Japan)
   Which is more global, manga or Shakespeare?
2. Harumo Sanazaki,(Manga Artist (Japan) (with Ryuta Minami as an interpreter)
   Creating Manga Shakespeare for Mature female Readers: a Sex-Positive Feminist’s Point of View
3. Emma Hayley, Managing Director of SelfMadeHero (UK)
   On SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare Series
4. Sonia Leon, Manga Artist (UK), creator of  Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Yilin Chen, Providence University (Taiwan)
Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman”: A Striking Absence of Gertrude and Her Sexuality in the Taiwanese Graphic Novels of Hamlet

This paper will examine three graphic novels of Hamlet on the Taiwanese market in the twenty first century, especially the way in which Gertrude and her sexuality are represented to clarify the invisible self-censorship. It looks into the scenes in relation to Gertrude’s chastity and her sexual desires in these adaptations and find out the differences in the portrayal of Gertrude’s mother image between the two local adaptations and one British edition. In this pioneering research, I propose both Confucianism and shôjo manga traditions may be responsible for the absence of Gertrude and her sexual appeal.

2. Ma Yujin, University of London (UK)
A Brief Study of the Readership of Chinese Shakespeare Manga

Following the trend of adapting Shakespearean texts for comic books, a rich diversity of Chinese Shakespeare manga has been produced in the past decade. Some are published for the school education market and some seek to contribute to popularize Shakespeare’s works. However, there has been little previous discussion or contextualization of these manga versions. Drawing on the different publication features and the manga readership, this paper will explore how Chinese Shakespeare manga combines canonical Shakespeare with popular youth culture and to what extent Chinese manga versions have influenced readers’ understanding of the original Shakespeare works.

3. Ryuta Minami, Shirayuri College (Japan)
Global Dissemination of Fragments of Shakespeare in Japanese Anime (Animation Films)

Shakespearean productions in mass/pop visual culture do not seem to have received due considerations in spite of their pervasive presences in manga comics and animated films. These pop cultural Shakespeares are often globally and collaboratively shared and circulated across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries among fans of anime (animated films) and manga comics. In other words, pop cultural Shakespeares have become part of a global participatory cultural community, in which a spectator/consumer/fan becomes an active participant as commentator, collaborator or re-creator. This paper discusses a relationship between pop cultural re-productions of Shakespeare and his global dissemination through anime.

4. Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba (Japan)
Which is more global, manga or Shakespeare?

In this glocalized, multicultural and media-mix age, there is not much point to insist that Shakespeare is a monopoly of England. Likewise, it is anachronistic to argue that only manga produced by Japanese artists for Japanese readers is authentic. In an attempt to contextualize the following presentations by manganized Shakespeares by Sanazaki, Hayley and Leong, this presentation shows history, theory and practice of negotiations between Shakespeare and manga (and/or graphic novels). The question I would be raising is: which is more global, manga or Shakespeare? –or, is this question simply nonsense?

5. Harumo Sanazaki,(Manga Artist (Japan) (with Ryuta Minami as an interpreter)
Creating Manga Shakespeare for Mature female Readers: a Sex-Positive Feminist’s Point of View

Hamuro Sanazaki talks about her manga re-creations of Shakespeare’s plays which are targeted specifically at mature female readers. What is remarkable about her Shakespearean manga is the ways she shifts perspectives, focusing upon mature female characters such as Lady Capulet and Lady Macbeth, both of whom coincidentally are not given their first names in Shakespeare’s plays. In creating her Macbeth, for example, Sanazaki conducted historical researches to get her real name back for Lady Macbeth in her work. Sanazaki discusses why and how she manganises Shakespeare’s plays as a sex-positive feminist manga artist.

6. Emma Hayley, Managing Director of SelfMadeHero (UK)
On SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare Series

Emma Hayley talks about the Manga Shakespeare series from its conception to its execution and its success over the last seven years. She talks about why the medium of manga is a natural fit for Shakespeare’s plays, the team behind the series and the decisions made on editing Shakespeare’s words and re-inventing his works in new settings. While some may think Shakespeare would have been turning in his grave, she explains why she thinks that Shakespeare would have championed this pioneering way of presenting his works.

7. Sonia Leon, Manga Artist (UK), creator of  Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

Sonia Leong talks about the challenges of adapting Romeo and Juliet, not just into the Manga format (which has its own storytelling techniques, panel design, emotional exaggeration and visual style) but also into the setting of modern-day Tokyo. She explains how she updated the character designs and their relationships to each other, and how she made key elements of the plot work with today’s technology and cultural norms.

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: L106.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Agnès Lafont, University of Montpellier – Institut d’Etudes sur la Renaissance, L’âge Classique et les Lumières, UMR 5186 (France), and Atsuhiko Hirota, Kyoto University (Japan)

Participants

Chair : Yves Peyré, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)

1. Charlotte Coffin, Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne (France)
   Where from and where to? Heywood’s appropriation of classical mythology in The Golden Age (1611)
2. Tania Demetriou, University of York (UK)
   The Genre of Myth, or Myth without Ovid?
3. Atsuhiko Hirota, University of Kyoto (Japan)
   Venetian Enchantresses and Egyptian Sorcery: Transformations of the Circean Myth in Othello
4. Agnès Lafont, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
   Ovidian emergences in Spenser’s Faery Queen: Britomart and Myrrha, an unexpected textual junction?
5. Janice Valls-Russell, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
   Constance and Arthur as Andromache and Astyanax? Trojan Shadows in Shakespeare’s King John

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Charlotte Coffin, Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne (France)
Where from and where to? Heywood’s appropriation of classical mythology in The Golden Age (1611)

While the Ages plays are recognized by critics as having played an important part in Heywood’s and the Red Bull’s success in the 1610s, they are seldom analysed in detail. This paper will offer a close reading of The Golden Age and address both its rewriting of (not very) classical sources in dramatic form, and its relationship to non-mythological plays of the same period, like Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. It will also reconsider the structure of the play, which seems based on alternation but reveals a deeper cohesion, with pervasive concerns about succession, transgression, and generation.

2. Tania Demetriou, University of York (UK)
The Genre of Myth, or Myth without Ovid?

This paper will attempt to revisit the classical paradigms that shaped the Elizabethan tradition of poems known as ‘Ovidian’, or ‘mythological epyllia’. In particular I will try to ask what literary influences beyond Ovid energise these poems by exploring certain short mythological poems from antiquity, their early modern afterlife, and their place in the particular process whereby Elizabethan poet-playwrights created their own ‘epyllic’ tradition.

3. Atsuhiko Hirota, University of Kyoto (Japan)
Venetian Enchantresses and Egyptian Sorcery: Transformations of the Circean Myth in Othello

Circe, a goddess and witch with a power to change men into beasts, has been variously reconfigured in the literary tradition since originating in The Odyssey. This paper aims at exploring the crossroads between the tradition of Circean myths and Othello, a play representing the fluidity of identity in the Mediterranean setting and abounding in references to beasts. For this purpose, it focuses on Othello’s tale about his past hardships and his handkerchief, both of which first link Othello to witchcraft but result in suggesting Desdemona’s connection with Circe and her traditional descendants.

4. Agnès Lafont, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Ovidian emergences in Spenser’s Faery Queen: Britomart and Myrrha, an unexpected textual junction?

Both (unexpected) references to incestuous Myrrha (Met.X.311-476) in Spenser’s book III of The Faerie Queene are a symptom of a Virgilian-Ovidian intertextuality which is gradually acknowledged by critics. Britomart as Myrrha (Adonis’ mother turned into a Myrrh-tree) and as Laurel-like Daphne exemplifies what Raphael Lyne calls a ‘complex intertextual junction’ testifying of the poet’s compound engagement with classical tradition; charting these Ovidian subtexts unveils an heterogeneous mode of imitatio, while it also uncovers a deep anxiety about female chastity woven in the texture of an essentially Virgilian epic poem.

5. Janice Valls-Russell, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Constance and Arthur as Andromache and Astyanax? Trojan Shadows in Shakespeare’s King John

This paper seeks to demonstrate that various factors converge in King John to endow setting, rhetoric and characters with a discreet classical dimension, within the context of a play that is a Tudor interpretation of medieval history. Coloured by political and religious contingency, and the Elizabethans’ complex relationship with the medieval past, the play’s tragic overtones also carry traces of a contemporary fascination with the Trojan tradition. Shakespeare’s remodelling of events and his dramatisation of the figures of Constance and Arthur suggest a revisiting of the destruction of Troy and the tragic fates of Andromache and Astyanax.

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 16h-17h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leader / Organisatrice

Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)

Participants

1. Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
   “TaH pagh, taHbe'” – Shakespearean Heritage in the Postmodern Space Opera
2. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College, Trondheim (Norway)
   The Extraordinary Presence of Shakespeare and his Characters in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
3. Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia (USA)
   ‘Desdemona’s Voice’: The Shakespearean Past in Jeff Noon’s Vurt
4. Jennifer Drouin, University of Alabama (USA)
   Doctor Who‘s “The Shakespeare Code”, or Science Fiction as a new New Historicism

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
“TaH pagh, taHbe'” – Shakespearean Heritage in the Postmodern Space Opera

Shakespearean references in science fiction have been read as speculations on future literary traditions, as a means of establishing ‘hero’ and ‘villain’, or as pop culture’s claim to the bard. Yet it remains to be analyzed how Shakespeare’s plays function within the concept of postmodern space operas, toying with echo chambers and universal simulation. Holodeck performances and Hamlet quotes in Klingon on Star Trek, a Macbeth plot in Battlestar Galactica, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars – in many different forms, Shakespeare in space continues to raise questions about the self-fashioning of humanity as a whole in a future of steadily increasing challenges.

2. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College, Trondheim (Norway)
The Extraordinary Presence of Shakespeare and his Characters in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Shakespeare and his characters appear in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2012) to offer readers recognizable figures to which Moore can connect a variety of fluidly recreated historical and fictional characters. The result is a multimodal virtual space where all literary figures coexist to confound time and space (science fiction’s primary realms of utopic possibility). In this paper, I demonstrate how Shakespeare, as the icon of “original” literature, anchors the infinite fluidity of the League’s many worlds thus allowing the fictionality of familiar literature to fade as readers enter the particularly creative simulacrum of Moore’s concluding Black Dossier (2005).

3. Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia (USA)
‘Desdemona’s Voice’: The Shakespearean Past in Jeff Noon’s Vurt

This paper argues that Jeff Noon’s 1993 British cyberpunk novel Vurt rewrites Shakespeare’s tragedy of exogamy or racial crossing, Othello, as a triumphant fable in favor of interspecies mixing. The novel moves among 1990s Manchester, the drug-fuelled, multi-species virtual game-world or Vurt, and the deadly cultural crossings of Shakespeare’s Othello. The gang whose exploits the narrator, Scribble, documents prides itself on its racial purity, to such an extent that Scribble is in love with his own sister, Desdemona. By the end of the novel, however, Scribble discovers that the Vurt favors endogamy over endogamy and cross-cultural myth-making over antique Englishness.

4. Jennifer Drouin, University of Alabama (USA)
Doctor Who‘s “The Shakespeare Code”, or Science Fiction as a new New Historicism
Like John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, “The Shakespeare Code” episode of Doctor Who recreates the material conditions of Shakespeare’s London; however, the television series obsessed with time and history does so more accurately than the film constrained by the conventions of romantic comedy. Whereas Madden’s film distorts the timeline of Shakespeare’s plays, Doctor Who endeavours to fill in the gaps, notably by imagining the lost Love’s Labour’s Won. Doctor Who demonstrates that science fiction, because it is concerned primarily with humanity’s legacy to the universe, is more apt to do New Historicism than other genres.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Saturday 26 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Panel B: Saturday 26 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: V115/V116.

Leader / Organisateur

Christopher Leslie, Polytechnic School of Engineering at New York University (USA)

Participants

Panel A

1. Justin Kolb, American University in Cairo (Egypt)
   “The Dissolution of the Engine of this World”: The decay of nature and the Anthropocene in the history plays
2. Felix Sprang, University of Hamburg (Germany)
   “What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?” Shakespeare’s Animals – a Class of Their Own.
3. Martin Hyatt, Ph.D., independent scholar
   Shakespeare and Birds
4. Jarosław Włodarczyk, Polish Academy of Sciences and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin
   and Zuzanna Czerniak, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (Poland)
   Astronomical Fragments in Shakespeare and Modern History of Astronomy

Panel B

1. Christopher Leslie, Polytechnic School of Engineering at New York University (USA)
   Specters of Unnatural History in Macbeth
2. Marianne Kimura, Yamaguchi Prefectural College (Japan)
   Hamlet as a Cosmic Allegory about Solar Energy
3. Shu-hua Chung, Tung Fang Design Institute (Taiwan)
   Nature in The Tempest
4. Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University and Bilkent University (Turkey)
   The Tempest in Prospero’s Mind and in Outer Space, Reflecting the Creative Imagination of the Artist and the Natural History of the Time

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Justin Kolb, American University in Cairo (Egypt)
“The Dissolution of the Engine of this World”: The decay of nature and the Anthropocene in the history plays

In 1580, the largest earthquake in British history was recorded and a comet ignited the sky. These sparked a rash of pamphlets, including Francis Shakelton’s Blazing Star, which warns of “dissolution of the Engine of this World.” This paper focuses on Richard II’s repeated invocations of an organic commonwealth of man and nature. The play sees humanity estranged from nature, bracketed off from a nature it acts upon. Drawing on theorists like Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Jane Bennett, this paper examines the roots of this historical narrative and its effects in literary study, science, and ecology.

2. Felix Sprang, University of Hamburg (Germany)
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?” Shakespeare’s Animals – a Class of Their Own.

We accept too easily that Shakespeare’s animals serve as metaphors that shed some light on human behaviour. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s plays also gesture at a methodological crisis at a time when proto-morphological and proto-ethological observations challenged authorities like Aristotle and Pliny. In my paper, I argue that Shakespeare’s plays acknowledge this crisis. Following Laurie Shannon, I suggest that the term ‘animal’, used only eight times by Shakespeare, needs to be reconsidered in the light of husbandry manuals. If we wish to assess Shakespeare’s place among the animals, it is this domain of practical knowledge that we should consider more carefully.

3. Martin Hyatt, Ph.D., independent scholar
Shakespeare and Birds

Where did Shakespeare acquire his knowledge of birds? Some would have been familiar from the English countryside. Others were familiar from traditions involving a variety of literary and scientific texts. Birds appeared as natural history subjects in the ancient science of Pliny and Aristotle and as characters in the classical stories of Ovid and others. Did Shakespeare also demonstrate familiarity with newer natural historians such as Turner and Gesner? Did he favour new knowledge over old or natural knowledge over mythological? From Shakespeare’s varied use of birds, I will select some pertinent examples to explore these questions.

4. Jarosław Włodarczyk, Polish Academy of Sciences and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin
and Zuzanna Czerniak, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (Poland)
Astronomical Fragments in Shakespeare and Modern History of Astronomy

Tracing and interpreting astronomical fragments found in Shakespeare’s works has a long tradition. The exegetes have included astronomers, Shakespeare scholars, historians of science, and simply lovers of Shakespeare. Their conclusions span a wide range of readings, from proposed identification of celestial portents to the claim that at least some of Shakespeare’s plays are an allegorical presentation of scientific conflict between the chief cosmological models of his time. In this paper we would like to argue that in such investigations there might still be room for analytical tools borrowed from contemporary history of astronomy and the history of science.

5. Christopher Leslie, Polytechnic School of Engineering at New York University (USA)
Specters of Unnatural History in Macbeth

By the early sixteenth century, groups of naturalists engaged in a collective enterprise to distinguish the inhabitants of the natural world. Given this context, Macbeth’s narrative, which relies on haunts and apparitions, may seem anomalous. Spiritual phenomenon, combined with weather imagery, create a world that at first seems to reinforce premodern notions of the natural world. The play’s tragic outcome, of course, does not validate the actions of its characters, and so too, one can read the high degree of praeternatural imagery as a warning to the contemporary audience. Macbeth demonstrates the bankruptcy of those who rely on supernatural portents.

6. Marianne Kimura, Yamaguchi Prefectural College (Japan)
Hamlet as a Cosmic Allegory about Solar Energy

Hillary Gatti’s The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge (1989) draws many parallels between Giordano Bruno’s Lo Spaccio della besta trionfante and Hamlet. Gatti plausibly suggests that the book Hamlet is reading is this one. She refers to a Hermetic “hidden secret,” buried in the play. Bruno fashioned his own art of memory using his own astronomical and scientific ideas and this architecture of basic cosmic relationships became a framework for Shakespeare. Given Shakespeare’s general interest in solar energy, it is possible to see how Hamlet functions as a solar energy allegory that contains the playwright himself in a big way.

7. Shu-hua Chung, Tung Fang Design Institute (Taiwan)
Nature in The Tempest

In depicting natural world in The Tempest, Shakespeare reveals two contradictory views of nature — an organism and a machine. In The Tempest, natural phenomena can be changed by human magic; namely, the natural world is undermined by science. In my paper, from an ecological perspective, focusing on how Shakespeare presents natural world and its interaction with humankind, I argue that it is hard for humankind to think scientifically nature as a machine to replace nature as an organism, and that the flourishing of science cannot absolutely guarantee humankind against harm to enjoy the fruit of happiness.

8. Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University and Bilkent University (Turkey)
The Tempest in Prospero’s Mind and in Outer Space, Reflecting the Creative Imagination of the Artist and the Natural History of the Time

The Tempest has a symmetrical structure of correspondences that evoke the multiplicity of a hall of mirrors in which everything reflects and re-reflects everything. Music is used as a device of creating harmony and operates as an acoustic ‘mirror of truth’ referring to psychic purification. Shakespeare employs the alchemical meaning of the ‘tempest,’ pointing to ‘a boiling process’ that removes impurities. Jarman’s The Tempest and Peter Greeneaway’s Prospero’s Books reflect a deep interest in Renaissance Hermeticism and a fascination with the occult. This paper deals with the importance of alchemy, psychic purification and music in Shakespeare’s last play.

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Carla Dente, Martin Procházka, Pavel Drábek (Italy-Czech Rep.-UK)

Participants

1. Carla Dente, University of Pisa (Italy)
   Heteroglossia and Text Construction in the Framework of Political and Cultural Diversity: From Shakespeare’s Henry V to Greig’s Dunsinane
2. Pavel Drábek, University of Hull (United Kingdom)
   Heteroglossic Subjects: the Dialogism of the Shakespearean Actor
3. Martin Procházka, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)
   Chronotope and Heterotopia: Carnival Time and Grotesque Bodies in Twelfth Night and The Second Part of Henry IV

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Carla Dente, University of Pisa (Italy)
Heteroglossia and Text Construction in the Framework of Political and Cultural Diversity: From Shakespeare’s Henry V to Greig’s Dunsinane

Bakthin’s notion of dialogism as multilingualism is discussed starting from the concepts of nationhood and statehood, cultural achievements at the foundations of Britain as a nation and of English as expression of British identity, constructed in the early modern period. Nowadays we are living through a period when the very idea of U.K. as a unified state is more questioned than ever, and the unity on the point of breaking up. My aim is to discuss the separate ways in which Shakespeare and Greig discuss Scottish history according to their own agendas, focusing on language and intercultural communication.

2. Pavel Drábek, University of Hull (United Kingdom)
Heteroglossic Subjects: the Dialogism of the Shakespearean Actor

Bakhtin’s heteroglossia is not only a useful stylistic term but may be used as a critical tool for approaching the acting subject: the character as created by the actor onstage. Shakespeare’s heteroglossia – the multiplicity of voices, registers, inner dialogues as well as character functions – can no more be said to create integral human identities but rather subjectivities in statu nascendi. The Shakespearean heteroglossic subject quaintly coincides with the French post-structuralists notions of the self and the rhizome. The paper takes into consideration transmutations of Shakespearean heteroglossia in critical editions, translations, and on concrete actor performances of Shakespearean roles.

3. Martin Procházka, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)
Chronotope and Heterotopia: Carnival Time and Grotesque Bodies in Twelfth Night and The Second Part of Henry IV

Interpreting the grotesque and the carnival time in Shakespeare leads to the recognition of both the advantages and the limitations of Bakhtin’s concepts of the grotesque body and the chronotope. While the former is based on the assumptions of a homogeneous time and organic form, the latter breaks with the organic paradigm and anticipates notions of dynamic, open and heterogeneous systems. The paper will explore the possibility of interpreting the spatio-temporal aspects of the above plays in the confrontation of Bakhtin’s and Foucault’s approaches, concentrating on homogeneity vs. heterogeneity of time and space and on the related features of bodies.

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30

Room: L109.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Dympna Callaghan, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Lukas Erne, Indira Ghose (USA-Switzerland)

Participants

1. Lukas Erne, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
   Reconfiguring Shakespeare: Catholic and Protestant Editing
2. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
   “All of one communitie”: Shakespeare, Florio and the translation of Montaigne
3. Indira Ghose, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
   Shakespeare, Civility, and Identity in Early Modern England
4. Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University (USA)
   Shakespeare and the Culture of Resemblance

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Lukas Erne, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Reconfiguring Shakespeare: Catholic and Protestant Editing

There are two opposed trends in the modern textual reconfiguration of Shakespeare, represented by the respective belief that we need more or less extensive editorial intervention. The thinking that informs these two trends can be understood in terms of the religious differences that divided Europe at the time of Shakespeare, including Catholic France and Protestant England. What may be termed ‘Catholic editing’ holds that editorial tradition leads us to a fuller understanding of the text, whereas ‘Protestant editing’ claims, by contrast, that we need to revert to the text in its original purity.

2. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
“All of one communitie”: Shakespeare, Florio and the translation of Montaigne

That in The Tempest Shakespeare lifted almost verbatim a passage from Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals has long been recognised. My paper will reconsider this passage alongside Samuel Daniel’s ideal of a transnational “one communitie” produced by “th’intertrafique of the mind” in translation. Translation is similarly viewed as it is practised in the play as a utopic site of cultural and linguistic mingling without the “bound[s]” of authorial ownership. Indeed, the dramatist’s stage, like the translator’s page, offers a model of “linguistic and cultural hospitality” for an international community “attuned to internal differences, inevitable mistakes” (Rita Felski).

3. Indira Ghose, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Shakespeare, Civility, and Identity in Early Modern England

Early modern England saw a huge demand for continental literature of all kinds, including manuals of courtly manners. Although aimed at an elite readership, these texts were avidly read by aspiring members of the newly educated classes, who mined them as guidebooks to sophisticated behaviour. This paper seeks to explore the links between elite literature and the public theatre, and the way Shakespeare ironically opens up the cult of manners for scrutiny on stage. At the same time, the increasing importance of what Bourdieu has termed cultural capital in shaping identity is represented and enacted in the early modern theatre.

4. Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University (USA)
Shakespeare and the Culture of Resemblance

This paper takes as its starting point Montaigne’s observations about genetic resemblance in order to explore the Renaissance “culture of resemblance” in Shakespeare. I will argue that within the Shakespearean canon resemblance of all kinds—twins, onomastic identity etc., is discovered in such high concentration because it constitutes a central aesthetic principle. Indeed, Shakespeare’s works themselves might be understood not in terms of chronology — from early to late — in terms of artistic development (important as these ways of reading may be), but rather as uncanny forms of repetition.

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V106B.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Dr. Poonam Trivedi, Associate Professor, Department of English, Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, Delhi (India) poonamtrivedi2@gmail.com

Dr. Sarbani Chaudhury, Professor, Department of English, University of Kalyani, Kalyani, India sarbanich@gmail.com

Participants

1. Sarbani Chaudhury, University of Kalyani (India)
   Fun, Frolic and Shakespeare: Kalyani Ishtyle
2. Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi (India)
   Rhapsode of Shakespeare: V Sambasivan’s popular kathaprasangam / storytelling
3. Paromita Chakravarti, Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India)
   Taming of the Bard, Bengali ishtyle: Domesticating farce in Srimati Bhayankari
4. Preti Taneja, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
   Who is the wise man and who is the Fool? The importance of buffoonery in Indian Shakespeare

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Sarbani Chaudhury, University of Kalyani (India)
Fun, Frolic and Shakespeare: Kalyani Ishtyle

Radix, the annual reunion of the Department of English, University of Kalyani, regularly showcases the insidious seepage of high voltage Indi-pop, Bolly/Holly dance numbers into the ‘culturally admissible’ recitals of classical dance, music, and Tagore songs. From 2008 to 2012, the highpoint of the day’s festivities has been the staging of a raunchy, risqué and impudently abridged version of a Shakespearean play. This paper proposes to investigate the developing tenor of these translations and with special focus on the last production, the ‘comedy’ of Macbeth, which cannibalizes, digests and regurgitates a diametrically split Shakespeare for local consumption.

2. Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi (India)
Rhapsode of Shakespeare: V Sambasivan’s popular kathaprasangam / storytelling

This is a particularly telling tale of the myriad and mingled modes in which Shakespeare circulates in modern Indian culture challenging notions of him as a high-brow poet. It is about his popularization in the southern state of Kerala through a variant of a devotional story-telling form, kathaprasangam. V Sambasivan (1929-1997), a foremost exponent, secularized the form bringing in Shakespeare alongside stories from epic, folk and contemporary literature. His act, like the rhapsodes / itinerant minstrels of old, was a solo narration interspersed with singing and commentary stitching up stories (Gk. rhapto = stitch ode). Thousands flocked to his sessions.

3. Paromita Chakravarti, Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India)
Taming of the Bard, Bengali ishtyle: Domesticating farce in Srimati Bhayankari

The proposed paper will read Srimati Bhayankari (Mistress Terror), an extremely successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew on the 1970’s Bangla commercial stage which in 2001 was made into film, a sentimental bourgeois melodrama, celebrating “family values” and docile femininity. The paper will examine the implications of deploying Shakespeare, merely as a plot resource, divorced from the complexity of his language, contexts and generic negotiations, not as an icon of Bengali modernity, but as a currency of commercial mass culture, upholding populist and regressive sexual politics, Bengali ishtyle.

4. Preti Taneja, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
Who is the wise man and who is the Fool? The importance of buffoonery in Indian Shakespeare

This paper proposes that postcolonial Indian Shakespeares act as Fool, simultaneously obedient while ‘speaking back’ to centres of power. I discuss the identity of the Fool in Shakespeare and in Indian literature, highlighting a particular kind of buffoonery now less popular in Western culture but very much alive in India. I focus on the work of Indian actor/director Atul Kumar, including 2013’s Nothing Like Lear, and 2012’s  Twelfth Night performed for the Globe-to-Globe ‘World Shakespeare Festival,’ in Hindi for a multilingual audience to show how, through their very presence, these productions are bufooning, subversive reminders of the hybrid postcolonial condition.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Saturday 26 April 2014, 9h-10h30

Panel B: Saturday 26 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Anne-Valérie Dulac, Université Paris 13 Nord (France) and Laetitia Sansonetti, École polytechnique and EA PRISMES – Université Paris 3 (France)

Participants

Panel A: Tradition and the Shakespearean talent (chair: Laetitia Sansonetti)

1. Andy Auckbur, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France)
   “He was another Nature”: Shakespeare’s genius and sixteenth-century literary theory
2. Daniel Cadman, Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom)
   ‘Quick Comedians’: Garnier, Sidney, and Antony and Cleopatra
3. Sally Barnden, King’s College, London (United Kingdom)
   The man with the skull: negotiating Hamlet’s appropriation of memento mori art

Panel B: Shakespeare and his foils (chair: Anne-Valérie Dulac)

1. Chantal Schütz, École polytechnique and EA PRISMES – Université Paris 3 (France)
   Middleton and Shakespeare: collaboration, parody and rewriting
2. Rémi Vuillemin, Université de Strasbourg (France)
   ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’: Renaissance Petrarchism and Shakespearean criticism
3. Laetitia Sansonetti, École polytechnique and EA PRISMES – Université Paris 3 (France)
   Shakespeare = Marlowe + Spenser? The coincidence of opposites as critical dogma

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Andy Auckbur, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France)
“He was another Nature”: Shakespeare’s genius and sixteenth-century literary theory

In this paper, I intend to show how the eighteenth-century English Shakespearean critics reverted to a sixteenth-century conception of the poet as “Maker” in order to grant him a quasi-divine status partially originating from a conception of the role of the poet which was expressed in works such as Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Such an endeavour requires that we delve into the conceptual foundations on which a progressive acknowledgment of Shakespeare’s talent was built and which later led to the deification process which contributed to creating an icon of English literature.

2. Daniel Cadman, Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom)
‘Quick Comedians’: Garnier, Sidney, and Antony and Cleopatra

Critical discussions of Cleopatra’s resonance in Renaissance drama have long been dominated by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a trend that has marginalised Mary Sidney’s play, Antonius, and its source, Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine. It has been a commonplace to regard Shakespeare’s play, with its expansive time-frame and its representation of events like the Battle of Actium, as antithetical to the neo-classicism that characterises Sidney’s play. However, this paper argues that these plays should be considered as part of a shared tradition that emphasises Cleopatra’s retreat into the private space of her tomb and her resistance to becoming a theatrical spectacle.

3. Sally Barnden, King’s College, London (United Kingdom)
The man with the skull: negotiating Hamlet’s appropriation of memento mori art

Since the late nineteenth century, the Yorick image has been the commonly accepted strategy for representing Hamlet in visual shorthand. Itself an animation of a pre-existing art-historical trope, the encounter between Hamlet and Yorick is echoed by meetings of men and skulls in The Honest Whore and The Revenger’s Tragedy. In this paper, I aim to reassess the relationship of the skull scenes in those three plays before and after the influence of the composition’s appropriation by visual culture related to Hamlet, and consequently to raise questions about the role of visual culture in the canonisation of Shakespeare’s works.

4. Chantal Schütz, École polytechnique and EA PRISMES – Université Paris 3 (France)
Middleton and Shakespeare: collaboration, parody and rewriting

It would appear that Middleton was no more concerned than Shakespeare with attribution, let alone with collecting his theatrical works in a Folio volume. Yet thanks to Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s 2007 edition of his complete works, Middleton is no longer a non-entity in the catalogue of Jacobean authors. It is now agreed that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare, possibly adapted two of his plays and abundantly quoted and parodied him. I will focus this paper on Middleton’s complex relationship to Shakespeare, trying to figure the constant “negotiations” between authors working in the same playhouses or in rival theatres.

5. Rémi Vuillemin, Université de Strasbourg (France)
‘The course of true love never did run smooth’: Renaissance Petrarchism and Shakespearean criticism

This paper will attempt to determine if, why and how the French focus on Shakespeare has been a deterrent to the study of Petrarchism and more particularly of the Petrarchan sonnet. It will focus on editions and on criticism of Shakespearean poems and plays dealing with love. Clearly, Petrarchism has often been used to provide a foil, a negative example against which the value of Shakespeare’s works has been set. In other instances, the question of Petrarchism has only been instrumental—and therefore presented in a much simplified version—to critical discourse.

6. Laetitia Sansonetti, École polytechnique and EA PRISMES – Université Paris 3 (France)
Shakespeare = Marlowe + Spenser? The coincidence of opposites as critical dogma

Patrick Cheney’s trilogy of books on Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare offered a solution to the problem posed by Richard Helgerson’s dual categorisation of Elizabethan and Jacobean authors into “prodigals” and “laureates” by making room for Shakespeare, who could fit into neither of Helgerson’s categories. Yet in using Marlowe and Spenser in order to present Shakespeare, “national poet-playwright,” as their synthesis, Cheney tended to downplay their similarities. This paper will ask what such an outlook has entailed for our understanding of Marlowe and Spenser as Shakespeare’s contemporaries – and whether there is another way to deal with the three authors.

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisateur

Edward Simon (USA)

Participants

1. Andrea F. Trocha-Van Nort, United States Air Force Academy (USA)
   Shakespeare’s Secular Man within Nature
2. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
   “I Guess One Angel in Another’s Hell”: The “Heretical” Nature of the Dark Lady Sonnets and Their Reception
3. Jean-Louis Claret, Aix-Marseille University (France)
   Shakespeare the Atheist
4. Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia (Italy)
   «Necessity will make us all forsworn»: French brawls and Machiavellian kings in Shakespeare’s plays

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Andrea F. Trocha-Van Nort, United States Air Force Academy (USA)
Shakespeare’s Secular Man within Nature

Although human endeavor — the subject of Shakespeare’s plays – often falls shy of greatness, the reassuring perennity of the non-human, of matter, of its irrepressible forces and transcendent qualities, surfaces in critical moments of peripeteia or anagnorisis. We will first explore gradients of Shakespeare’s Lucretian perspective regarding matter, substance, and humans within the larger realm of nature. We then pursue mimetic complexities created by analogies from the natural world, a world to which characters often turn to comprehend a crisis. Finally, we will consider characters’ embracing of the natural world in the face of death, when forfeiting earthly victory to Fortune.

2. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
“I Guess One Angel in Another’s Hell”: The “Heretical” Nature of the Dark Lady Sonnets and Their Reception

The strongly “anti-Christian” nature of the second part of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is especially notable, although critics have generally been little inclined to acknowledge its highly subversive philosophical message, more or less intentionally ignoring the Dark Lady section, summarily dismissed as an example of parodic inversion of the Petrarchan model. I will demonstrate that, in these sonnets, Shakespeare calls into question the very foundations of Christian thought in order to show their internal inconsistencies, and to propose instead a new ontological paradigm that, based on materialistic, Epicurean and Brunian principles, proclaims reality to be an indissoluble union of spirit and matter.

3. Jean-Louis Claret, Aix-Marseille University (France)
Shakespeare the Atheist

Shakespeare loved to position himself on top of the cliff that overlooked the sea of unbelief but never actually took the plunge. While critics are still currently endeavouring to determine whether Shakespeare was a Catholic or a Protestant, one may wonder if atheism could have been his response to the ongoing troubles the Reformation had actually brought about in early modern England. After all, atheism was a long tradition that, Alan Sinfield recalls, dates back to Epicurus and Lucretius, was revivified by Renaissance neoplatonism and spurred on by nascent empiricism. Moreover, “people do not necessarily believe what they are told…” (152)

4. Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia (Italy)
«Necessity will make us all forsworn»: French brawls and Machiavellian kings in Shakespeare’s plays

In Elizabethan England, the outbreak of a possible war of religion was a critical issue, involving the most important exponents of politics and culture and Shakespeare’s 1590-plays were written within this particular background. By demonstrating their possible connection with the 1598 Edict of Nantes, the successful restaging of late Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and the modern theories of Giordano Bruno and of Alberico Gentili, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, I would focus on the instrumental, Machiavellian use of religion seemingly proposed by Shakespeare to create a national – though fictional it could be — unity.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Panel B: Tuesday 22 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: ENS, salle Dussane.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Christa Jansohn, University of Bamberg (Germany)
Dieter Mehl, University of Bonn (Germany)

Participants

1. Andrew Dickson, Theatre Editor for the Guardian (UK)
   National Poet or National Disgrace? Britain’s Tercentenary of 1864
2. Marie-Clémence Régnier, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
   «Que peut donc le bronze là où est la gloire?» The French Jubilee in 1864: monuments and pilgrimage in Stratford in Victor Hugo’s William Shakespeare
3. Júlia Paraizs, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)
   Festive and Critical Approaches: Shakespeare’s Tercentenary (1864) in Hungary
4. Ann Jennalie Cook, Vanderbilt University (USA)
   Commemorations Behind the Scenes
5. Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
   Latin America, 1964: Art and Politics in the Year of Celebrating Shakespeare
6. Mami Adachi, University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo (Japon)
   Commemorating Shakespeare in Japan

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Andrew Dickson, Theatre Editor for the Guardian (UK)
National Poet or National Disgrace? Britain’s Tercentenary of 1864

This paper will discuss Britain’s 1864 tercentenary celebrations, and the fact that the “Great National Festival” to celebrate Shakespeare nearly turned into a national disgrace. In Stratford-upon-Avon, a gala performance of Hamlet was cancelled at the last minute, and a birthday procession through the capital ended in farce. The Times commented mournfully that “Shakespeare is not a whit more admired this year than he was last year”. Yet 1864 also became a turning point: the seeds of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre were planted, along with the now-traditional Birthday parade and luncheon, and the enthusiastic tercentenary celebrations in other countries convinced many to honour their native son more patriotically next time.

2. Marie-Clémence Régnier, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
«Que peut donc le bronze là où est la gloire?» The French Jubilee in 1864: monuments and pilgrimage in Stratford in Victor Hugo’s William Shakespeare
France took part in Shakespeare’s celebrations in 1864 and sent a prominent Sorbonne teacher, Alfred Mézières, to Stratford, the writer’s birthplace in England. In the meantime, the old Romantic avant-garde gathers around Victor Hugo to honour one’s mentor. The Jubilee’s celebrations raise the question of the recognition of great writers as a cultural heritage property and of the raise of a cult around the Bard’s relics, houses and portraits. The presentation will focus on Victor Hugo’s analysis on that matter in the eponymous essay he devoted to William Shakespeare in 1864.

3. Júlia Paraizs, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)
Festive and Critical Approaches: Shakespeare’s Tercentenary (1864) in Hungary

Júlia Paraizs will discuss the major Hungarian observance of the 1864 tercentenary, the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National Theatre. Since the performance was followed by a tableau vivant called “The Apotheosis of Shakespeare”, the occasion has been best explained in terms of a semi-religious cult by Péter Dávidházi (1998). However, as the talk will argue, the festive framing of the tercentenary has actually concealed the critical intentions behind it. A look at the contemporary press reviews reveals that there was a heated debate on the choice of the play due to its problematic genre.

4. Ann Jennalie Cook, Vanderbilt University (USA)
Commemorations Behind the Scenes

This paper will deal with celebrations that involve Shakespeare but do not necessarily focus on his years of birth or death. It will include historical events like David Garrick’s 1796 Jubilee, as well as the Birthplace Trust’s commemoration in 1964. However, it will focus on little-known, behind-the-scenes aspects of these and other gatherings, most notably the World Congresses of the International Shakespeare Association, begun in 1971, continued in 1976 as part of the United States Bicentennial and at five-year intervals thereafter, as well as the forty years of the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America.

5. Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
Latin America, 1964: Art and Politics in the Year of Celebrating Shakespeare

In Latin America, Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary didn’t prompt an entire year of ceremonies and activities but a modest array of events, with a touch of local colour. However, Shakespeare’s 400th provided the stimulus, or excuse, for professionals of cultural enterprises to use programs of the kind that the region’s governments have historically employed for co-opting critical voices. This paper explores possible ties between several events, artists, and contexts, as well as potential political implications thereof and therein, hoping to reach past circumstances and into the actual and symbolic uses and meaning of “Shakespeare” in the region then and beyond.

6. Mami Adachi, University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo (Japon)
Commemorating Shakespeare in Japan

The activities of the Shakespeare Society of Japan (SSJ) may be a factor behind the wide dissemination of Shakespeare in Japan today. The first SSJ was established on 23rd April, 1930, but encountered setbacks in the years before World War II—during which it finally ground to a halt. In 1961, it was reborn as the present SSJ, opening its doors to scholars, writers, and the general public, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2011. In placing the SSJ’s 1964 Shakespeare Jubilee in perspective, this paper will review the scholarly, educational and cultural role of the SSJ and related institutions.

Schedule / Horaire

Panel A: Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30

Panel B: Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Sophie Chiari (chiarisophie@hotmail.com) is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Aix-Marseille University, France. She has written several articles on Elizabethan drama and poetry, and has recently published a monograph on The Image of the Labyrinth in the Renaissance (Champion, 2010). She has just completed a translation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into French (Le livre de poche, 2011) and a revised edition of Renaissance Tales of Desire (CSP, 2012). She is currently working on a special issue of EREA devoted to colours in early modern England as well as on a book devoted to William Shakespeare and Robert Greene (Classiques Garnier). She is also part of a collaborative project coordinated by Jean-Michel Déprats and focused on the translation of Tennessee Williams’s dramatic works (Editions théâtrales).

Mickael Popelard (mickael.popelard@unicaen.fr) is a Senior Lecturer in English studies at the University of Caen-Basse Normandie, France. His interests include Renaissance literature as well as the history of ideas. He has written several articles on Elizabethan drama and early modern men of science such as John Dee or Thomas Harriot. His latest publications include a book on Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: l’humaniste, le magicien, l’ingénieur, Paris, PUF, 2010) and a monograph on the figure of the scientist in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (Rêves de puissance et ruine de l’âme: la figure du savant chez Shakespeare et Marlowe, Paris, PUF, 2010). He has also recently contributed to a volume on the quest for the Northwest Passage edited by Frédéric Regard (The Quest for the Northwest Passage, London, Pickering and Chatto, 2013).

Participants

Panel A: Shakespeare et la science

1. Frank Lestringant, Paris Sorbonne (France)
   La Tempête de Shakespeare, ou le témoignage de la cartographie renaissante
2. Margaret Jones-Davies, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
   Les énigmes abstraites (‘abstract riddles’) de l’alchimie (Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2.1.104)
3. Pierre Iselin, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
   La musique : science ou pratique ?
4. Pascal Brioist, Université de Tours (France)
   L’école de la nuit revue et corrigée

Panel B: Shakespeare and Science

1. Carla Mazzio, University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA)
   The Drama of Mathematics in the Age of Shakespeare
2. Jonathan Pollock, University of Perpignan (France)
   Shakespeare and Atomism
3. Anne-Valérie Dulac, University of Paris 13 Nord (France)
   Shakespeare’s Alhazen: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the history of optics
4. Liliane Campos, University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle (France)
   Wheels have been set in motion”: geocentrism and relativity in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Frank Lestringant, Paris Sorbonne (France)
La Tempête de Shakespeare, ou le témoignage de la cartographie renaissante

La Tem­pête commence par un naufrage, à une époque où l’intérêt pour la cartographie marine ne cesse de croître. La pièce tout entière découle d’une cartographie fantasmée puisqu’elle se déroule sur une île mystérieuse de Méditerranée. Elle est ainsi jalonnée d’allusions géographiques parfois contradictoires : Milan, Naples, Alger ou Tunis sont autant de villes et de mondes exotiques qui s’offrent au spectateur de l’époque. Je souhaite donc montrer ici que La Tempête, un témoignage indirect des découvertes scientifiques de la Renaissance, peut être vue comme le reflet de la cartographie de l’époque, où se mêlaient peuples imaginaires et références savantes.

2. Margaret Jones-Davies, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
Les énigmes abstraites (‘abstract riddles’) de l’alchimie (Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2.1.104)

Shakespeare recourt à la poétique de l’alchimie au moment où cette dernière cesse d’être une science. Dans son œuvre, l’alchimie fournit des métaphores de la perfectibilité éthique de la nature humaine, mais plus de la Nature comme c’était le cas auparavant. Les images alchimiques se muent en effet en énigmes abstraites (« abstract riddles ») sans aucune prise sur la Nature elle-même. L’analyse du constant recours que Shakespeare fait à l’alchimie révèle son conservatisme face à l’institution monarchique par exemple mais la manière dont il aborde les effets littéraux de l’alchimie sur les lois de la Nature est assurément moderne.

3. Pierre Iselin, Université Paris Sorbonne (France)
La musique : science ou pratique ?

La question prend à la fin du seizième siècle en Angleterre une acuité particulière, non seulement en raison du débat qui fait rage à propos de la musique d’église, mais aussi parce qu’une distinction presque catégorielle apparaît dans la société, à l’université, et dans la terminologie même, entre le « musicus » et le « cantor », au moment où la musique pratique connaît un succès grandissant. On tentera de voir comment le drame de Shakespeare et de ses contemporains fait écho à cette nouvelle donne épistémologique et sociale et l’intègre dans sa dramaturgie.

4. Pascal Brioist, Université de Tours (France)
L’école de la nuit revue et corrigée

Dans son étude sur Peines d’amour perdues, Amelia Frances Yates qui fait de la pièce de Shakespeare une œuvre à clé, voit dans le IXe Comte de Northumberland, Henry Percy, le prototype du personnage de Navarre qui renonce à l’amour pour mieux se consacrer aux études philosophiques. Sans aller jusqu’à voir comme Yates, ou Muriel Bradbrook, dans le cercle de Northumberland le cœur d’une très hypothétique Ecole de la Nuit professant l’athéisme, nous nous demanderons ce qu’étaient au juste les intérêts « mathématiques » du cercle d’Henry Percy à Syon House et à Petworth.

5. Carla Mazzio, University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA)
The Drama of Mathematics in the Age of Shakespeare

This paper will explore the relationship between the history of mathematics and the history of drama in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. It aims to open up new avenues for scholars of drama and “science” to consider various dimensions of mathematical practice and theory as they impacted—and were impacted by—dramatic structures, humanistic questions, and—perhaps most curiously—lexicons of affect involving potentially catastrophic or comic dimensions of human experience.

6. Jonathan Pollock, University of Perpignan (France)
Shakespeare and Atomism

The atomists were convinced that all our knowledge derived ultimately from the senses: the study of clouds allows us to understand, by way of analogy, how material forms emerge, change and eventually dissolve under the influence of forces both external and internal. Lucretius devotes much of the last part of De rerum natura to the phenomenon. With this in mind, we will explore Shakespeare’s evocations of cloud formation in Hamlet, King Lear, Antony & Cleopatra and The Tempest, in order to prove that Shakespeare had read Lucretius very closely indeed.

7. Anne-Valérie Dulac, University of Paris 13 Nord (France)
Shakespeare’s Alhazen: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the history of optics

In “The Earl of Northumberland and ‘Stella’s’ sister” from A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Frances Yates argued that there could be “little doubt … that one of the books which the king and his court are studying at the commencement of the play is the Opticae Thesaurus of Hasan ibn Hasan”. Although many historians have further analysed Alhazen’s resonance in early modern England, Yates’s assumption has not yet been thoroughly re-assessed in the light of later studies. This paper will discuss Yates’s intuition from our early 21st century perspective, thus opening up onto renewed questions regarding Shakespearean optics.

8. Liliane Campos, University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle (France)
‘Wheels have been set in motion’: geocentrism and relativity in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

By decentering our reading of Hamlet, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead questions the legitimacy of centres and of stable frames of reference. His characters’ comical attempts at understanding their position suggest a postmodern view of the canon, yet their loss of bearings is relocated within a scientific paradigm which Stoppard partly derives from Shakespeare’s text. This paper will examine how Stoppard plays with the physical and cosmological models he finds in Hamlet, particularly that of the wheel and of circular movement, and gives a new scientific depth to the fear that time is ‘out of joint’.

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)

Participants

1. Livia Segurado Nunes, Aix-Marseille Université – LERMA (France)
   Shakespeare à la Brasileira: A comical and folkloric Richard III
2. Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)
   Shakespeare on the Brazilian Screens

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Livia Segurado Nunes, Aix-Marseille Université – LERMA (France)
Shakespeare à la Brasileira: A comical and folkloric Richard III
Recent Brazilian productions of Shakespeare have endeavoured and managed to transpose the foreign text to their specific cultural realities, reclaiming Shakespeare to represent national and regional identities. Sua Incelença, Ricardo III, produced by Clowns de Shakespeare, is an example of this reappropriation that mixes the English matter with Brazilian colours, combining clown and circus techniques, as well as elements of street theatre with a strong regional and popular accent. Focusing on a farcical approach and making a point in blurring hierarchic notions of culture, this production is not afraid of turning the historical drama into a folkloric Brazilian universe.

2. Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)
Shakespeare on the Brazilian Screens

After a brief overview of Brazilian appropriations of Shakespeare for the screen (both TV and film), this paper will discuss two Brazilian appropriations, O Cravo e a Rosa, a 2000/2001 TV “novella” inspired in The Taming of the Shrew, and the 1972 film, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte, a “slum Hamlet”. Elements of popular Brazilian culture will be highlighted, showing how a bridge between the canonical foreign text and the contemporary Brazilian reality is created permitting the general audience unused to going to theatre to have access to the erudite cultural product.