Seminar 21: Shakespearean Festivals in the 21st Century

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: L109.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Nicoleta Cinpoes, University of Worcester (UK), Florence March, IRCL, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France), and Paul Prescott, University of Warwick (UK)

Participants

  1. Susan Brock (University of Warwick, UK), Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, UK), and Paul Prescott (University of Warwick, UK)
    Shakespeare on the Road: North American Festivals in 2014
  2. Debra Ann Byrd (Producing Artistic Director, Take Wing And Soar Productions and the Harlem Shakespeare Festival, USA)
    The Harlem Shakespeare Festival
  3. Jean-Claude Carrière (President of the Montpellier Festival: “Le Printemps des comédiens”) and Florence March (IRCL, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
    Shaping democratic festivals through Shakespeare in the South of France: Avignon and Montpellier
  4. Nicoleta Cinpoes (University of Worcester, UK)
    ‘Everyman’s Shakespeare’: Craiova Shakespeare Festival
  5. Jacek Fabiszak (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland)
    The Gdansk Shakespeare Festival: A Shakespeare Theatrical Event
  6. Isabel Guerrero Lorente (University of Murcia, Spain)
    The Almagro Festival and its Shakespearean variety
  7. Ivan Lupic (Stanford University, USA)
    What’s Past is Prologue: Ragusan Shakespeare
  8. Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame in London, UK)
    Grassroots Shakespeare: Thirteen Years of Performance in the Village of Patalenitsa, Bulgaria
  9. Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK)
    Digital Shakespeare and Festive Time
  10. Patricio Orozco (director of Próspero Producciones, Argentina)
    The Buenos Aires Shakespeare Festival
  11. Julia Paraizs (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
    Shakespeare Festival – Gyula, Hungary
  12. Guy Roberts (artistic director of Prague Shakespeare festival)
    Prague Shakespeare Company

Description

This international and comparative seminar aims to bring together practitioners, festival staff, actors and directors, performance critics and theatre historians to discuss the recent past, present and future of Shakespearean festivals in Europe, North America and beyond. The seminar will consider festivals focusing exclusively on Shakespeare and festivals in which Shakespeare is significantly involved, drama festivals and arts festivals, experimental festivals which are laboratories for creation and festivals which showcase national or international contemporary artistic creation. Participants are invited to explore the aesthetic, structural, historical and/or socio-political interactions between Shakespeare and the festivals he informs, and the modalities of such interactions.

The following questions are meant to provide a framework which will facilitate the comparative study between the different festivals:

  • What is the status of Shakespeare in the festival: is it a Shakespeare festival? a drama or arts festival in which the Shakespearean corpus plays a major part? In the latter case, how frequently is Shakespeare performed? What is the proportion of Shakespearean productions? Are Shakespearean productions commissionned by the festival director/programmer?
  • What scope or necessity is there for non-Shakespearean performance in the festival?
  • In non exclusively Shakespearean festivals, are Shakespearean productions considered as a guaranteed income or a vector for aesthetic experimentation and avant-garde productions?
  • How and when did the festival emerge?
  • Was it a local project/enterprise/priority/ambition?
  • Which institution(s) organise it?
  • How long does the festival last and what is its frequency?
  • Is it a generic or a themed event (topic, play, etc)?
  • In what type of venue is Shakespeare staged? Indoors or out in the open? Are site-specific productions encouraged?
  • What is the relationship between funding and artistic policy?
  • How does the festival relate to academia, education, tourism, etc?
  • How does the festival relate to other media (TV, radio, internet broadcasting)?
  • What is the relationship between local reviewers and the health of the festival?
  • How do festivals build and sustain audiences?
  • How do festivals measure ‘success’ and ‘impact’?
  • What would a democratic festival look like?
  • What is the financial policy regarding the price of seats?
  • The language(s) of the festival: do they have other events outside the staged productions? Do they offer surtitles? simultaneous translation?
  • Do festival networks benefit individual festivals?
  • How have festivals been represented in fiction (TV, novels, film) and what does this reveal about their cultural reputation?

Seminar 20: ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’: The Nature of Problem in Shakespearean Studies

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: V115/V116.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta (Canada) Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey), and Merve Sarı Hacettepe University (Turkey)

Participants

  1. Lazarenko Darya, Zaporizhzhia National University (Ukraine)
    “To thine ownself be true”: dealing with opacity and solving riddles in the Ukrainian translations of Hamlet
  2. Preeti Gautam, M.J.P. Rohilkhand University Bareilly (India)
    Airy Nothing or Else? Negotiating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of generic categorization
  3. Özlem Aydin Öztürk, Bülent Ecevit University (Turkey)
    “Like, or find fault, do as your pleasures are”: The Mock-Heroic in Troilus and Cressida
  4. Swati Ganguly, Visva-Bharati (India)
    The problematic of representing Cleopatra: the aesthetics of grotesque
  5. Merve Sarı, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
    The Subversive Power of the Fantastic as a Mode in The Tempest
  6. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
    A problematic relationship in a problem play: why All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the least performed plays of the Shakespearean canon
  7. Kübra Vural, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
    The Problems of the Female Wor(l)d in Troilus and Cressida
  8. Agnieszka Szwach, Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce (Poland)
    All’s Well, That Ends Well: A Problem Play Or A Problematic Heroine?
  9. Jennifer Edwards, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
    ‘Bifold authority’: Shakespeare’s Problem Children
  10. Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Porto (Portugal)
    The problem of cynicism in Measure for Measure
  11. Natalia A. Shatalova, Lomonossov Moscow State University (Russia)
    A ‘problem play’: interplay of genre and method
  12. Emine Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
    A Problematic Play: Questions, Ambiguity and Human Nature in King Lear

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Lazarenko Darya, Zaporizhzhia National University (Ukraine)
“To thine ownself be true”: dealing with opacity and solving riddles in the Ukrainian translations of Hamlet

The history of the Ukrainian Hamlet shows that the tragedy’s thought-provoking cognitive resources have always been efficiently employed as a means of intellectual campaigning. Today Hamlet keeps attracting the most gifted and charismatic translators who attempt to decipher the messages encoded in this masterpiece. The result differs each time depending on the aim and epistemological priorities of the translator. Sometimes new riddles are created. Singling out those special ambiguous moments may show us how the opacity of Shakespeare’s twilight can be deliberately turned either into a bright day, or a dark night.

2. Preeti Gautam, M.J.P. Rohilkhand University Bareilly (India)
Airy Nothing or Else? Negotiating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of generic categorization

The debate dismantling the traditional categorization of attributing distinct categories to Shakespeare’s plays has taken into its ambit even his ‘pure romances’. The research paper makes an attempt to underscore the grey areas subsisting along the apparent happy content of the play, dismissed generally as ‘ airy nothing’,’ unaccountable to social or political realism’ etc. The paper argues that beneath the festivity lurches the unrest and despair brewing up in the society of Shakespeare’s time. Gender tensions heralding the beginning of a cultural redefinition of female youth, the debate about folk and courtly theatre, awareness about class suggest play’s open-endedness.

3. Özlem Aydin Öztürk, Bülent Ecevit University (Turkey)
“Like, or find fault, do as your pleasures are”: The Mock-Heroic in Troilus and Cressida

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is classified as one of his problem plays due to its blend of comedy and tragic material. Set in the Trojan war, the play makes use of the heroic legend and love story of Troilus and Cressida to present a problematic world. This paper focuses on Shakespeare’s presentation of the mock-heroic by undermining set rules of courtly love tradition and heroism to point to the fact that these idealised concepts are only romantic ideals in total contrast to real life. In that sense, the play is neither a comedy nor tragedy as real life rarely is.

4. Swati Ganguly, Visva-Bharati (India)
The problematic of representing Cleopatra: the aesthetics of grotesque

At the heart of Antony and Cleopatra (1608), is the figure of Cleopatra. She elicits a simultaneous fascination and revulsion because the play draws attention to the process of her representation as an amalgam, a yoking together disparate elements. This unsettles the response of readers and audience. I would like to explore the strategies through which this occurs and suggest that she is meant to be a fantastic hybrid creature that aesthetic discourses identify as grotesque. This I argue can be understood as the Orientalist fantasy of Egypt as space of carnivalesque excess.

5. Merve Sarı, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Subversive Power of the Fantastic as a Mode in The Tempest

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest relies on the supernatural and the carnivalesque in order to temporarily suspend the rules that regulate the society. Questioning power and authority, and the issue of self and the other, the play brings several contrasts like illusion and reality, id and superego, civilisation and barbarism together so as to establish new discourses against the socially dominant ones. Thus, enabling the previously marginalised to be decentred, The Tempest is subversive in terms of the questions it raises against the socially dominant discourses, subsequently marking the play as a problem play.

6. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
A problematic relationship in a problem play: why All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the least performed plays of the Shakespearean canon

All’s Well that Ends Well is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. In this paper I shall suggest that the problematic nature of the play is due to the unease that audiences feel at the nature of the central love story and specifically link this unease to the “quasi-incestuous” make up of Bertram and Helena’s relationship. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the indifferent reception that the play receives is due the female protagonist being an active pursuer of a male and the basis of this chase is not the usual motivation of romantic love, rather sexual anxiety.

7. Kübra Vural, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Problems of the Female Wor(l)d in Troilus and Cressida

Troilus and Cressida’s masculine atmosphere leaves no space for women to act and speak at the time of the Trojan War. In this patriarchal world, Cressida is forced to obey the orders of the male figures which ends with the separation of the lovers. Her compulsory going to the Greek camp seems to drive her into oblivion. Although Cressida lacks a voice of her own to express her actual feelings, her misogynistic representation portraits an unfaithful female figure. This paper aims to demonstrate the problems of female world in terms of representation and language of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

8. Agnieszka Szwach, Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce (Poland)
All’s Well, That Ends Well: A Problem Play Or A Problematic Heroine?

To a number of modern critics, especially since the rise of socially oriented drama, a ‘problem play’ connotes rather a play ‘about’ problems than a play ‘with’ problems. In All’s Well, with its striking focus on sexual and gender politics, problems are linked to Helena a determined woman undeterred to take on a challenge in a patriarchal world. Therefore, this paper makes an attempt to analyse Helena’s relationships with the main male characters of the play and to examine to what extent those relationships reflect or even question social, political and cultural order of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.

9. Jennifer Edwards, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Bifold authority’: Shakespeare’s Problem Children

For F.S. Boas the term ‘problem plays’ reflected the ways in which Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure dramatize intractable moral problems. A century on from Boas, however, the term has shifted its meaning to accommodate the view advanced by Tillyard that the plays themselves are problems in the same way that some children are ‘problem’ children. Pushing this analogy further, this paper contends that it is not only the textual children who are problematic, but also the critical parents, who fail to recognise the ‘bifold authority’ that governs Shakespeare’s works.

10. Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Porto (Portugal)
The problem of cynicism in Measure for Measure

This paper proposes to identify the social dissemination of cynicism as one of the central problems of Measure for Measure. Resorting to Peter Sloterdijk’s definition of cynical reason as “enlightened false consciousness”, I will consider the pervasive cynicism in the play as an uncomfortable manifestation of the conflict between appearance and reality and of the resulting negotiation of knowledge. This conflict will be said to take the social form of a Vienna peopled with cunning rulers and knowing subjects who only seem capable of reacting to measures they do not believe in by resorting to ruses.

11. Natalia A. Shatalova, Lomonossov Moscow State University (Russia)
A ‘problem play’: interplay of genre and method

Shakespeare’s method in so-called problem plays is often said to defy their grouping, and genre-crossing elements can be found elsewhere across Shakespearean canon. The present paper argues that two plays – Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure — have deep-lying affinity with the truly problem plays of the 19th-20th centuries. They are heavily charged ideologically, while partially blocking emotional involvement of the audience. The term “problem play” may be also applied to Antony and Cleopatra, but with a different meaning, thus stressing the importance of receptive aspects of the analysis.

12. Emine Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
A Problematic Play: Questions, Ambiguity and Human Nature in King Lear

Though King Lear isn’t categorised as problem play, it has a serious mood, hence has various features of problem play. The aim of this paper is to analyse King Lear in terms of problematic social, political, moral and familial questions it raises and leaves to the audience interpretation. Moreover, the generic ambiguity will be analysed as though the play is a tragedy, it has comic and absurd elements. The analogies with the historical background of the 16th and 17th centuries will be demonstrated while the exploration of human nature will be also dealt with.

Seminar 19: Shakespeare and Global Girlhood

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: Maison des Mines, salle AB.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Ariane M. Balizet, Texas Christian University (USA) and Marcela Kostihová, Hamline University (USA)

Participants

  1. Leah Adcock-Starr, University of Washington-Seattle (USA)
    B.F.F.’s and the Bard: Reclaiming the Importance of Female Friendship in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  2. Sara Eaton, North Central College (USA)
    ‘Shaping Fantasies’: Courtly Love and Twentieth-Century Movies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  3. Natalie K. Eschenbaum, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (USA)
    Juliet’s Narcissism
  4. Jennifer Flaherty, Georgia College and State University (USA)
    Is there a Doctor in the House of Capulet?
  5. Preeti Gautam, Government Raza Post Graduate College (India)
    Encoding the Language of Girlhood: A Study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  6. Erica Hateley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
    Antipodean Impulses: Making Sense of Shakespearean Girls in Twenty-First Century Australia
  7. DeLisa D. Hawkes, North Carolina Central University (USA)
    Displacement and Delusion: Comic Reflexivity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  8. Celi Oliveto, Mary Baldwin College (USA)
    Challenging Gender Stereotypes through Production
  9. Shannon Reed, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
    A Twenty-Line Trap?: Shakespeare Enacted by Young Women
  10. Paris Shun-Hsiang Shih, National Chengchi University (Taiwan)
    Shakespearean Spice Girls?: Untangling Postfeminist Girlhood in She’s The Man and Ten Things I Hate About You
  11. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
    Patriarchal Idealism and The Merchant of Venice
  12. Deanne Williams, York University (Canada)
    Global Girls in Shakespeare’s Late Plays

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Leah Adcock-Starr, University of Washington-Seattle (USA)
B.F.F.’s and the Bard: Reclaiming the Importance of Female Friendship in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

As written, William Shakespeare’s popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream relies upon the agency and actions of a pair of girls. Unsophisticated and irresponsible choices made in cutting, casting, and conceiving the play for mass consumption not only devalue Helena and Hermia and their pivotal role in the plot, but are indicative of a neglectful attitude towards the experiences and relationships of young women. Rigorous textual analysis and considered production choices have the potential to reclaim A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a significant contribution to a theatrical canon in which depictions of complex female relationships are much needed and seldom seen.

2. Sara Eaton, North Central College (USA)
‘Shaping Fantasies’: Courtly Love and Twentieth-Century Movies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Twentieth-century movie adaptations of Midsummer Night’s Dream replicate Courtly Love’s definitions of courtship. While Slavoj Zizek’s discussions of Courtly Love’s ideology focus on its tragic applications, this essay will explore how Courtly Love works in the comic mode. Courtly Love is invoked to shape the various romances in the playtext; the result is the acting out of sado-masochistic responses to “love,” registered as fantasy by the play’s end. Twentieth-century film productions repeat this pattern as well as the ideology.

3. Natalie K. Eschenbaum, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (USA)
Juliet’s Narcissism

This paper considers what the characterization of Juliet in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation teaches girls about selfhood, love, and death. Luhrmann links the story of the “star-cross’d lovers” to Ovid’s tale of “Narcissus and Echo”; he uses mirrors and reflections, through glass and water, to suggest that Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another is similar to narcissistic self-love. Juliet is the one who attempts to shift the relationship from love of the self to love of an “other,” but doing so necessitates their death. Luhrmann’s Juliet shows that girls’ love holds great power, but that self-love defines this power.

4. Jennifer Flaherty, Georgia College and State University (USA)
Is there a Doctor in the House of Capulet?

My paper addresses Romeo’s Ex and Saving Juliet, novelizations of Romeo and Juliet. Counteracting the glamorization of Juliet’s star-crossed romance and suicide, each author introduces an alternate heroine (who balances a healthy romantic relationship with a desire to work in medicine) as Juliet’s foil. Both authors encourage young readers to de-romanticize Juliet’s secret love and early death. These novels are part of a continuing trend in young adult adaptations that reframe Shakespeare’s stories, calling attention to the challenges faced by young women (past and present) and offering solutions for contemporary readers.

5. Preeti Gautam, Government Raza Post Graduate College (India)
Encoding the Language of Girlhood: A Study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The paper advances the argument and offers an insight into how in delineating girlhood, Shakespeare deviates from scripting the conventional femininity codes and construction of girlhood in renaissance. While dramatizing gender tensions, the play also seems to suggest how girls are used as symbols of social collapse, besides underscoring the social and cultural assumptions of the potential of girlhood for disruption and subversion. The paper argues that renaissance practice to engage in social critique led to challenging the culturally imposed gender inequality. The play influences immensely the discourse of girlhood and offers a cultural redefinition of female youth.

6. Erica Hateley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
Antipodean Impulses: Making Sense of Shakespearean Girls in Twenty-First Century Australia

Shakespeare retains an ambivalent status in Australia as an artefact of British imperialism and as a site of potential resistance to historical hierarchies of nation, culture, or gender. Such ambivalence informs recent Australian depictions of Shakespearean girls. In film, prose and graphic-novel adaptations of Macbeth and Hamlet, girls’ bodies are mobilised to disrupt assumptions about the authority of Shakespeare in Australia. In young adult appropriations of Shakespeare, female protagonists make sense of themselves by making sense of Shakespeare, and thus cultural agency and authority remain rooted in Shakespeare but are made the purview of girlhood.

7. DeLisa D. Hawkes, North Carolina Central University (USA)
Displacement and Delusion: Comic Reflexivity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Displaced, or inverted reflection exists in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Considering characters outside of the lovers, displacement occurs when what we expect to occur in one character occurs in another, and inversion turns the “normal” upside down. Shakespeare uses an inverted reflexivity to mask notions which arouse the ire of the censors. This view probes the Helena-Bottom contrast rather than the Puck-Bottom antithesis while addressing the socio-political aspects of the displacement of fools with location of form and settings. This festive comedy analyzes Shakespeare’s ideas on who fools were with respect to their political identity, gender, and social condition.

8. Celi Oliveto, Mary Baldwin College (USA)
Challenging Gender Stereotypes through Production

This paper explores student experiences watching Mary Baldwin College’s Masters of Fine Arts Shakespeare and Performance company Rogue Shakespeare’s non-traditional, primarily female Shakespeare company. American classrooms largely ignore the issue of Shakespeare’s gender inequality and consequently may reinforce stereotypical expectations of male and female behavior for students. . This paper argues that seeing women playing lead male roles will lead students to question assumptions about gender typed behavior. This project surveyed student audiences before and after the cross gender cast production to gather feedback concerning student expectations and changes concerning expectations of male and female behavior.

9. Shannon Reed, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
A Twenty-Line Trap?: Shakespeare Enacted by Young Women

Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1100 characters to choose from. Girl actors are even more so, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on young women actors? Here, I’ll reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a girl actor and present ethnographic research on how other women who played Shakespeare’s young female characters reflect on their experiences. Their words point to the dual, contradictory nature of this limited canon, proving both its limitations and opportunities, along with suggestions for change.

10. Paris Shun-Hsiang Shih, National Chengchi University (Taiwan)
Shakespearean Spice Girls?: Untangling Postfeminist Girlhood in She’s The Man and Ten Things I Hate About You

This paper uses two modern Shakespeare film adaptations to examine how certain Shakespearean young female characters are turned into postfeminist figures and how postfeminist girlhood is represented. In She’s the Man, we see how Viola manages to play with different gender roles with the help of commodities, and how she alienates herself from prescribed gender identity with critical awareness. In Ten Things I Hate about You, we see how Bianca is turned into a postfeminist girl and how she embodies “girl power.” Bianca’s overt female sexuality and her knowledge in girl fashion turn her into an unruly girl.

11. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
Patriarchal Idealism and The Merchant of Venice

Theorists have examined the patriarchal agenda of timeless literary pieces for decades. Lois Tyson has stated that the female characters in texts will fall into one of two simple categories: the “good girl” or the “bad girl.” Jill Dolan suggests that female characters in classic plays are marginalized as objects there to enhance the view of the audience. In this paper, I shall demonstrate how Shakespeare’s female characters are often responsible for driving the plot of the play, behaving as strong-minded women who cannot be so easily categorized as “good girl” or “bad girl.”

12. Deanne Williams, York University (Canada)
Global Girls in Shakespeare’s Late Plays

This paper considers the girls of Shakespeare’s late plays in a global context. The stories of Marina, Perdita, and Miranda — even Imogen – are shaped by international travel, and I will explore the possibilities of thinking about these characters as travellers, and place them in discussion with some recent theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism, which provides an alternative to paradigms of colonial (and postcolonial) nationhood. I will consider the implications of these diverging models of girlhood, the cosmopolitan vs. the colonial, in Shakespeare. How do the competing, even contradictory, affiliations of Shakespeare’s global girls address questions global citizenship and/or national identity?

Seminar 18: Shakespeare, Middleton and the fatherless lineage

Schedule / Horaire

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-17h.

Room: ENS, salle Celan.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Rosy Colombo, University of Rome “Sapienza” (Italy), and Daniela Guardamagna, University of Rome “Tor ergata”(Italy)

Participants

  1. Francesca Brancolini, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
    Was It Shakespeare Who Revised Locrine? A Question of Authorship
  2. Rosy Colombo Smith, “Sapienza” University of Rome (Italy)
    Origin Displaced
  3. Tommaso Continisio, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
    Shakespeare’s Hand in Mucedorus: Did the Bard Write the Additional Scenes?
  4. Daniela Guardamagna, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
    Middleton beyond the Canon
  5. Roger Holdsworth, University of Manchester (UK)
    Timon of Athens as a Middleton Play
  6. Lucia Nigri, University of Salford (UK)
    Authorial and non-authorial links in The Lady’s Tragedy
  7. Giuliano Pascucci, “Sapienza” University of Rome (Italy)
    Not All is Lost. Cardenio, Double Falsehood and music
  8. Rossana M. Sebellin, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
    Imagery in Thomas of Woodstock and Richard II

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Francesca Brancolini, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
Was It Shakespeare Who Revised Locrine? A Question of Authorship

Locrine (1595), attributed to the hand of a University Wit (Peele and Greene are the two most likely candidates), is one of the plays bearing the “W.S.” acronyme on its frontispiece. Some critics have seen Shakespeare behind the revision of some scenes of the text. My purpose is to analyse those scenes (probably the Strumbo ones, by some connected to the figure of Falstaff) with the help of Computational Linguistic tools, in order to verify if these theories can be supported (or not) by statistical evidence, which could open new perspectives on the authorship studies of the play.

2. Rosy Colombo Smith, “Sapienza” University of Rome (Italy)
Origin Displaced

This presentation focuses upon the category of ‘origin’ from a theoretical viewpoint, which, besides including philological/textual aspects, inevitably opens up the issue of interpretation, not limited to ‘capturing’ an originary, foundational ‘meaning’. I argue that origin can never be recovered in conventional terms, but is rather displaced in space and time, in the materiality of subsequent edited texts: Freud stated that telling a dream is already an experience of displacement, in which what remains of the dream are significant traces. A case in point are the multiple versions of Hamlet, which I will approach as a palimpsest to illustrate my argument.

3. Tommaso Continisio, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
Shakespeare’s Hand in Mucedorus: Did the Bard Write the Additional Scenes?

It is sometimes suggested that the ‘new additions’ added to Q3 of Mucedorus, a tragicomedy written in the 1590s and one of the period’s most popular plays, are by Shakespeare. In my paper I apply various tests for authorship derived from computational linguistics to establish the truth, or at least the feasibility, of this claim. I then consider how such tests might be applied to the whole play to help determine how many authors are present, and who they might be.

4. Daniela Guardamagna, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
Middleton beyond the Canon

The ‘new Middleton’ who emerged from the Seventies to the Nineties of the 20th century (since the work of MacDonald P. Jackson, David Lake and Roger Holdsworth), and even more so after the publication of his Collected Works and Companion by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (with M.P. Jackson, John Jowett, Valerie Wayne and Adrian Weiss), is very different from the author that was proposed till the Seventies and even longer. Especially in the field of tragedy, the new author-figure presents striking features which greatly modify our perception of his work. This novelty is the subject of my presentation.

5. Roger Holdsworth, University of Manchester (UK)
Timon of Athens as a Middleton Play

Three centuries of criticism have discussed Timon as a Shakespeare play, largely as an adjunct of King Lear. But Timon is also a Middleton play: he co-wrote it with Shakespeare, and some two-fifths of the Folio text is by him. Tracing links of content and style between Timon and the rest of the Middleton canon – not only his plays but his poems, satiric and devotional pamphlets, and city pageants – demonstrates what a multifaceted and innovatory work Timon is, with a capacity to challenge and disturb its audience in ways that the Lear comparison, however relevant, entirely fails to convey.

6. Lucia Nigri, University of Salford (UK)
Authorial and non-authorial links in The Lady’s Tragedy

Written and performed in 1611, the authorship of The Lady’s Tragedy has been a source of much conjecture: Goff, Chapman, Shakespeare, Massinger, Tourneur, Chapman, Ford, and Fletcher have been all argued for. More recently critics almost unanimously attribute the play to Middleton. This contribution will discuss the degree to which this attribution can be corroborated by critical means and will investigate the relationship between plot and subplot in the tragedy. It will also look at possible non-authorial links with Shakespeare and the influences his plays may have had on Middleton’s tragedy.

7. Giuliano Pascucci, “Sapienza” University of Rome (Italy)
Not All is Lost. Cardenio, Double Falsehood and music

In 2001, Michael Wood suggested that the Elizabethan song Woods, Rocks and Mountains, by Robert Johnson, is the only remnant of Cardenio, a lost play presumably written by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Wood revived the debate about the Double Falsehood/Cardenio querelle, but also the problem of Shakespeare’s canon. His ingenuous, well received theory is based on the textual similarities between the song and Shelton’s translation of Don Quijote, source of Cardenio. However, these and many others so far disregarded similarities should be further investigated to ascertain what conclusions can be drawn about authorship attribution issues from the comparison.

8. Rossana M. Sebellin, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy)
Imagery in Thomas of Woodstock and Richard II

Thomas of Woodstock, also known as Richard II part I, is an anonymous text, so far little explored, apart from the impressive four-volume edition by Michael Egan (2006): this critic is sure the play is by Shakespeare, but his findings have convinced few experts: attribution remains debated. Beside Egan’s book, a linguistic analysis of the play has been carried out by Donatella Montini (2012), but a study of the cluster of images pertaining to both texts has not yet been attempted.

Seminar 17: ‘Seeing As’: Shakespeare and Denotement

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 16h-18h.

Room: L106.

Leader / Organisateur

Michael Hattaway, New York University in London (UK)

Participants

  1. Letitia Goia, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca (Romania)
    The Enhancement Of Shakespeare’s Sacred in Verdi’s Adaptation of Othello
  2. Claire Guéron, Université de Bourgogne (France)
    ‘I would [..] / Have turned mine eye’ (Cymbeline, 1.3.17-22): Shifting to the Mind’s Eye in Shakespeare’s Late Plays
  3. Eric Harber, Independent Scholar (UK)
    Ambivalence: fire and mud in Othello
  4. John Langdon, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
    Death in Midsummer: the Ritual Death of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  5. Emilio Méndez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
    ‘Behold the meaning’:  Denotements through the Sonnets of Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well
  6. Patricia Parker, Stanford University (USA)
    (De)noting and Slander
  7. Kiernan Ryan, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
    ‘Prosper on the top (invisible)’: Power and Perception in Shakespeare
  8. Ewa Sawicka, Warsaw University (Poland)
    Self-mystification in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Letitia Goia, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca (Romania)
The Enhancement Of Shakespeare’s Sacred in Verdi’s Adaptation of Othello

The present research focuses on the adaptation of Othello from play to libretto, focussing on the sacred elements and the religious expressions that were set to music. Othello holds the Shakespearean record for the number of times heaven, or the devil, are mentioned. Although the playwright doesn’t follow a particular theological course, religious elements are scattered throughout the play, either in a clear form or in more subtly crafted expressions. Thus, the sacred, which in Shakespeare’s play is only alluded to, turns, in Verdi’s opera libretto, into an obvious good-evil dichotomy, with Romantic accents and deep musical references.

2. Claire Guéron, Université de Bourgogne (France)
‘I would [..] / Have turned mine eye’ (Cymbeline, 1.3.17-22): Shifting to the Mind’s Eye in Shakespeare’s Late Plays

An often-discussed aspect of Renaissance perspective is its incorporation of the viewer’s position in the construction of the design. Similarly, this paper argues that Shakespeare’s later plays incorporate the distance between audience and performance as a parameter of the drama, in such a way as to encourage a complex, layered vision requiring an interplay between the viewer’s literal eye and his or her mind’s eye. I argue that the plays explore the status of the images so produced, as well as the resulting ambiguities in the semiotic status of the actor’s body, involving a tension between mimetic and emblematic signifying functions.

3. Eric Harber, Independent Scholar (UK)
Ambivalence: fire and mud in Othello

Whereas in Hamlet Shakespeare traces the ambivalences of thought that inhibit Hamlet’s action to opposing powers in the universe at large and repeated in the world — which daunt him — Othello, someone of legendary stature imported from outside European culture, is revealed to have control of those powers, albeit remaining unconscious of the fact. This gives him a singular nature; a lofty authority. Yet the action that unfolds shows how his strengths that emanate from those powers can, once he is made vulnerable, be exploited to corrupt, betray and destroy someone of his heroic stature, who, till then, had led a charmed life.

4. John Langdon, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
Death in Midsummer: the Ritual Death of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play-acted deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe, while usually perceived and portrayed largely as merely comic elements, may also be understood as ritual, mock sacrifices to assuage the threat of death. Mock deaths also provide a symbolic redemption to characters within the play, the audience, and they underscore the sense of renewal underlying the play as a whole. The comic element in Dream adds a cathartic dimension to these ritual deaths, echoing ancient folk customs of slaying the carnival king or queen in order to assuage the perennial threat of a finite mortality.

5. Emilio Méndez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
‘Behold the meaning’:  Denotements through the Sonnets of Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well

This paper, by examining sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well, explores how characters and spectators become accomplices in denotements that further the plot but which also delve into anxieties regarding awareness, perception and interpretation. In 4.3 of each play, amateur poets are unaware of who is hearing their sonnets being read aloud. The observers ‘denote’ for other characters, as well as for the audience, what they see and hear. These two plays provide earlier and later examples of Shakespearean denotements and how they work in the frame of two comedies with ambiguous endings.

6. Patricia Parker, Stanford University (USA)
(De)noting and Slander

This paper will examine three Shakespeare plays in which denoting and noting figure in relation to a slanderous accusation of female infidelity – Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Cymbeline. Starting from what one of the texts of Othello calls ‘close denotements’, it will move to the darker associations of ‘noting’ itself, including ways in which it produces the note or ‘stain’ it purports more objectively to ‘see’.

7. Kiernan Ryan, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Prosper on the top (invisible)’: Power and Perception in Shakespeare

As A. D. Nuttall has observed, Shakespeare’s mimetic art allows us to see aspects of reality that we could not otherwise perceive. This paper examines the techniques Shakespeare employs to make visible the unconscious imperatives that dictate his characters’ fates. When Prospero commands Ariel, ‘Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else’, the audience is invited to behold personifications of the covert constraints that determine their lives too. The effect of such visualizing strategies is to empower the audience by revealing the unseen forces that disempower them in the world beyond the theatre.

8. Ewa Sawicka, Warsaw University (Poland)
Self-mystification in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline

The paper discusses the Renaissance idea of the self in As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. Alluding to Paul Ricoeur’s postulate that self-understanding is mediated by text, I would like to trace a process of departure from an embodied self, presented in those plays as a strategy of self-mystification. The characters’ wilful and conscientious departure from truth about themselves, i.e. their gradual departure from objective reality towards its subjective representation, problematizes the relation between truth and falsity. Filtered through the human mind, the real self is turned into a literary fiction, abstracted from its defining, spatio-temporal setting.

Seminar 16: The Celebrated Shakespeare: public commemoration and biography

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: ENS, salle Dussane.

Leader / Organisateur

Michael Dobson, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham (UK)

Participants

  1. Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidad do Porto (Portugal)
    Secular Saints : Shakespeare in the Camões Tricentenary (1880)
  2. Anna Khrabrova, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
    “Your changed complexions are to me a mirror which shows me mine changed too”: Shakespeare visualization and monumentalization
  3. Robert McHenry, University of Hawaii (USA)
    John Dryden’s Shakespeare: Before Shakespearean Biography
  4. Karen Newman, Brown University (USA)
    Shakespeare celebrated in Paris, 1827
  5. Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
    The Blemishes of the Repertoire: Translation as Celebration. The Shakespeare Cult in Nineteenth Century Hungary
  6. Francisco Fuentes Rubio, University of Murcia (Spain)
    Mickey Mouse Shakespeare: An apparently conservative postal walk through Stratford
  7. Codruta Mirela Stănişoară, University of Craiova (Romania), and Emil Sîrbulescu, University of Craiova (Romania)
    From Global to Local and back to Global: a case-study in Shakespeare’s Romanian after-life
  8. Nataliya Torkut, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
    “…By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his”: public commemoration of Shakespeare in the Soviet Ukraine
  9. Noemi Vera, University of Murcia (Spain)
    Celebrating the man: Spanish biographies of Shakespeare in the tercentenary of his death
  10. Shuhua Wang, National I-Lan University (Taiwan)
    The ‘Shakespeare Renaissance’ and the Rise of China

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidad do Porto (Portugal)
Secular Saints : Shakespeare in the Camões Tricentenary (1880)

This paper will look into representations of Shakespeare in the textual and iconographic record of the 1880 Camões celebrations, in both Portugal and Brazil. It will consider transcripts of public speeches included in the solemnities, but also accounts of the festivities in the contemporary press. The political and cultural challenges faced by Anglo-Portuguese relations in the ‘new imperial’ age, and the uses given to Shakespeare in such a context, will be looked into with particular care. I therefore propose to cover an enlightening chapter in the fortunes of Shakespeare within the commemorative practices of European and new-world cultures.

2. Anna Khrabrova, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“Your changed complexions are to me a mirror which shows me mine changed too”: Shakespeare visualization and monumentalization

This paper will explore the significantly changing visual representations of Shakespeare produced at crucial points in the public development of his cult, from the birth of Bardolatry in the eighteenth century to the explosion of publications across many media seen around the 1964 quatercentenary and beyond. Examples will include Andy Warhol’s Droeshout image in several colours, 1962; Pablo Picasso’s numerous variations on the theme of Shakespeare’s face, 1964; R. Olbiński’s Free Shakespeare in Central Park, 1994; K.Chadwick’s William Shakespeare and the 20th century, 1996; R. Steadman’s William Shakespeare, 2000; and M.Glaser’s 25 Shakespeare Faces, 2003.

3. Robert McHenry, University of Hawaii (USA)
John Dryden’s Shakespeare: Before Shakespearean Biography

Although Dryden apparently knew little about Shakespeare’s life, when he received a portrait of Shakespeare from Sir Godfrey Kneller he described the likeness as an inspiration, and the gift crystallized his sense of Shakespeare’s personality. Shakespeare then became not merely a collection of great plays, but a person who embodied wisdom and artistic boldness. This paper will show that Dryden was an influential founder of the eighteenth century’s fashion for possessing and admiring portraits of Shakespeare, and that ultimately Dryden identified himself with Shakespeare, seeing him as a literary father and parent of English drama.

4. Karen Newman, Brown University (USA)
Shakespeare celebrated in Paris, 1827

What sort of figure was the Shakespeare advanced as a focus of celebration in Moreau’s Souvenirs du théatre anglais, the commemorative publication sold during Charles Kemble’s famous visit to the Odéon theatre in Paris in 1827? What sort of Shakespeare did the prefatorial materials and the illustrations to the program present? To what audiences were the Souvenirs directed? This paper examines the Souvenirs in the context of the visit of the English actors to post-Napoleonic/Restoration France.

5. Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
The Blemishes of the Repertoire: Translation as Celebration. The Shakespeare Cult in Nineteenth Century Hungary

This paper will examine the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 300th birthday in Budapest in 1864, an occasion which prompted some scepticism as well as some expressions of Bardolatry. It will pay particular attention to the critic Pal Gyulai and the controversy over the making of new Shakespearean translations for theatrical use.

6. Francisco Fuentes Rubio, University of Murcia (Spain)
Mickey Mouse Shakespeare: An apparently conservative postal walk through Stratford

In 1990, for the international philatelic exhibition Stamp World London 90, Shakespeare was memorialised in a set of ten Disney postage stamps issued by Grenada Grenadines which portrayed a Shakespearean Mickey Mouse along with different views of Disney-like versions of Shakespeare’s home town, Mary Arden’s house and Anne Hathaway’s cottage. These postal documents at first sight hold a conservative position, as they seem to link the author to the spirit of Merry Old England, a utopian view of a past England. Yet, as I shall show, the stamps carry a contradictory political message.

7. Codruta Mirela Stănişoară, University of Craiova (Romania), and Emil Sîrbulescu, University of Craiova (Romania)
From Global to Local and back to Global: a case-study in Shakespeare’s Romanian after-life

Founded by an actor-manager, Emil Boroghina, the Craiova Shakespeare Festival has since 1994 promulgated a cosmopolitan and theatrical Bard. The production of Hamlet performed during the second edition of the Festival (1997) aptly featured the Ghost, strikingly resembling the Droeshout portrait, sitting at a writing desk. The same personage was later to appear as the King-Actor in “The Murder of Gonzago”. This paper will explore the ways in which Craiova’s festival (seen in the wider context of Romanian Shakespeare) has contributed to the (inter)national understanding of Shakespeare, turning him into a simultaneously local and global public figure.

8. Nataliya Torkut, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“…By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his”: public commemoration of Shakespeare in the Soviet Ukraine

There were three major pan-Soviet Shakespearean festivals during Ukraine’s membership of the USSR: 1939, 1964, and 1966. While official propaganda asserted that only the Soviet reception of his work was correct, the large-scale popularization of the English genius and the multilevel reception of his works contributed to a situation in which William Shakespeare began to occupy a central, pivotal point for ideological dissent. My paper will explore the ways in which his literary heritage, endowed with a strong ethical, axiological and aesthetic potential, stimulated reflective thinking, which itself contained a threat to the basic epistemological foundations of totalitarianism.

9. Noemi Vera, University of Murcia (Spain)
Celebrating the man: Spanish biographies of Shakespeare in the tercentenary of his death

Virtually one third of all Spanish biographies of Shakespeare were published around 1916, and some are still among the most exhaustive lives of Shakespeare ever written in Spanish. My main focus here will be on Alfonso Par’s Catalan Vida de Guillem Shakespeare (1916) and Eduardo Juliá’s Shakespeare y su tiempo (1916), a novelised biography which combines real and fictional events. My aim is to explore the versions of William Shakespeare the man presented to the Spanish readers in this key year, as well as to situate them within a wider context of Spanish works recreating Shakespeare’s life and character.

10. Shuhua Wang, National I-Lan University (Taiwan)
The ‘Shakespeare Renaissance’ and the Rise of China

This paper traces the recent history of celebrating Shakespeare in China, from the 1980s through the recent founding of the Asian Shakespeare Association and the Taiwan Shakespeare Association (2013). As I shall show, from the very first two Shakespeare Festivals in China — in 1986 and in 1994 — Chinese Shakespeareans from both sides of the Taiwan Straits have successfully used the Bard as a mouthpiece for political propaganda and as a way of performing their national crossings into modernization. William Shakespeare then becomes an icon of cultural integration in the global academic community in the first decade of the 21st century.

Seminar 15: Shakespeare in French Film/France in Shakespearean Film

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA) and Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)

Participants

  1. Mário Vítor Bastos, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
    Shakespeare and the Poetics of French Film in the early 1960s: Ophélia by Claude Chabrol
  2. Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
    “You may go so far”: Branagh, Depardieu, Reynaldo
  3. Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno (Italy)
    Exilic / Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient
  4. Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA)
    “I am not what I am”: Othello and Role-playing in Le Enfants du Paradis
  5. Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III (France)
    Macbeth in André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain (1952): Mise en Abyme and Transgression
  6. Anthony Guneratne, Florida Atlantic University (USA)
    A Certain Tendence in Post-New Wave Shakespearean Cinema: From Early Truffaut to Late Godard via Orson Welles
  7. Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)
    The Real and the Fake: Shakespeare, Cinema, Authenticity, and Post-War Europe in André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Mário Vítor Bastos, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Shakespeare and the Poetics of French Film in the early 1960s: Ophélia by Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol was known for the inclusion of literary, dramatic and filmic texts in the fabric of his films. Released in 1962, Ophélia has a filmic black and white discourse which illustrates that interplay. It also shows cinematic and historical depth, underlining the Nouvelle Vague perspective with a poetics of its own. Within Ophélia’s frame Shakespeare’s Hamlet appears as the main inter-textual source for a productive relation of art and meaning, illuminating aspects of how the dynamic presence of the Bard in contemporary culture works.

2. Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
“You may go so far”: Branagh, Depardieu, Reynaldo

Gerard Depardieu’s appearance as Reynaldo in Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet continues the director’s ongoing emulation of the “International Epic” style of mid-20th-century film makers like David Lean. Although the name Reynaldo is Iberian, not Gallic, Depardieu endows the character with a local man’s expertise in Paris. As with many aspects of Hamlet, Reynaldo’s cultural identity was explored in in an earlier engagement with the play, In the Bleak Midwinter. For Midwinter, Nicholas Farrell (Horatio in Hamlet) plays Tom Newman, who adopts forms of accented English to distinguish the many characters assigned to him. For Reynaldo, Tom focuses on the name’s associations with the French folk figure Renart.

3. Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno (Italy)
Exilic / Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient

Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961) is about a literature student, Anne Goupil, who becomes involved with a group of bohemians centering around the absent figure of Spanish musician Juan. The film incorporates theatre director Gérard Lenz’s attempt to stage the play, even though this play is an ensemble of “shreds and patches,” and “unplayable.” The paper explores the significance of this incorporation, and shows how this relates to the aesthetics of Rivette as nouvelle vague director. It argues that the film simultaneously insists on an exilic, serial, self-erasing “Shakespeare” that “belongs to no one” and an idyllic, transcendent “Shakespeare.”

4. Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA)
“I am not what I am”: Othello and Role-playing in Le Enfants du Paradis

Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) brilliantly explores the ever permeable and mercurial boundaries between theatrical art and life, a theme Shakespeare contemplates throughout his oeuvre. Jacques Prévert, writer of Les Enfants’ screenplay, makes Shakespeare’s Othello a consistent focus throughout the film, which shares with the play many of its central themes: obsessive love, corrosive envy, deceit, the drive for power, the importance of social roles and role-playing. Prévert’s self-reflexive use of Shakespeare during the German Occupation conveys that the French people often had to adopt roles that required masking; roles their very lives depended upon.

5. Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III (France)
Macbeth in André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain (1952): Mise en Abyme and Transgression

Released in 1952, André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain revolves around a theatre company and its staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the course of the rehearsals and performances, the dark minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth start oozing through those of the lead actors and lovers (Ludovic and Aurélia), fostering their deep grudges against the stage director, Aurélia’s twisted husband, whom they end up shooting. The film explores the multiple potentialities of mise en abyme as framing and framed fictions constantly interlace. I shall here focus on devices of transgression and permeability of the threshold between stage and backstage.

6. Anthony Guneratne, Florida Atlantic University (USA)
A Certain Tendence in Post-New Wave Shakespearean Cinema: From Early Truffaut to Late Godard via Orson Welles

Drawing from recently rediscovered materials pertaining to Welles’s “lost” Shakespearean oeuvre, and delving retrospectively into French critical reactions to Welles’s allegorical recasting of Shakespeare as auto/biography and contemporary history, this presentation proposes to show that French auteurs thematized Welles’s “break with Hollywood” as an inspiration for distinctive, individual departures from the trenchant “anti-literary classic” New Wave position articulated in Truffaut’s 1954 Cahiers du cinéma manifesto. Recapitulating Welles’s peripatetic interstitiality (from fiascos at the Venice Film Festival to triumphs at Cannes), post-New Wave citations serve as meta-commentaries on their own aesthetic impulses and historical underpinnings by insistently adapting Shakespeare through Welles.

7. Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)
The Real and the Fake: Shakespeare, Cinema, Authenticity, and Post-War Europe in André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone

Les Amants de Vérone (1949, dir. André Cayatte) is an underappreciated meditation on the place of Shakespeare in post-war European culture. A doomed romance across classes played out against the backdrop of a film of Romeo and Juliet, Les Amants focuses on questions of cultural, romantic, and cinematic authenticity in which Shakespeare’s play serves as a touchstone of truth, albeit a qualified one. The film bears comparison with the other major Romeo and Juliet film of the period, Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet, but also with Les Enfants du Paradis, like Les Amants authored by Jacques Prévert.

Seminar 14: ‘Many straunge and horrible events’ – Omens and Prophecies in Histories and Tragedies by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Schedule / Horaire

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-17h.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Imke Lichterfeld, Universität Bonn (Germany), and Yan Brailowsky, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France)

Participants

  1. Justin Kolb, American University in Cairo (Egypt)
    “The Dissolution of the Engine of this World”: History and the Decay of Nature in History
  2. Lee Rooney, University of Liverpool (UK)
    ‘A prophet to the fall of all our foes!’: Joan la Pucelle, prophecy, and the challenging of history in 1 Henry VI
  3. Jessica Malay, University of Huddersfield (UK)
    Opposing interpretations of sibylline dynastic prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Fletcher’s The Prophetess
  4. Craig Bourne, University of Hertfordshire (UK), and Emily Caddick Bourne, University of Cambridge / University of London (UK)
    Prophecy and misunderstanding in Macbeth
  5. Per Sivefors, Linnaeus University (Sweden)
    Prophecies, dreams and epistemological change in early modern drama
  6. Oriane Littardi, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (France)
    “What are you?”: Identifying Anonymous Prophets in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Histories
  7. Jordi Coral, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
    “Can Curses Pierce the Clouds and Enter Heaven?”: Prophecy and Imprecation in Richard III
  8. Kristin M. Distel, Ashland University (USA)
    “By the pricking of my thumbs”: Corporeal Omens in Shakespeare’s Tragedies
  9. Nathalie Borrelli, Université de Namur (Belgium)
    Shakespeare’s Prophesying Witches
  10. Patricia Harris Stablein Gillies, University of Essex (UK)
    The Crowned Eye: Visual Space and Prophecy in 1 Henry VI

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Justin Kolb, American University in Cairo (Egypt)
“The Dissolution of the Engine of this World”: History and the Decay of Nature in History

Published after the portentous earthquake and blazing comet that marked the year 1580, Francis Shakelton’s Blazing Star warns of “dissolution of the Engine of this World.” Shakelton warned of “the Decay of Nature,” a concept that became widespread in the 17th century, sanctioning the use of art and science to amend, improve, or replace natural processes. Transitioning from Shakleton, my paper will focus on Richard II, and its repeated invocations of an organic commonwealth of man and nature displaced by power politics. I will argue for the relevance of the “decay of nature” discourse to the problems of history plays.

2. Lee Rooney, University of Liverpool (UK)
‘A prophet to the fall of all our foes!’: Joan la Pucelle, prophecy, and the challenging of history in 1 Henry VI

In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, Joan’s claims to divine sanction and prescience problematise the fixity and inevitability of history-yet-to-come that we would expect the chronicles to guarantee, challenging the narrative of English exceptionalism that can be read into them. This paper argues that, by considering Joan within the context of the play’s apocalyptic dimension, she seems to promise a cataclysmic alternate future — something that would constitute an outrageous defiance of the prescriptions of the English chronicles. Joan, through her relationship to prophecy, becomes an emblem for and a source of the chaos that defines the early reign of Henry VI.

3. Jessica Malay, University of Huddersfield (UK)
Opposing interpretations of sibylline dynastic prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Fletcher’s The Prophetess

In Macbeth Shakespeare portrays the sibylline figures from his source texts into the demonic figures. He acknowledges the power of prophecy to influence dynastic change, but shares the growing anxiety about prophesy in English culture. In contrast, John Fletcher’s play, The Prophetess constructs a Sibylline character out of the many diverse and traditions surrounding the figure, presenting a character of divine power rather than satanic depravity. The play challenges contemporary dramatic productions that present the Sibyl or prophetess figure.

4. Craig Bourne, University of Hertfordshire (UK), and Emily Caddick Bourne, University of Cambridge / University of London (UK)
Prophecy and misunderstanding in Macbeth

Macbeth’s themes of foreknowledge, fate and freedom make it intriguing to philosophers. Robin Le Poidevin has recently argued that the play represents a world where the future is ‘fixed’. We present an alternative account which understands Macbeth’s prophecies and omens as devices guiding expectations about how the play itself will develop, and, thus, as revealing more about the representation itself than the world it represents. We examine what the two accounts reveal about the importance of prophecies and omens to themes of inevitability. Finally, we consider Macbeth’s own response to prophecies, identifying a serious mistake he makes about their significance.

5. Per Sivefors, Linnaeus University (Sweden)
Prophecies, dreams and epistemological change in early modern drama

This paper proposes that prophetic dreams in early modern plays are also a source of unease, in the sense that the “prophetic” value of them is frequently made problematic. Drawing on plays by Lyly, Webster and Shakespeare, the paper connects such tendenices to changing notions of the human psyche and to a gradual loss in the epistemological prestige of prophetic dreams. From the idea that dreams foresee the future, early modern drama comes to reflect the idea that dreams tell us something about the dreamer him- or herself.

6. Oriane Littardi, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (France)
“What are you?”: Identifying Anonymous Prophets in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Histories

Prophets possess a puzzling identity, especially knowing that many of them remain anonymous. The absence of a name hinders the process of identification and we are driven to look for other signs that are given by theatrical devices, as physical appearance or speech. However, the concept of identity is not only, as we understand it in its ordinary meaning, the question of the name. It comprehends, above all else, the issues of the being as it is one and the same. Indeed, the uniqueness and the sameness of the prophet present an instability that echoes the world they evolve in.

7. Jordi Coral, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
“Can Curses Pierce the Clouds and Enter Heaven?”: Prophecy and Imprecation in Richard III

This paper examines a variant of prophecy that is distinctively performative in nature, namely, the curse. It focusses on Margaret’s spectacular malediction of the protagonist in Richard III, which constitutes an act of psychic aggression as much as the prediction of an individual’s fate. Whether the destruction of super-self-possessed Richard bears testimony to the workings of a providential force beyond his control or, conversely, serves to confirm that we are dependent on others for our integrity, the play remains a disturbingly ambiguous one, reflecting the evolving conception of vengeance in an increasingly desacralized world.

8. Kristin M. Distel, Ashland University (USA)
“By the pricking of my thumbs”: Corporeal Omens in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

My paper illustrates the significance of corporeality when interpreting omens in the tragedies. I will especially examine Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. I will argue that some of the most meaningful portents take place through a character’s physical body. These bodily forebodings illustrate the characters’ intense entrenchment in their respective crises. Shakespeare’s choice of the body as a portentous object lends itself to a New Historical reading of the tragedies. That is, the characters’ physical connectedness to fate, prophecy, and omens provides insight into the functions of the body and of literature in Shakespeare’s England.

9. Nathalie Borrelli, Université de Namur (Belgium)
Shakespeare’s Prophesying Witches

The weïrd sisters, Joan of Arc and Margery Jordan are five female characters in Shakespeare’s plays for whom the designation ‘witch’ is not merely a term of abuse but also a reference to their prophesying roles. In this paper I will first demonstrate how the ambiguous and intangible nature of the actual practice of prophesying influences Shakespeare’s choice of words to denominate these ‘prophesying characters’ as well as the structure of their prophecies. Subsequently I will compare these witches’ fictional prophecies to one another as well as to typical non-fictional Renaissance prophecies and discuss their role in the plays concerned.

10. Patricia Harris Stablein Gillies, University of Essex (UK)
The Crowned Eye: Visual Space and Prophecy in 1 Henry VI

The conflicted status of monarchy, both English and French, disturbs the association of prophecy with the crown in 1 Henry VI. The issue of prophecy and its location in the royal crown is posed in the contrast of the funeral speeches that open Henry VI, Part I. Prophetic blindness also afflicts the French who were Henry V’s “dazzled” adversaries. The disruption of visionary kingship embraces playwright, spectator, player and theatrical space. All those convened to the crown play at resolving contradictory prophecies.

Seminar 13: The Shakespeare Circle

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.

Room: V107.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (UK)

Participants

  1. John Astington, University of Toronto (Canada)
    Theatre Friends: The Burbages
  2. Susan Brock, University of Warwick (UK)
    Shakespeare’s Neighbours and Beneficiaries
  3. Paul Edmondson, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (UK)
    Actors and Editors John Heminges and Henry Condell
  4. David Fallow, Independent Scholar (UK)
    His father John Shakespeare
  5. Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire (UK)
    His son, Hamnet Shakespeare
  6. Andrew Kesson, University of Roehampton (UK)
    Fellow Dramatists and Early Collaborators Henry Chettle, Robert Greene, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele
  7. Alan Nelson, University of California, Berkeley (USA)
    His literary patrons the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and Sir John Salusbury
  8. Duncan Salkeld, University of Chichester (UK)
    Collaborator George Wilkins
  9. Bart Van Es, St Catherine’s College, Oxford (UK)
    Fellow Actors Will Kemp, Augustine Phillips, Robert Armin and other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and King’s Men
  10. Greg Wells, University of Warwick (UK)
    Son-in-law John Hall
  11. Catherine Shrank, University of Sheffield (UK)
    His sister’s family: The Harts
  12. Stanley Wells, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (UK)
    A close family connection: The Combes

Abstracts / Résumés

Most biographies of Shakespeare drive a direct trajectory from his birth to his death, taking note of his relatives, friends, and colleagues only in so far as what is already known about them impinges directly on his life. Yet many of these people are both relatively under-investigated and of interest in their own right. Moreover fresh study of their life stories may well cast both oblique and direct illumination on Shakespeare’s life and on the social and intellectual environment that he inhabited. In the light of this belief we are editing a collection of essays for Cambridge University Press called The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography due to be published in 2016. Some of our contributors are able to take part in this seminar to try out their ideas and discuss their work so far.

Seminar 12: ‘Green’ or Ecocritical Shakespeare: non- human nature as a character in his plays

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Malvina Isabel Aparicio (Argentina)

Participants

  1. Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa (USA)
    “Water’s Violent Love”
  2. Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University (Poland)
    “Map of Woe”: The Topography of Female Body in Titus Andronicus
  3. Joseph Campana, Rice University (USA)
    The Bee and the Sovereign: Segments, Swarms, and the Early Modern Multitude in Coriolanus
  4. Viktoriia Marinesko, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
    “The Something that Nature Gave Me”: the Role of Nature in Shaping the Genius through the Prism of Shakespeare’s Biographies
  5. Malvina Aparicio, Argentine Catholic University / University of the Salvador (Argentina)
    The Non-Human as a Character in Macbeth
  6. Simon C. Estok, Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea)
    Ecocriticism and Timon of Athens
  7. David Morrow, College of Saint Rose (USA)
    Shakespeare before the Metabolic Rift: Land, Labor and Ecocriticism
  8. Doyle Ott, Sonoma State University (USA)
    Putting a Tempest in a Teapot: Physicalizing the Storm in Shakespearean Performance

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa (USA)
“Water’s Violent Love”

In her afterword to “Ecomaterialism,” a cluster of essays in Postmedieval (2013), Jane Bennett urges us to engage vibrant matter’s potential threats to human life, its violence. Too often, ecocritics celebrate the agency of non-human matter; yet today the powers of earth, air, fire, and water threaten and injure human populations more strongly and randomly than ever. I touched on this topic in my contribution to the cluster in Postmedieval, entitled “Water Love,” and for this seminar I want to make explicit the violent love of Shakespeare’s tempests.

2. Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University (Poland)
“Map of Woe”: The Topography of Female Body in Titus Andronicus

This paper discusses the definition of the forest as a space regulated by the repetitive act of appropriation on the part of the royal authority as well as the correspondences between the rhetoric of forest possession and the codification of another locus communis for the political use of nature, i.e. female body. Spatialization/naturalization of the female body in Titus Andronicus offers three interlocking imaginary topographies: 1. a “feminized” topography of Rome as the lady, 2. that of the forest as a whore, and 3. the “politicized” topographies of female bodies of Lavinia and Tamora that oscillate between the two.

3. Joseph Campana, Rice University (USA)
The Bee and the Sovereign: Segments, Swarms, and the Early Modern Multitude in Coriolanus

Were humans the only political creatures in early modernity? Clearly not, answers a wave of work in animal studies. Yet to which forms of non-human life do we attend? How might we think about early modern polities with help from what Thomas Moffett referred as Lesser Living Creatures? Here I argue with reference to Coriolanus that questions of sovereignty, so beneficially impacted by a wave of work on animality, might be significantly sharpened through attention to a wider range of non-human forms of life, particularly insects, and the segments and swarms impact what constitutes a body politic and political collectivity.

4. Viktoriia Marinesko, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“The Something that Nature Gave Me”: the Role of Nature in Shaping the Genius through the Prism of Shakespeare’s Biographies

Shakespearean scholars see nature in the Bard’s works not as something ornamental, but as an important object of literary presentation which fulfils a “narrative function.” Shakespeare’s biographers are “following the verbal traces he left behind back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open” (Greenblatt). Among those traces nature is one of the most distinct. The aim of this paper will be to investigate the way in which different sub-genres of biographies view the concept of nature in Shakespeare’s works, and employ it in their fictional model of reality as a cognitive tool.

5. Malvina Aparicio, Argentine Catholic University / University of the Salvador (Argentina)
The Non-Human as a Character in Macbeth

By borrowing ecological concepts like ‘adaptation’ ‘mimicry’ ‘e/in/volution’ for the treatment of the Wëird Sisters in Macbeth, they can be viewed in an ‘earthly’ way, devoid of supernatural connotations which can be left to idiosyncratic perceptions of time, place and culture. They may cease to operate as ‘symbols’ of evil, the ‘witches’, and simply ‘be’ natural creatures undergoing a process of decay as the result of their toxic habitat, the northern lands, around Shakespeare’s time (1606). The experience ‘in the heath’ could be read then in symmetrical opposition to King Lear: rather than affording a ‘moment of clarity’ it would bring sheer confusion.

6. Simon C. Estok, Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea)
Ecocriticism and Timon of Athens

Studying Timon of Athens from an ecocritical perspective, I will argue for the necessity of queering green and greening queer early modern scholarship, with an eye to recognizing the central ity of ecophobia in much of what is going on in Timon. This play goes out of its way to queer Timon, perhaps to defamiliarize his relationships so that his excesses and impacts are more clearly visible. Timon has much to say to our students about: the social and environmental limits of consumption; meat and vegetables; the unsustainability of the hierarchies we imagine and live by; and about delusions of grandeur.

7. David Morrow, College of Saint Rose (USA)
Shakespeare before the Metabolic Rift: Land, Labor and Ecocriticism

If Shakespearean ecocriticism is to be activist, and if doing such work includes “opening up radical challenges in the plays” (Estok), then Marxist conceptions of labor, class struggle, and primitive accumulation offer it promising (if underutilized) interpretive categories. Through the lens of agrarian conflict, this paper analyses the dramatic and ideological functions of representations of rural commoners and social relations on the land in several tragicomic romances. It also aims to suggest ways in which Marxist ecocriticism might allow us to reconsider Shakespearean drama in light of our own era’s escalating conflicts over land and food.

8. Doyle Ott, Sonoma State University (USA)
Putting a Tempest in a Teapot: Physicalizing the Storm in Shakespearean Performance

This paper examines the evolving use of the human performer to evoke the fury of the storms that so often drive Shakespeare’s plots. Some productions evoke these forces with the aid of scenography and sound, while others use extended physical performance tech niques to evoke the storm. How might these corporeally realized weather events carry meaning differently than storms created through more standard stage technologies? Build ing on recent ecocritical investigations, I examine Shakespeare’s storms as performative phenomena created by human bodies on the stage.

Seminar 11: “It’s Shakespearian!”: The critical fortune of a commonplace in France from 1820 to the present

Schedule / Horaire

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-17h.

Room: ENS, salle des Résistants.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Gisèle Venet and Line Cottegnies (France)

Participants

  1. Sylvaine Bataille, Université de Rouen (France)
    Quand les séries américaines sont « shakespeariennes » : le cliché à l’épreuve de la production télévisuelle contemporaine
  2. Christine Sukic, Université de Reims (France)
    « Il est Shakespeare ! »
  3. Gabriel Louis Moyal, McMaster University, Hamilton (Canada)
    Traduire l’Angleterre : Le Shakespeare de François Guizot
  4. Emilie Ortiga, Université du Havre (France)
    The Presence of Shakespeare in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette
  5. Florence Krésine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (France)
    Shakespeare-Gautier : trait d’union ou trait de génie ?
  6. Frédéric Picco, Lycée Camille Jullian à Bordeaux (France)
    Les Contes cruels, ou quand le conte devient le lieu shakespearien
  7. Ladan Niayesh, Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 (France)
    Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Berlioz’s ‘Shakespeare’

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Sylvaine Bataille, Université de Rouen (France)
Quand les séries américaines sont « shakespeariennes » : le cliché à l’épreuve de la production télévisuelle contemporaine

« Série aux accents shakespeariens », « digne d’un drame shakespearien », « rappelant l’univers shakespearien », « tragédie shakespearienne » : ces expressions ne sont pas rares sous la plume des journalistes ou bloggeurs de la presse culturelle (en France et ailleurs) pour qualifier des séries américaines contemporaines telles que House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Boss, ou encore The Wire, The Sopranos ou Sons of Anarchy. Il s’agira d’explorer la façon dont est utilisée la référence à Shakespeare dans ces commentaires : outil de légitimation culturelle, le cliché est également révélateur d’une construction commune de « Shakespeare ».

2. Christine Sukic, Université de Reims (France)
« Il est Shakespeare ! »

On étudiera quelques biographies de Shakespeare, en particulier celles qui accompagnent les éditions et traductions du poète en France, depuis les traductions de La Place jusqu’au début du XXe siècle. Les éléments biographiques sont-ils censés éclairer l’œuvre, comme le pensait La Place, ou au contraire, l’œuvre est-elle en contradiction avec la vie du poète, selon Amédée Pichot? On constatera les choix effectués selon les époques et selon les sensibilités des auteurs. On se demandera comment ces biographes ont pu contribuer à forger le « shakespearien », et comment ils éclairent encore notre compréhension de cette notion.

3. Gabriel Louis Moyal, McMaster University, Hamilton (Canada)
Traduire l’Angleterre : Le Shakespeare de François Guizot

Publié ostensiblement pour accompagner sa nouvelle traduction des œuvres complètes du barde, De Shakespeare et de la poésie dramatique de Guizot (1822) s’avère un document profondément informé par les conflits politiques de la Restauration. Le tableau de l’Angleterre d’Élisabeth, la biographie de Shakespeare s’y donnent à lire comme des allégories, voire des leçons sur l’histoire de l’évolution de la constitutionnalité ou sur celle du rôle du théâtre populaire dans la construction d’une culture politique. Il s’agira de resituer ce texte dans une stratégie politique fondée sur une conception élargie de la traduction.

4. Emilie Ortiga, Université du Havre (France)
The Presence of Shakespeare in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette

Published in 1846, Balzac’s La Cousine Bette shows us the extent to which Shakespeare’s works and characters have been integrated into French literary culture. Balzac’s comparisons of his own characters to characters such as Richard III, Iago and Othello presuppose an audience familiar with Shakespeare’s works. We would like to discuss the implications of Shakespeare’s presence in La Cousine Bette in order to better understand the qualities and characteristics that Balzac attributes to Shakespeare. Of what does Shakespeare’s “genius” consist, according to Balzac? What would the word “Shakespearean” mean in the context of Balzac’s representation of Shakespeare?

5. Florence Krésine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (France)
Shakespeare-Gautier : trait d’union ou trait de génie ?

Trait d’union, trait de génie. Le génie du théâtre de Shakespeare hante les romans, nouvelles, théâtre et poésie de Théophile Gautier. En réalité, l’œuvre de Gautier est une œuvre féconde, proprement shakespearienne. « Shakespeare-Gautier » présente des affinités avec le concept pythagoricien de la transmigration des âmes que Shakespeare, il est vrai, a raillé. Dans Partie-carrée, il faut à l’un des personnages « doubler le rocher de Shakespeare ». La référence constante à Shakespeare accuse peut-être le désir ambivalent, impossible d’un texte dont la surface serait lisse, sans aspérité, le désir de supplanter, parmi tous les génies, « le grand Shakespeare » !

6. Frédéric Picco, Lycée Camille Jullian à Bordeaux (France)
Les Contes cruels, ou quand le conte devient le lieu shakespearien

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam n’est pas passé à la postérité pour son œuvre théâtrale, qui comptait pourtant beaucoup pour lui. Son œuvre la plus connue, les Contes cruels, paraît quand leur auteur renonce à devenir dramaturge. Son goût pour le théâtre ne disparaît pas, car les Contes cruels ne cessent de croiser la perspective narrative et le théâtre. Le point d’intersection est le lieu shakespearien. Lieu au sens de topos prévisible chez un écrivain postérieur d’une génération à William Shakespeare et aussi de seuils narratifs où le nom de Shakespeare joue plusieurs rôles.

7. Ladan Niayesh, Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 (France)
Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Berlioz’s ‘Shakespeare’

‘Point de Shakespeare, rien; un ouvrage manqué’ were the words used by the French composer Hector Berlioz to express his disappointment after the Parisian premiere of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi in February 1833. Examining some of the charges he brought up against a work inspired, not by Shakespeare, but by the Italian novelle which were his sources, and using a medium, the opera, which did not even exist in Shakespeare’s time, I will try and recover some of the characteristics considered ‘Shakespearean’ by the French romantic standards of the early 1830s.

Seminar 10: Shakespeare and Slavic / East and Central European Countries

Schedule / Horaires

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-17h.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Michelle Assay, Universities of Paris-Sorbonne (France) and Sheffield (UK), and David Fanning, University of Manchester (UK)

Participants

  1. Michelle Assay, Université Paris-Sorbonne (France) and University of Sheffield (UK)
    Akimov and Shostakovich’s Hamlet: a Soviet ‘Shakesperiment’
  2. Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
    Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in Serbian Poetry
  3. Chris Berchild, Indiana State University (USA)
    Designing the Bohemian Coast: Twentieth Century Czech Appropriations of Shakespearean Space and Place
  4. Frank W. Brevik, Savannah State University (USA)
    East European Shakespeare Pre- and Post-1989: A Formalist Presentism?
  5. Jana Bžochová-Wild, Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava (Slovakia)
    Tracking (Foot)prints of Shakespeare in Slovak
  6. Anna Cetera, University of Warsaw (Poland)
    I see it in my motion, have it not in my tongue: The Slavic Sounds of Shakespeare
  7. Refik Kadija, “Luigi Gurkauqi” University of Shkodër (Albania)
    History of Shakespeare’s Translations into Albanian and the Stage Production of Shakespeare’s Plays in Albania
  8. Natalia Khomenko, York University (Canada)
    Seeing Double: Cultural Appropriation and Shakespearean Characters in the Soviet Novel
  9. Jiri Kopecky, Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic)
    William Shakespeare and Czech National Music
  10. Gabriela Łazarkiewicz, University of Warsaw (Poland)
    Shoah and The Tempest in Poland: The Productions of 1938 (dir. Leon Schiller) and of 2003 (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski)
  11. Ivona Mišterová, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Czech Republic)
    “Hurry, hurry and love, what thou shall not see twice”: The Shakespeare Festival at the National Theatre in Prague in 1916
  12. Madalina Nicolaescu, University of Bucharest (Romania)
    Shakespeare Studies in Socialist Romania
  13. Alexandra Portmann, University of Berne (Switzerland)
    Who is Fortinbras after the siege of Dubrovnik? Staging Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 1994
  14. Irina Prikhodko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (Russia)
    Russian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
  15. Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
    Appropriations of Shakespeare in 1838: Experimenting with the tragic and the pathetic in England and Hungary
  16. Andrzej Wicher, University of Łódź (Poland)
    Wawel meets Elsinore. The National and Universal Aspects of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Vision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
  17. Oana-Alis Zaharia, “Dimitrie Cantemir” University of Bucharest (Romania)
    “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” Nineteenth-Century Romanian Macbeth(s)

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Michelle Assay, Université Paris-Sorbonne (France) and University of Sheffield (UK)
Akimov and Shostakovich’s Hamlet: a Soviet ‘Shakesperiment’

When in 1932 Nikolay Akimov made his directing debut with Hamlet, nobody expected to witness one of the greatest scandals of Russian/Soviet theatrical history. With Ophelia portrayed as a drunken prostitute, and Hamlet by a short, fat comedian, it is hardly surprising that critical opinion should have been sharply divided, agreeing only that Dmitry Shostakovich’s equally irreverent music was the best thing about the production. This paper suggests an understanding of Akimov’s intentions more grounded in documentary evidence, not least in relation to Shostakovich’s music, which, paradoxically, may have been too skilful for the good of the production.

2. Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in Serbian Poetry

Narrative poem On Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, written by Serbian Romantic poet Laza Kostić, begins with an inter-textual reminiscence of the Book of Genesis, which flows into a dialogue with Shakespeare’s works. The beginning glorifies Shakespeare as masterpiece of God’s creation, and its human continuation. The initial third person narrative switches into a dialogical second person, and the poetic voice speaks directly to Shakespeare and his characters until the end of the poem. Invocations of characters bring condensed interpretations of various plays while the poet expresses a ‘presentist’ – avant la lettre – thinking about Shakespeare and Serbian culture in the nineteenth century.

3. Chris Berchild, Indiana State University (USA)
Designing the Bohemian Coast: Twentieth Century Czech Appropriations of Shakespearean Space and Place

Throughout the twentieth century and the history of the Czechoslovak state, many Czech scenographers and directors blazed new international trails by using the varied dramatic locations of Shakespeare in new and innovative ways. This paper will engage in a historical and semiotic analysis of specific Czechoslovak Shakespearean performances (specifically the scenographic work of designers František Tröster and Josef Svoboda) and their approaches to space and place that created a clear and public commentary on the political, social, and artistic status of Czechoslovakia. Their manipulation and appropriation of space and place to comment upon Czech society became a model for political theatre internationally.

4. Frank W. Brevik, Savannah State University (USA)
East European Shakespeare Pre- and Post-1989: A Formalist Presentism?

My paper argues that to subject Shakespeare to a “Russian Formalist” analysis is in itself a fruitful Presentist manoeuvre in 2014, bringing not only increased insights into the primary Shakespeare texts themselves but also provides a “prophetic” reflection-before-the-fact on the nature and future of literary criticism. I draw on Boris Tomashevsky’s essay “Thematics” from 1925 to show how limited a political-revolutionary (then) or Presentist-radical (now) “interest” is as an artistic and aesthetic metric. Nevertheless, this critical fusion between Russian Formalism and Presentism problematizes its topical origins and post-1989 paradigms, the Shakespearean focus being spying in Hamlet and The Tempest.

5. Jana Bžochová-Wild, Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava (Slovakia)
Tracking (Foot)prints of Shakespeare in Slovak

The paper examines the book editions of Shakespeare in Slovak as part of shifting literary, cultural and social contexts. The focus is on questions such as: what functions these books fulfil in society; what values they facilitate and create; how do they interpolate their literary or theatrical status; to what extent they support or suppress foreignness; what audience they address; which cultural and political factors acted on the Slovak rewriting of Shakespeare; what the different books are missing and what cultural deficits this particular absence indicates. Broadly speaking: what construction of Shakespeare do they generate in Slovak culture.

6. Anna Cetera, University of Warsaw (Poland)
I see it in my motion, have it not in my tongue: The Slavic Sounds of Shakespeare

My paper sets to explore the specificity of the Slavic translations of Shakespeare with some special emphasis on the prosodic features of Slavic languages. Preceded by a general discussion of the sounds and rhythms of Slavic languages, the paper presents the overview of the translations strategies (both imitative and compensating) used by Slavic translators to deal with the challenges of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter.

7. Refik Kadija, “Luigi Gurkauqi” University of Shkodër (Albania)
History of Shakespeare’s Translations into Albanian and the Stage Production of Shakespeare’s Plays in Albania

Part I. Translations: 1) The earliest translations by Fan Noli. 2) Communist censorship in the translation of twelve plays during 1950-1990. 3) Translation of Shakespeare’s works after 1990. Part II. Production in Albania and Kosovo. 1) Aleksander Moisiu played Hamlet, Romeo, Othello, etc., staged by Max Reinhardt. 2) Production of Shakespeare’s plays by National Theatre, etc. 3) Amateur production by English students, Tirana University, in 1964, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday; by the students of the Academy of Fine Arts, Tirana; and by A.U.K.’s Theater Class, Kosovo directed by Marijs Boulogne.

8. Natalia Khomenko, York University (Canada)
Seeing Double: Cultural Appropriation and Shakespearean Characters in the Soviet Novel

This paper argues that, in Yury Olesha’s The Three Fat Men (1927) and Olga Larionova’s The Leopard from the Peak of Kilimanjaro (1965), the uncanny doubling of the Shakespearean girl character reflects the fraught process of refashioning Shakespeare into a proto-Soviet playwright. The awareness that an ideologically correct version of Shakespeare can be created only through a policy of determined misprision, and that the reality of his texts lurks in the background, manifests in the girl character’s existence as both a dedicated supporter of the revolutionary cause and the artificial double, deeply alien to the new, communist world.

9. Jiri Kopecky, Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic)
William Shakespeare and Czech National Music

When Prague celebrated Schiller´s anniversary in 1859 both main nationalities – Czech and German – shared all festivities. But after October diploma 1860 such kind of cooperation was no more possible. One of the first demonstrations of strong Czech culture was Shakespearean celebration in 1864, which was organised only by Czechs as an symbolic return of „perdita ars bohemica“ into Czech lands. Bedřich Smetana as well as Antonín Dvořák were interested in Shakespeare´s works. Around 1900, two operas based on Shakespeare´s plays were composed: The Tempest (Zdeněk Fibich) and Jessika (J. B. Foerster).

10. Gabriela Łazarkiewicz, University of Warsaw (Poland)
Shoah and The Tempest in Poland: The Productions of 1938 (dir. Leon Schiller) and of 2003 (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski)

Notwithstanding the customary association of The Tempest with the postcolonial discourse, there are two significant Polish productions of the play which link it with the history of Shoah. First, in 1938, a Jewish theatrical ensemble transformed the play into a poignant parable about the Jewish people (represented by Prospero’s intellectual heritage) tormented by Nazism (prefigured by the brutal force of Caliban). Secondly, in 2003, Krzysztof Warlikowski inscribed his production of The Tempest into the context of the painful national debate about Polish-Jewish relations during and shortly afterwards of the Second World War. Both productions appear crucial for the Polish reading of The Tempest.

11. Ivona Mišterová, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Czech Republic)
“Hurry, hurry and love, what thou shall not see twice”: The Shakespeare Festival at the National Theatre in Prague in 1916

This paper examines how the Shakespeare play cycle was staged at the National Theatre in Prague in 1916 in terms of the critical reception of particular productions; e.g. The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth, in theatre reviews published in Czech periodicals. I will argue that, in a time of distress, Shakespearean drama served as an effective communication channel by offering spiritual consolation, courage, and a new perspective on the future.

12. Madalina Nicolaescu, University of Bucharest (Romania)
Shakespeare Studies in Socialist Romania

This paper will consider the ideologies and constraints governing Shakespeare studies in the socialist period, focusing on the period of the late sixties and early seventies, generally considered to be one of detente. Against this political and cultural background the paper will investigate the negotiation east-west, the penetration of “Western” approaches as opposed to those promoted by socialist realism, while at the same time looking into the reasons why the major site of Shakespeare studies was not the universities but the theatre and its journals.

13. Alexandra Portmann, University of Berne (Switzerland)
Who is Fortinbras after the siege of Dubrovnik? Staging Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 1994

Since the 1950s Shakespeare’s Hamlet was regularly performed at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. With this vivid staging tradition in mind, the paper focuses on two versions of Hamlet, namely the classical performance directed by Joško Juvančić, and the performance of Luko Paljetak’s meta-theatrical adaptation “Poslje Hamleta”. Both performances premiered in 1994, only two years after the siege of Dubrovnik. Through a comparative perspective, this paper examines the function of Fortinbras in these two performances and raises the question how Hamlet becomes a mirror of the changing political and cultural circumstances.

14. Irina Prikhodko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (Russia)
Russian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Despite their enormous popularity and numerous translations and editions in Russia during the last 70 years, Shakespeare’s Sonnets still remain terra incognita for Russian readers not acquainted with Shakespeare’s famous series of poems in the original. Multiple translations which appeared in this period experience a strong influence of Samuel Marshak who published his translation of the whole book of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1947. Highly appreciated by the literary critics and readers, his translation was considered an exemplary one. But actually it was far from Shakespeare’s own poetics. In my paper I will compare samples of various Russian translations to Shakespeare’s own text.

15. Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
Appropriations of Shakespeare in 1838: Experimenting with the tragic and the pathetic in England and Hungary

Coincidentally in 1838, Macready in England and Egressy in Hungary chose to act the “original” Shakespeare in their impersonations of Lear. Macready insisted on acting the Shakespearean words, dismissing the melodramatic and happily ending version by Nahum Tate that held the stage for a hundred and fifty years, thus producing the first full restoration of King Lear in London. Egressy insisted on acting the Shakespearean words, dismissing all Hungarian play-texts translated from German which held the stage for decades, thus producing the first Lear translated from English in Pest-Buda. The paper explores their inventive impersonations and their lasting impacts.

16. Andrzej Wicher, University of Łódź (Poland)
Wawel meets Elsinore. The National and Universal Aspects of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Vision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The paper is to show the possibilities, and limits of Wyspiański’s national thinking through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Very important here is the Ghost, who can be interpreted as the spirit of history, the ghost of a father, the spirit of the fatherland, the voice of the ancestors, the Holy Ghost, and the Evil Spirit. Hamlet served the Polish poet as itself a ghost standing for “the truth of other worlds” that can, however, be made relevant to the world he cared the most about, the city of Cracow conceived of as Poland’s spiritual, that is ‘ghostly’, and only virtual, capital.

17. Oana-Alis Zaharia, “Dimitrie Cantemir” University of Bucharest (Romania)
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” Nineteenth-Century Romanian Macbeth(s)

The paper sets out to examine the first Romanian translations of Macbeth by St.Bîgescu (1850) and P.P.Carp (1864, 1886) from a cultural perspective. The first part offers a comprehensive overview of the cultural and historical context that saw the emergence and development of the prolific 19th century translation activity. The second part aims to reveal the manner in which the Shakespearean play is appropriated by means of translation in order to make it conform to different cultural and political agendas.

Seminar 9: Legal Perspectives on Shakespearean Theatre

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Daniela Carpi and J. Gaakeer (Italy-Netherlands)

Participants

  1. Helen Vella Bonavita, Edith Cowan University (Australia)
    Stand up for Bastards: Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Shakespeare’s plays
  2. Francois Ost, Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles (Belgium)
    Weak kings and perverted symbolism. How Shakespeare treats the doctrine of the King’s two bodies
  3. Carolyn Sale, University of Alberta (Canada)
    Shakespeare’s Common Law: Hamlet and Conscience
  4. Gary Watt, University of Warwick (UK)
    No Play Without Will
  5. Andrew Majeske, University of California Davis (USA)
    Dying declarations, feigned deaths, and dramatic rebirths in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Helen Vella Bonavita, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia (Australia)
Stand up for Bastards: Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Shakespeare’s plays

From King John to King Lear, legitimacy and its counterpart illegitimacy is an abiding concern in Shakespeare’s plays. The notion of ‘legitimacy’ and its multiple applications – to inheritance, to power, to identity – dominate much of sixteenth and early seventeenth century drama, but are particularly evident in Shakespeare’s history plays. From the clear legalistic debate over legitimacy and inheritance that is the opening of King John, to the use of illegitimacy as political metaphor in Richard II, illegitimacy is a critical thematic concept frequently manifested onstage in the figure of the Bastard.

2. Francois Ost, Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles (Belgium)
Weak kings and perverted symbolism. How Shakespeare treats the doctrine of the King’s two bodies

The doctrine of the two bodies, arising from the political theology of the Middle Ages, plays an essential role through the western political philosophy. The theme runs through many of Shakespeare’s plays . But Shakespeare rarely uses the doctrine in order to legitimise power. What interests him is the theme of the weak king (where there is tension between the two bodies) and the fact that a king cannot with impunity manipulate the symbolic power which underlies this doctrine.

3. Carolyn Sale, University of Alberta (Canada)
Shakespeare’s Common Law: Hamlet and Conscience

My paper focuses on the proposition that the Shakespearean drama, like the work of the earlier sixteenth-century writer Christopher St. German, cultivates “conscience” in regard to law, not as a matter of practice within any formal court, or emanating from any single figure, but rather as an entity that is general, inclusive, and collective. In the time and space of performance Shakespeare’s writing for the stage contributed to the shaping of a law that is truly “common” by helping to make a conscience that is inherently communal. The test case for my proposition will be Hamlet; the theoretical underpinnings, post-Marxist.

4. Gary Watt, University of Warwick (UK)
No Play Without Will

The death of feudalism in England has been long and drawn out — lingering to this day — but it suffered a mortal wound on 20 July 1540 when the Wills Act (32 Hen VIII c.1) came into force. It permitted feudal tenants to devise 2/3 of their land by will at law. Shakespeare was born at the dawn of this new age of will, and his first plays were virtually contemporaneous with the publication of the first text to offer a comprehensive treatment of testamentary law in the English language. In this paper I will demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare uses the English legal language of testamentary will to express the drama of conflict between dispensation (royal, paternal etc) and individual desire.

5. Andrew Majeske, University of California Davis (USA)
Dying declarations, feigned deaths, and dramatic rebirths in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale

In this paper I will examine dying declarations, feigned deaths, and dramatic rebirths as they relate to issues of female chastity in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. I will contrast these Shakespearean works with the Classical era drama Hippolytus by Euripides, and Machiavelli’s masterful comic refashioning of the ancient Lucretia myth in his play Mandragola. One purpose for this examination is to shed light on the shaky foundations of the evidentiary advantage given to certain dying declarations in Anglo-American law, at least to the extent this advantage is based (tacitly) upon considerations relating to the Christian afterlife.

Seminar 8: La fabrique du personnage shakespearien

Schedule / Horaire

Vendredi 25 avril 2014, 16h-18h.

Salle: V106B.

Leader / Organisatrices

Delphine Lemonnier-Texier, Université Rennes 2, Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine, Université de Caen, and Estelle Rivier, U. du Maine (France)

Participants

  1. Miguel Borras, fondateur du Théâtre du Bout du Monde (France)
  2. Adel Hakim, directeur du Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry (France)
  3. Thomas Jolly, directeur artistique de La Piccola Familia (France)
  4. Abigail Rokison, Université de Birmingham (Royaume-Uni)

Abstracts / Résumés

Support de tous les fantasmes de création lors du passage au plateau, le personnage shakespearien est aussi la base du rêve de l’artiste, acteur ou metteur en scène puis du spectateur. La matérialité du rôle à l’époque élisabéthaine – rouleau de parchemin sur lequel figuraient les seules répliques prises en charge par le personnage – est là pour rappeler à la fois la primauté du jeu théâtral dans l’approche du texte shakespearien et la spécificité du rôle comme part. à l’écoute des artistes et de leurs méthodes et approches, les questions de rôle, de distribution, de jeu et de direction d’acteurs seront abordées dans un questionnement fondé sur l’étude et l’analyse de la fabrique du spectacle.

1. Miguel Borras, fondateur du Théâtre du Bout du Monde (France)

Influencé par le Théâtre de l’Opprimé d’Augusto Boal, Miguel Borras a fondé le Théâtre du Bout du Monde en 1990, compagnie composée d’acteurs venus d’horizons variés dont le but est de valoriser les amateurs participant à leurs projets. En 2010, il a monté un Songe d’une nuit de mai (traduction de Pascal Collin) élaboré à partir des possibilités de chacun rassemblant des SDF membres d’un atelier EMMAÜS (les artisans), des pensionnaires du Centre d’Accueil et de Soin de Nanterre (les jeunes Athéniens) et de la Maison de Retraite attenante (Thésée), des enfants d’écoles primaires limitrophes (les fées, les décors).

2. Adel Hakim, directeur du Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry (France)

Acteur, metteur en scène, dramaturge, il dirige actuellement le Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry. Dans ses travaux qu’il a également enseignés à l’École du Théâtre national de Strasbourg, ou à l’ENSATT entre autres, il prête une attention particulière aux grands textes pour leur résonance contemporaine et, d’un point de vue scénographique, au mouvement des corps dans l’espace. En tant que comédien, il a notamment joué dans Le Songe d’une nuit d’été et Les Deux Gentilshommes de Vérone. En tant que metteur en scène, il a présenté Mesure pour Mesure au Château de Grignan puis au Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry, en 2007.

3. Thomas Jolly, directeur artistique de La Piccola Familia (France)

Acteur, metteur en scène, il est directeur artistique de La Piccola Familia. Il a reçu en 2009 le prix du public de l’Odéon pour sa mise en scène de Toâ de Sacha Guitry. Dès 2010, il échafaude la mise en scène de l’intégralité de la trilogie Henry VI de William Shakespeare. Ces trois pièces ont été regroupées en deux cycles comptant chacun deux épisodes. Présentés lors du festival Mettre en scène 2012 (TNB, Rennes), les deux premiers épisodes de ce récit épique ont offert au public une expérience théâtrale rare, jubilatoire, portée par une vingtaine d’acteurs. Jouant habilement des ressorts des feuilletons, basculant avec aisance d’un registre à l’autre, Thomas Jolly poursuit cette traversée : l’épisode 3 a été créé au Festival Mettre en scène 2013 (TNB, Rennes). L’épisode 4 verra le jour au Festival d’Avignon 2014.

4. Abigail Rokison, Université de Birmingham (Royaume-Uni)

Jeune actrice devenue célèbre dans le rôle de Primrose Larkin dans le feuilleton télévisé The Darling Buds of May, Abigail Rokison est à présent universitaire et professeur de pratique théâtrale à l’Institut Shakespeare de l’Université de Birmingham. Dans son ouvrage, Shakespearean Verse Speaking. Text and Theatre Practice (Cambridge, 2009) elle expose sa méthode de construction du personnage shakespearien. C’est à partir des fluctuations sonores et rythmiques que les répliques prennent tout leur sens. Elle prend grand soin d’analyser, puis de mettre (et de faire mettre) en espace, les variations du texte dramatique, signalant l’importance du style dans la perception de chaque rôle.

Seminar 7: ‘In this distracted globe’?: Cognitive Shakespeare

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Anja Müller-Wood and Sibylle Baumbach, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany)

Participants

  1. Elisa Bertinato, Tor Vergata University, Rome (Italy)
    Interpreting space, movement and power in Measure for Measure
  2. Michael Booth, Brandeis University/Harvard University (USA)
    Shakespeare, Stories and Conceptual Blending
  3. Joachim Frenk, Universität des Saarlandes (Germany)
    Falstaff’s Self-Serving Rhetoric
  4. N.R. Helms, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (USA)
    Collaborative Cognition: Communicating with Madness in The Two Noble Kinsmen
  5. Lalita Pandit Hogan, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (USA)
    “… breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack”: Cognitive Unconscious, Rasa, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
  6. Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut (USA)
    My Othello Problem: Cognition and Aesthetic Response
  7. Raphael Lyne, University of Cambridge (UK)
    Shakespeare and Social Cognition
  8. Felix Sprang, Universität Hamburg (Germany)
    “Where think’st thou he is now?” The Extension of Rhetoric into Cognition in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Elisa Bertinato, Tor Vergata University, Rome (Italy)
Interpreting space, movement and power in Measure for Measure

This paper draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory to interpret place and movement of characters in Shakespeare’s problem play Measure for Measure, arguing that although some locations in the play are not well specified, those which are become meaningful at different levels of interpretation. Using CMT and CBT I will analyse how places and movements are conceptualized in individual speeches and in dialogues, what feelings combine with specific movements or immobility states and how these are conveyed linguistically and to which extent the web of movements within the play is relevant to the play’s representation of power.

2. Michael Booth, Brandeis University/Harvard University (USA)
Shakespeare, Stories and Conceptual Blending

This paper considers Shakespeare’s economies of design and expression and explores the relationship, in his storytelling, between coherence and complexity. Complex stories like his please us by weaving together events into one kind of system (logical, causal), weaving different perspectives into another kind of system (intersubjective), and weaving the two kinds of system neatly into one. The consummate storyteller makes these elements dovetail, and the playwright makes an audience experience a story’s causal logic and interpersonal emotional entailments in real time, infusing an hour or two with the steadily growing aesthetic richness of a single, coherent cognitive experience.

3. Joachim Frenk, Universität des Saarlandes (Germany)
Falstaff’s Self-Serving Rhetoric

Sir John Falstaff seems well-nigh indestructible before his offstage death reported by the Hostess in Henry V. Resembling folklore figures like the king of carnival and the Vice, Falstaff is interested in nothing but his own well-being, i.e., the preservation of his copious self. This is also evident in the rhetoric he uses, which documents his key strategies of survival: In the histories, from his first awakening on stage until his last address of the Lord Chief Justice, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor from his first boisterous appearance to his inclusion in the final tableau of bourgeois harmony.

4. N.R. Helms, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (USA)
Collaborative Cognition: Communicating with Madness in The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare and Fletcher’s portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter reveals the frustration of communication between the mad and the sane, yet at the same time it offers an alternative: theatrical play, crediting another’s beliefs in order to begin a conversation. This theatrical play is a merger of inference and imagination, for it requires both a theory of how the mad person thinks—knowledge of the Jailer’s Daughter’s delusions—and the willingness to imaginatively inhabit an off-center, unsettled perspective. Thus, Two Noble Kinsmen suggests the usefulness of cooperation—or collaboration, if you will—between different methods for understanding the minds of others.

5. Lalita Pandit Hogan, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (USA)
“… breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack”: Cognitive Unconscious, Rasa, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Octavius Caesar’s observation on Antony’s death is a self-referential comment. Eliciting no great investment in the fates of the protagonists, the play is neither a romantic nor a heroic tragedy; its design is anchored solely in emotions ancillary to romantic passion and heroic ambition and organized around junctures, deviations and deferrals. I will explore how schema deviance (a concept from Cognitive Poetics) works in the play, draw on Sanskrit Poetics for a theory of junctures, or plot sandhis (referring to moments of reflection and doubt) to reexamine its epistemic logos, and ultimately tie it to LeDoux’s notion of cognitive unconscious.

6. Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut (USA)
My Othello Problem: Cognition and Aesthetic Response

Bardolatry has been a topic of analysis and debate among Shakespeare scholars for many years. However, no one seems to have systematically considered the cognitive and affective consequences of Shakespeare’s reputation for individual aesthetic response. In this essay, I consider a specific case of this “bardolatry effect”, my own (long-denied) problem with the ending of Othello. The purpose of the analysis is two-fold. First, it aims to explore the cognitive and emotional effects of social norms on individual aesthetic response. Second, it considers the consequences of these effects for our broader, social understanding and appreciation of literary texts.

7. Raphael Lyne, University of Cambridge (UK)
Shakespeare and Social Cognition

One of the key aspects of human social cognition is the ability to see through other eyes (literally and metaphorically). This ability is frequently at issue in Shakespeare’s plays, where we are confronted with many strange fictional minds, but also rely on them to tell us what the world looks like. I will argue that we should see certain scenes as experiments in social cognition that rely on an embedded theory of how our minds work together; and I will base this partly in comparison with the very different experiments and theories conducted by other dramatists (Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher).

8. Felix Sprang, Universität Hamburg (Germany)
“Where think’st thou he is now?” The Extension of Rhetoric into Cognition in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra

When we think of cognition in Shakespeare we often think of bringing neuroscience to the plays (cf. Cook, 2011). It is equally fascinating to think of cognition in Shakespeare as an extension of classical rhetoric. Following Helen Vendler’s observation (1997: 168) that Shakespeare “respects the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)”, I will discuss how Antony and Cleopatra engages with mnemonic techniques, methods of loci, rhetorical inventio and elocutio. Antony’s struggle to break his “strong Egyptian fetters” (1.2.105) can help us rethink the relevance of early modern rhetoric, in particular rhetorical mind games, for cognitive processes.

Seminar 6: Global Shakespeare as Methodology

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), Elizabeth Pentland, York University (Canada), and Alexa Huang, George Washington University (USA)

Participants

Discussant: David Schalkwyk, Global Shakespeare Centre, Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick (UK)

Participants in alphabetical order:

  1. Anston Bosman, Amherst College (USA)
    Aside Effects
  2. Mariacristina Cavecchi, University of Milan (Italy)
    Tagging the Bard. Shakespeare and Graffiti
  3. Tom Cheesman, Swansea University (UK)
    The ”Global” Shakespeare Translation Space
  4. Brian Culver, New York University (USA)
    “[B]anish plump Jack, and banish all the world”: Global Studies and Shakespeare’s History Plays
  5. Eric Johnson, Folger Shakespeare Library (USA)
    BardMetrics: Measuring the Global Shakespeare Marketplace
  6. Yvette Khoury, Independent Scholar (UK)
    The ‘Customised’ Model of Aterlife Draws On
  7. Aneta Mancewicz, University of Bedfordshire (UK)
    Global and Local Dialectics in Jan Klata’s Titus Andronicus (Wroclaw & Dresden 2012)
  8. Martin Orkin, University of Haifa (Israel)
    Troilus and Cressida: Shakespeare, the National Theatre and the RSC as ‘global’?
  9. Ronan Paterson, Teesside University (UK)
    “Cleave not to their mould”: Transformations of Macbeth
  10. Elizabeth Pentland, York University (Canada)
    Hujjat: Figuring the Global and the Local in Student Appropriations of Shakespeare
  11. Aleksandra (Ola) Sakowska, King’s College London (UK)
    ‘Liquid Shakespeare’: Theorising global and local performance from a sociological perspective
  12. Mariangela Tempera, University of Ferrara (Italy)
    Global Shakespeare in Tatters: Analyzing Fragments from His Works in World Cinema
  13. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
    Methods behind Designing Global Shakespeare Courses

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Anston Bosman, Amherst College (USA)
Aside Effects

The multiple channels of global Shakespeare may be separated into a “main text” and “side texts.” From sign language interpreting to intertitles and subtitles to multimedia glosses, we encounter Shakespeare’s work in ways that deepen comprehension but threaten distraction. Might the early modern aside—an amalgam of speech and movement—help us to grasp today’s “side texts”? Can divided attention on the sixteenth-century stage remain a model for twenty-first century reading and spectatorship? Should we map the verbal onto the national and the visual onto the transnational? Or have translation and remediation forced a change in those cognitive processes?

2. Mariacristina Cavecchi, University of Milan (Italy)
Tagging the Bard. Shakespeare and Graffiti

My paper explores how and why “Shakespeare graffiti” has become an important cultural phenomenon and fathoms a possible new methodology to approach the study of Shakespeare. Many traces of Shakespeare have been disseminated in the graffiti world and, conversely, the grammar and language of graffiti have often been used by theatre, cinema and visual art to update Shakespeare. It is a field of investigation which can give meaningful contributions to Shakespeare studies. 
Indeed graffiti quoting Shakespeare’s lines have been proliferating all over the world and they seem to respond to the need for a transnational look while sustaining traditional values.

3. Tom Cheesman, Swansea University (UK)
The ”Global” Shakespeare Translation Space

“Shakespeare” is “global” like Coca Cola, but translation always occupies confined spaces joining language-specific communities of practice. So “global Shakespeare as methodology” suggests a utopian, cosmopolitan effort to institute a borderless space for future intellectual and creative endeavours. The plethora of versions of Shakespeare’s works presents an opportunity to forge quasi-global digital spaces where his worldwide traces can be represented and explored in new ways: in metadata, text data, and audiovisual media. Experiments are running for example at www.delightedbeauty.org and www.delightedbeauty.org/vvv — aiming to seed a global cultural space with Shakespeare.

4. Brian Culver, New York University (USA)
“[B]anish plump Jack, and banish all the world”: Global Studies and Shakespeare’s History Plays

1 Henry IV’s representations of nationhood and political sovereignty, economic metaphors of currency and counterfeiting, and composition during the financial crisis of the late 1590s all reflect early modern England’s emerging global economy. This global context, moreover, informs one of the play’s most recurrent critical issues, the relationship between national identity and individual subjectivity. Just as Falstaff in the famous tavern-scene makes of his round belly a synecdoche of the world’s global circumference, Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV makes English history part of the history of globalization.

5. Eric Johnson, Folger Shakespeare Library (USA)
BardMetrics: Measuring the Global Shakespeare Marketplace

Quantitative analysis of literature tends to look inward, examining the texts themselves. The project proposes to look outward, enabling researchers to examine how readers, viewers, and scholars experience texts and other media surrounding them. BardMetrics is assembling data from Shakespeare-related institutions about their web site usage, book sales, ticket sales, conference attendance, and other metrics. These statistics show which works are searched and read the most; how scholars conduct research online; which countries are most interested in Shakespeare, and other trends. This paper will explain how this data-driven approach can benefit the field.

6. Yvette Khoury, Independent Scholar (UK)
The ‘Customised’ Model of Aterlife Draws On

Proclus’ Elements of Theology, which gives us the tools that explain the transformation of written works that seem to transcend the life of the author, the text or the period in which they existed. By utilising certain Proclusean ‘Propositions’ we assess the changes to written works and their transformations into new environments. The ‘customised’ model, I argue, allows us to analyse how Shakespeare’s works become infused with foreign cultural elements (alien to Shakespeare): elements such as Chinese operatic traditions, Arabic storytelling or Brechtian techniques, help make up new ‘customised’ drama in those cultures.

7. Aneta Mancewicz, University of Bedfordshire (UK)
Global and Local Dialectics in Jan Klata’s Titus Andronicus (Wroclaw & Dresden 2012)

In facilitating collaboration between companies across countries, globalization encourages comparison of national identities and approaches to Shakespeare. The global festival circuit promises intercultural dialogue, yet it also subtly imposes preconceived categories of nation and local staging style on its audiences. Jan Klata’s Titus Andronicus (Teatr Polski, Wroclaw and Staatschauspiel Dresden, 2012) self-consciously takes up this challenge. The performance addresses local and global dialectics of Shakespearean performance through an ironic exploitation of linguistic, cultural, and historical tensions in the portrayal of Poles as Goths and Germans as Romans.

8. Martin Orkin, University of Haifa (Israel)
Troilus and Cressida: Shakespeare, the National Theatre and the RSC as ‘global’?

How useful is the binary of the global and the local as part of a putative methodology for study of a global Shakespeare? Using, where appropriate, Troilus and Cressida, I examine Shakespeare’s (local) presentation of non-English (global) places within his plays. Then I consider application of this binary, after post-colonialism. The (now global) text has sometimes been used as emancipatory or ethical reference point within locations considered reactionary. How then may we rethink ongoing convergences of such or other perceived concerns within the global Shakespeare text and receptions, in particular locations? What limits may there be to the global-local paradigm?

9. Ronan Paterson, Teesside University (UK)
“Cleave not to their mould”: Transformations of Macbeth

Shakespeare’s plays are seen all over the globe, but one seems to assimilate more readily than most. Macbeth has been filmed more often than any other tragedy by Shakespeare, in settings from Madagascar to Melbourne to Mumbai, from medieval Japan to a modern day burger joint. The success of some of these films has in turn spawned Anglophone theatre productions which deliberately employ such settings and contexts. Why do Western directors believe that audiences find it easier to relate to the play set in modern day Liberia or feudal Japan than medieval Scotland?

10. Elizabeth Pentland, York University (Canada)
Hujjat: Figuring the Global and the Local in Student Appropriations of Shakespeare

This paper explores the use of creative writing or “applied Shakespeare” assignments as a methodology for teaching “global Shakespeare” in the undergraduate classroom. Hujjat, a student reimagining of Hamlet that translates the action to a remote, tribal region of Pakistan, draws upon a wide range of cinematic and textual sources encountered as part of a seminar on contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare. This remarkable project serves as my principal example as I explore the politics and aesthetics of student Shakespeare adaptations that seek to address issues of transnational significance through the lens of the local and the particular.

11. Aleksandra (Ola) Sakowska, King’s College London (UK)
‘Liquid Shakespeare’: Theorising global and local performance from a sociological perspective

In the paper I focus on my concept of ‘Liquid Shakespeare’ which came out of my research, placed at the intersection of Shakespearean studies, performance studies and sociological studies, at the historical time described by Anglo-Polish social thinker Zygmunt Bauman as ‘liquid modernity’. While the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre project in Poland will serve as a major example of how Shakespeare’s legacy is exploited in the unavoidable politics of the local and the global, I believe that this approach can be useful when discussing global Shakespearean performance in general, particularly its economic connotations, applicable to Shakespeare when considered a global brand.

12. Mariangela Tempera, University of Ferrara (Italy)
Global Shakespeare in Tatters: Analyzing Fragments from His Works in World Cinema

The paper makes a case for the relevance of the analysis of Shakespearean fragments on film and explores some of the methodological problems that researchers face when: a) building and accessing databases of references in non-English speaking countries; b) dealing with the pitfalls created by subtitles or multiple audio versions of a film; c) relying on local knowledge to distinguish between opportunistic and meaningful uses of Shakespearean references; d) exploring aspects of internal and external audience response to the fragments.

13. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
Methods behind Designing Global Shakespeare Courses

This paper undertakes a systematic examination of the process of constructing and teaching a Global Shakespeare course. I first analyze the issues of what place the early modern play-texts will have on the syllabus, which materials will count as “global”, and how to incorporate languages other than English into the course. I then use examples of real courses to discuss how relevant texts and audio-visual material can be assembled into syllabi. I look at course design based on chronology, geography, genre, or political and cultural themes, proposing that different models will suit the interests and needs of different student populations.

Seminar 5: Shakespeare and the Visual Arts

Schedule / Horaire

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-18h.

Room: ENS, salle des Actes.

Leader / Organisateur

Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)

Participants

  1. Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University (USA)
    Ekphrastic Criticism in Practice: Making the (Reader) “See” Shakespeare-in-Performance
  2. Elizabeth Howie and Dr. Tripthi Pillai, Coastal Carolina University (USA)
    “So Full of Shapes is Fancy”: Photogenic Time and Space in Twelfth Night
  3. José Manuel González, University of Alicante (Spain)
    Painting and Representing Gender in the Drama of Early Modern England and Spain
  4. Michele De Benedictis, University of Cassino (Italy)
    The substantial pageant of majestic vision: Shakespeare, Stuart Masques, and the Theatrical Paragone of Arts
  5. Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia (USA)
    Deceiving Art in Venus and Adonis
  6. Peter Latka, University of Toronto (Canada)
    “All Adonises must die”: Shakespeare, Titian, and Elizabethan Visual Culture
  7. Armelle Sabatier, University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France)
    Roses and Blood: Depicting and Visualising Red in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece
  8. Laura Beattie, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany)
    “I understand her signs”: Ekphrasis and the Male Gaze in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus
  9. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
    “Your painted counterfeit”: Drawing Portraits and Writing Sonnets
  10. Keir Elam, University of Bologna (Italy)
    “Wanton pictures”: The Baffling of Christopher Sly and the Visual-Verbal Intercourse of Early Modern Erotic Art
  11. François-Xavier Gleyzon, University of Central Florida (USA)
    Opening the Sacred Body: Shakespeare and Uccello
  12. Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
    Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Two Scenes of Drowning: Ophelia and Clarence’s Dream
  13. Julia Cleave, Member of the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy (UK)
    “Well-painted passion”: Shakespeare and the Bassano Fresco
  14. Guillaume Mauger, Paris IV-Sorbonne (France)
    “I have drawn her picture with my voice”: Desiring Gaze and Perspective Tricks in Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Portraits
  15. Hanna Scolnicov, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)
    Both Goddess and Woman: Cleopatra and Venus
  16. Olivia Coulomb, Aix-Marseille Université (France)
    Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra: between Stasis and Movement
  17. Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)
    “Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow”: Visual Representation and Ekphrastic Tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece
  18. Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
    “Those foundations which I build upon”: Construction and Misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale
  19. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Roma Tre University (Italy)
    Maternity and the Visual Arts in Shakespeare’s Romances
  20. Giuseppe Leone, Università di Palermo (Italy)
    “Hath Death lain with thy wife”: Eroticized Death Iconography in Shakespeare

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University (USA)
Ekphrastic Criticism in Practice: Making the (Reader) “See” Shakespeare-in-Performance

The act of reading and re-viewing stage performance, of re-presenting or re-visualizing – alas, never replicating – a mise-en-scène, can perhaps be the more fruitfully considered if we are permitted to invoke an ancient rhetorical process, that of ekphrasis and its defining quality of enargeia (or “vividness”). Defined in the Progymnasmata as “a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes”, a way of “making the listener ‘see’ the subject in their mind’s eye”, it is an approach, finally, that makes listeners into “spectators”—with the additional effect of producing an emotional impact, involving them imaginatively and affectively in the event.

2. Elizabeth Howie and Dr. Tripthi Pillai, Coastal Carolina University (USA)
“So Full of Shapes is Fancy”: Photogenic Time and Space in Twelfth Night

Our paper explores the photographical logics of Twelfth Night through a reading informed by the theories of Barthes and Deleuze. We contrast Malvolio’s poetics of photogenic framing to Feste’s nomadicism, which lacerates the frame, calling attention to the event and moment of the punctum. Through photographical logics we examine characters’ mediation of vision in tropes of presence and absence, the extraction of moments from time, indexicality, light, madness, duplicity/duplication/multiplication, posing, and framing. Our strategically ahistorical methodology engages innovatively with the paradoxical movements and temporalities of empowerment and disempowerment that vehiculate the pleasures and agonies of staging appearance in the play.

3. José Manuel González, University of Alicante (Spain)
Painting and Representing Gender in the Drama of Early Modern England and Spain

Dramatists and painters achieved notoriety and artistic excellence in early modern England and Spain. The paper examines the ways in which dramatists appropriated painting to represent gender in the drama of early modern England and Spain as theatre was regarded as a visual art. By appropriating painting, dramatists enriched their dramatic and theatrical possibilities and heightened the visual impact of the performance. It also explores the aesthetic ideas on painting and gender representations as well as the interaction between painting, gender, and dramatic art in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and The Winter’s Tale and Calderón’s The Painter of His Dishonour that reflect the ambivalence and conflictive relationships of visual images and textual representations in Shakespeare and his Spanish contemporaries.

4. Michele De Benedictis, University of Cassino (Italy)
The substantial pageant of majestic vision: Shakespeare, Stuart Masques, and the Theatrical Paragone of Arts

Aware of the classical paragone of arts, royal masques at Whitehall privileged the primacy of visual artistry over poetical contents by the sophistication of sceneries and perspective. This paper focuses on the influence of masque aesthetics on current drama, as voiced in the rival claims by the Poet and the Painter in Timon of Athens and re-echoed by the chief creators of Stuart spectacles: the inventor of dramatic verses, Ben Jonson, and the stage designer Inigo Jones. Shakespeare’s inset masques-within-a-play contributed to this debate, reconsidering the visual display of court entertainments either as ephemeral shows or unique works of art.

5. Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia (USA)
Deceiving Art in Venus and Adonis

In this paper, I look at Shakespeare’s attention to the visual in Venus and Adonis. My focus is chiefly on two moments in the poem in which Shakespeare explicitly mentions visual art. The first is his reference to a painting of a horse in a scene in which he is discussing two horses in the poem; the second is a comparison between Venus’s sexual frustration and the famous story of the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Finally, I look at the importance of the act of seeing in the poem’s conclusion.

6. Peter Latka, University of Toronto (Canada)
“All Adonises must die”: Shakespeare, Titian, and Elizabethan Visual Culture

Shakespeare structures Venus and Adonis around two prominent iconographical episodes: “The Courtship of Venus and Adonis” and “The Departure Scene”. While Titian’s Venus and Adonis (1593), in which Adonis appears to be breaking away from Venus to pursue the hunt is infused with considerably more gravitas than Shakespeare’s depiction of a comic struggle, the similarities between Titian and Shakespeare’s innovations call attention to themselves. This paper investigates the relationship between these two representations of the “Departure Scene”, while maintaining an awareness of Coleridge’s observation that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is designed as a series of sharply etched scenes.

7. Armelle Sabatier, University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France)
Roses and Blood: Depicting and Visualising Red in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece

While many critics have studied the rhetoric of colours in Venus and Adonis, the subtle codification of colours in The Rape of Lucrece seems to have drawn little attention. This paper aims at exploring the meaning and aesthetic value of red in its association with white and black in this poem. By taking into account the rhetoric of colours in poetry and the varied literary conceits, this study will highlight parallels with Elizabethan visual arts. Likewise, Lucrece’s criticism of the painter’s art conceals the ongoing rivalry between the painter and the poet to depict and visualise colours in The Rape of Lucrece.

8. Laura Beattie, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany)
“I understand her signs”: Ekphrasis and the Male Gaze in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus

Ekphrasis is commonly described as ‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan). However, Elsner suggests the true subject of ekphrasis is not ‘the verbal depiction of a visual object, but rather the verbal enactment of the gaze that tries to relate with and penetrate the object’ and this definition becomes highly significant in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus. By considering these texts in this way, we find that rather than merely indulging in the paragone, Shakespeare shows ekphrastic representation as a means of power with which violence, the male gaze and suffering are inextricably linked.

9. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
“Your painted counterfeit”: Drawing Portraits and Writing Sonnets

My paper will analyze the way in which Shakespeare elaborates the traditional association between painting and poetry, with a particular attention to the ambiguous affinity, both theoretical and practical, between the art of drawing portraits, and especially miniatures, and that of verbal praising, and specifically of writing sonnets. I will show how the triumph of the sonnet sequences coincides with that of portraits and miniatures, and consequently demonstrate how the idea of sonnet writing as portraying, and particularly limning, is present in many Canzonieri of the period. I will then discuss Shakespeare’s complex reflection on this rhetorical and conceptual paragone.

10. Keir Elam, University of Bologna (Italy)
“Wanton pictures”: The Baffling of Christopher Sly and the Visual-Verbal Intercourse of Early Modern Erotic Art

This paper investigates the Lord’s cryptic order, in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, to “hang around” his chamber with his “wanton pictures”, in order to baffle Christopher Sly. The promised erotic pictures have a complex intertextual and interartistic verbal-visual history, ranging from Gascoigne’s adaptation of Ariosto’s Supposes to Marcantonio Raimondi’s lost engravings of Giulio Romano’s “wanton” drawings and Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi. The Induction’s brief ekphrases of the pictures, however, do not describe pornographic representations of sexual athleticism, à la Raimondi, but rather episodes of Ovidian eroticism, not unlike Romano’s frescoes decorating the Palazzo Te in Mantua.

11. François-Xavier Gleyzon, University of Central Florida (USA)
Opening the Sacred Body: Shakespeare and Uccello

The paper aims at rethinking the Eucharistic utterance “This is my body … This is my blood” not merely as the key formulation of representation, but first and foremost as a decisive role in the attempt to write the body as a site/sight of terror and torture. Focusing upon Shakespeare’s drama along with specific paintings by Crivelli, Cimabue, and Paolo Uccello, the paper traces the phenomena and events of opening and cutting that leave their ekphrastic imprints upon the textual landscape of The Merchant of Venice. It will not be a question here of repeating or returning to the paradigm of the circumcision, but of highlighting that Shylock’s attempt to open the body, to make an incision into the Christian body of Antonio represents and reproduces a willingness to attack and to profane the Eucharist.

12. Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Two Scenes of Drowning: Ophelia and Clarence’s Dream

Shakespearean ekphrasis involves the verbal representation of a certain visual representation. In Sir Philip Sidney’s words, “the speaking picture” describes this kind of painted imagery being treated as if it were a work of pictorial art. There are examples of verbal paintings of human suffering either physical or mental in the Shakespearean canon. In Hamlet Gertrude gives the ekphrasis of how Ophelia is drowned, singing her song and appearing like a blossoming flower. In Richard III Clarence in his prison cell describes his dream of drowning. My paper will deal with pictorial representation of drowning and thanatos in Hamlet and Richard III.

13. Julia Cleave, Member of the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy (UK)
“Well-painted passion”: Shakespeare and the Bassano Fresco

In 2008, Professor Roger Prior presented his discovery of a remarkable series of cross-references between three prominent families in the town of Bassano del Grappa and Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays. His most striking finding was the degree to which the details of an elaborate fresco, painted by Jacopo Bassano on the façade of the Casa dal Corno, illuminates otherwise obscure tropes in both these plays and, in particular, an enigmatic concatenation of imagery in Act III of Othello. The aim of my paper will be to assess the implications of these findings with reference to the rubric of the seminar.

14. Guillaume Mauger, Paris IV-Sorbonne (France)
“I have drawn her picture with my voice”: Desiring Gaze and Perspective Tricks in Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Portraits

The rhetorical portraits-verbal constructs through which the human figure is construed as a portrait-featured in plays ranging from Twelfth Night to Pericles, exhibit recurring patterns, such as an erogenous elusiveness of features, a dialectics of opposites through which no synthesis is achieved, a backfiring of the gaze evocative of the ‘Medusa topos’. This paper will argue that these portraits draw less from the art of miniature painting, which they may nevertheless be said to comment on, than from mechanisms inspired by the “turning-pictures” and anamorphic images that were popular in Shakespeare’s time.

15. Hanna Scolnicov, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)
Both Goddess and Woman: Cleopatra and Venus

Shakespeare describes Cleopatra on the barge as “o’erpicturing” Venus, thus elevating her above a wide range of Renaissance paintings and Classical frescoes of the goddess. In the Renaissance and the Baroque, the goddess of love and beauty is usually depicted as a seductive woman, almost nude, often in a semi-reclining position, sometimes with some mythical attributes. The tension between the two aspects of “Venus” as both goddess and human model is echoed in the figure of Cleopatra, whose golden statue was placed by Julius Caesar in the newly built temple of Venus Genetrix, in 46 B.C. Shakespeare’s characterization of Cleopatra reflects this duality.

16. Olivia Coulomb, Aix-Marseille Université (France)
Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra: between Stasis and Movement

In Shakespeare’s time, the visual arts were flourishing on the Continent, but one can wonder what their impact exactly was on the playwright’s vision of art. A play such as Antony and Cleopatra is characterized by a complex web of human statues coming from Europe and interweaving with a specifically Jacobean vision of art. On the one hand, the tragedy stages a seemingly conventional vision of art seen as seductive and potentially dangerous. Yet, on the other hand, it also introduces a more daring aesthetic approach, which is especially innovative as far as statues are concerned.

17. Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)
“Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow”: Visual Representation and Ekphrastic Tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece

Considering intertextuality in the early modern period to be not only poetic but also figurative, this paper proposes an intermedial conversation between drama and painting, focusing on two particular iconographic topoi of visual representation in Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance art: the ekphrastic description of the sleeping woman portrayed  as a mental  rape  in both Othello and Cymbeline and the narrator’s description of the sleeping woman and the actual ravishing in The Rape of Lucrece. The juxtaposition of these two different literary and pictorial traditions of male fantasy may throw some fresh light on Shakespeare’s dramatic use of ekphrasis.

18. Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
“Those foundations which I build upon”: Construction and Misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale

This paper aims to examine the presence of architectural imagery in The Winter’s Tale, a play that is most often cited for its evocation of Giulio Romano. This play, whose plot is built upon Leontes’ misconstruction, is also famous for its two-part structure hingeing on the pivotal presence of Time and bridging the gap between Sicily and Bohemia. This peculiar construction can be read in architectural terms as the opposition between Leontes and Paulina, as the opposition between two plots – the former devised by a bad architect, the latter devised by a wise architect, with Time playing an ambivalent role.

19. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Maternity and the Visual Arts in Shakespeare’s Romances

Twice in Shakespeare’s romances — in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale — a mother dies in order to resuscitate, as an agent of reconciliation. In both plays death is problematically related to childbirth and the uncanny side of pregnancy. What kind of metamorphosis (or transfiguration) does the mother undergo in the interval which takes her from death to life again? Drawing on the ways in which the female body ‘infects’ and finally clarifies the male gaze, I want to explore the ways in which romance, theology, and the Renaissance Italian visual art combined to influence this cathartic/purgational representation of the maternal.

20. Giuseppe Leone, Università di Palermo (Italy)
“Hath Death lain with thy wife”: Eroticized Death Iconography in Shakespeare

According to Philippe Ariès, during the sixteenth century a new representation of Death spreads throughout Europe. The new figurative topos abandons the image of the rotten skeleton with the scythe cutting down human bodies to set up a new artistic proposal which appears both violent and erotic. Actually, an unprecedented carnal impetus drives the representation of Death in the paintings or engravings by Dürer, Baldung Grien, Niklaus Manuel, Sebald Beham, also affecting a large number of literary works composed during the XVI-XVII centuries. This paper aims at exploring the occurrences of this dreadful-erotic figurative paradigm in Shakespeare’s canon.

Seminar 4: Early Shakespeare

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 16h-18h.

Room: Vendôme.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Andrew J. Power (USA) and Rory Loughnane, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)

Participants

  1. Terri Bourus, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
    Shakespeare’s Early Hamlet
  2. Rob Carson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (USA)
    Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men
  3. Fran X. Connor, Wichita State University (USA)
    Richard Field and Venus and Adonis
  4. Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle (Australia)
    Cliques, networks and nodes: affinity and distinctiveness in early Shakespeare
  5. Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University (UK)
    The Date and Authorship of The Two Gentlemen of Verona
  6. MacDonald Jackson, University of Auckland (New Zealand)
    Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare’s Early Collaborations
  7. John Jowett, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
    Reconstruction or Collaboration: The Case of Richard Duke of York
  8. Andy Kesson, University of Kent (UK)
    Early Shakespeare and the first generation of commercial theatre
  9. Rory Loughnane, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
    Early Shakespeare, Late Peele
  10. Anna Pruitt, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
    The question of authorship and chronology in Act IV Scene 1 of Titus Andronicus
  11. Peter Sillitoe, De Montfort University (UK)
    Locating the Henry VI Plays: Spatial Dynamics in Early Shakespeare
  12. Will Sharpe, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
    Shakespeare’s Habits as a Collaborative Author
  13. Holger Schott Syme, University of Toronto (Canada)
    Whose Shakespeare?
  14. Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
    The Fly Scene in Titus

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Terri Bourus, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
Shakespeare’s Early Hamlet

The dominant textual theories about Hamlet all agree that the 1603 quarto, though printed earlier than the 1604/5 quarto and the 1623 folio, must represent a derivative version of the play, and therefore must date from 1599 or later. This paper argues that all such theories are fundamentally flawed. Theatrical evidence clearly indicates that the 1603 text represents an earlier version, written and performed eleven years before composition of the more familiar, longer texts. This interpretation places the 1603 version near the beginning of Shakespeare’s playwriting career.

2. Rob Carson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (USA)
Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men

Shakespeare’s history plays often seem to presuppose that their audiences are familiar with events that featured prominently in other history plays of the period: here we might think of the murder of Woodstock that lurks beneath the opening acts of Richard II, the slapping of the Lord Chief Justice that is kept offstage in 2 Henry IV, and the ways in which Jane Shore haunts the action of Richard III. This paper will focus on the dramaturgy of Richard III, exploring the ways in which Shakespeare’s play stages a dialogue with the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard III.

3. Fran X. Connor, Wichita State University (USA)
Richard Field and Venus and Adonis

William Shakespeare first appeared in print through printer Richard Field, publisher of the first two editions of Venus and Adonis. While the poem itself is entirely Shakespeare’s work, Field’s attention to the orthography and design of the poem were essential to establishing Shakespeare’s reputation as a poet. Using Field’s work on John Harrington’s 1591 Orlando Furioso as precedent, I will analyze the variants in the first two Venus and Adonis quartos to argue that Field similarly attempted to regularize spelling and other elements of the poem, establishing Shakespeare as a modern poet worthy of attention, and Field himself as a printer capable of elegant work.

4. Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle (Australia)
Cliques, networks and nodes: affinity and distinctiveness in early Shakespeare

English plays of the late 1580s and early 1590s seem to cluster by genre, and by progenitor — as descendants of Tamburlaine, or The Spanish Tragedy, or the Henry VI plays, for instance — rather than by author. Collaborative writing and careless textual transmission add to the sense of a collective dramatic product within which authorial trajectories are by no means clear. My paper will explore these questions with the tools of computational stylistics, establishng some points in early Shakespeare where single-authorial study is on firm ground and others where it must yield to other models of dramatic form and composition.

5. Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University (UK)
The Date and Authorship of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Two Gentleman of Verona is generally identified as one of the first plays, perhaps the very first, of Shakespeare’s career, and dated between 1585 and 1595 depending on just when one supposes that career began. This paper will survey the evidence for when Shakespeare started writing and consider Two Gentlemen‘s place among his first plays. Internal contradictions and inelegant passages have variously been attributed to dramatic immaturity, ‘stratification’ (that is, layers of authorial self-revision), and co-authorship. Computational stylistics will be used to reexamine the second and third of these possibilities as alternatives to the currently dominant first possibility.

6. MacDonald Jackson, University of Auckland (New Zealand)
Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare’s Early Collaborations

The Oxford William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986) presented 1 Henry VI, as by ‘Shakespeare and Others’ and the second edition (2005) added Titus Andronicus and Edward III to plays in which Shakespeare was a co-author. Evidence has since been accumulating that 2 and 3 Henry VI and Arden of Faversham belong to the same category. So ‘early Shakespeare’ is being redefined. Attribution of the middle scenes of Arden to Shakespeare is recent and contentious. But it can be strongly supported by analysis of how links with Arden are distributed within the five other putative collaborations. Shakespeare’s shares of all six plays have literary and dramatic qualities in common.

7. John Jowett, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
Reconstruction or Collaboration: The Case of Richard Duke of York

The title of this paper poses a false alternative in order to rebut it. Recent scholarship has proposed that 3 Henry VI is a collaborative play, and that it was revised by Shakespesare after he wrote R . Consequently the older hypothesis that the shorter and less Shakespearian 1595 Richard Duke of York is a memorial reconstruction looks vulnerable. This paper will agree that both versions are collaborative, and one them is revised. But it will reassert that Richard Duke of York is a derivative text with a tenuous line of transmission.

8. Andy Kesson, University of Kent (UK)
Early Shakespeare and the first generation of commercial theatre

Though we think of it as the period of Shakespeare’s early career, the late 1580s and early ’90s was also the period of the end of the first generation of commercial theatre-making. This paper will set out Shakespeare’s early work from the perspective of the theatre culture he joined, focusing in particular on contemporary controversies over performance, storytelling and authorship played out in the work of Greene, Lyly and the Queen’s Men repertory.

9. Rory Loughnane, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
Early Shakespeare, Late Peele

By 1594, when the first quarto of Titus Andronicus was published, George Peele (bap. 25 July, 1556) was at least 38 years old, some eight years Shakespeare’s senior. Peele, a Londoner and Oxford graduate, had been publishing regularly since the early 1580s. This paper considers what the identification of Peele as the author of the long opening scene of Titus Andronicus (at least) means for editing the play. As this scene has been traditionally edited, Shakespearean practices, linguistic and dramatic, rather than Peeleian, have informed editorial emendations. The paper will discuss several editorial cruxes, approaching the first scene anew with Peele’s corpus of writing in mind.

10. Anna Pruitt, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
The question of authorship and chronology in Act IV Scene 1 of Titus Andronicus

The uneven linguistic style of Titus Andronicus has made it difficult for scholars to fix a date for the play in Shakespeare’s early career. Stylistic elements have also served as evidence that Titus is co-authored, with most scholars identifying George Peele as the most likely candidate for the authorship of the play’s long opening scene and the possible author of Act IV Scene 1. By reassessing the authorship question for the latter scene, this paper will argue for the possibility that this scene bears traces of a different chronological layer of composition in Shakespeare’s text.

11. Peter Sillitoe, De Montfort University (UK)
Locating the Henry VI Plays: Spatial Dynamics in Early Shakespeare

This paper examines spatiality in the trilogy whilst employing the literary geography of London’s theatre industry to analyse the spaces of performance. Although critical theories of space have been usefully applied to large sections of the canon, little of this work has been undertaken on the early plays. Thus the paper addresses the spatial aspects of the plays, with numerous scenes taking place in battlefields and courts. At the same time, however, this research analyses how the uses of space in the plays during performance was influenced by the size of the playing companies and the dimensions of the venues.

12. Will Sharpe, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
Shakespeare’s Habits as a Collaborative Author

This paper will build on work I have undertaken in the Collaborative Plays volume as well as recent work on attribution and theatre history to reconsider Shakespeare as a collaborator in the early phase of his career, and how predominant a feature of his early writing it is. As the Henry VI plays continue to break apart, and with Martin Wiggins’ recent redating of The Two Gentlemen of Verona to 1594, I will consider the schematics of Shakespeare’s habits as a collaborative author, and argue that his early career is almost defined by collaboration to the same extent as his late.

13. Holger Schott Syme, University of Toronto (Canada)
Whose Shakespeare?

My paper considers the plays Shakespeare wrote before becoming a Chamberlain’s Man, and asks what happened to those scripts, why only some seem to have made it into the new company’s repertory, where those that did not may have ended up, and what a messier account of the fates of Shakespeare’s early works does for (or to) our traditional narratives of the development of London’s acting companies in the 1590s. I propose a reading of Shakespeare’s oeuvre that privileges the perspective of the companies for which the plays were written over the point of view constructed by the 1623 folio.

14. Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
The Fly Scene in Titus

Attribution scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that the 1594 quarto text of Titus Andronicus was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with George Peele. In doing so, it has also convincingly demonstrated that Peele is not the author of the “fly scene”, which first appeared in print in the 1623 folio. But proving that Peele did not write the scene does not logically prove that Shakespeare did. This paper attempts to determine whether Shakespeare wrote the added scene, and if so when.

Seminar 3: The Many Lives of William Shakespeare: Collaboration, Biography and Authorship

Schedule

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisateurs

Paola Pugliatti, University of Florence (Italy) and William Leahy, Brunel University London (UK)

Participants

  1. Christy Desmet, University of Georgia (USA)
    If the Style is the Man, Who Wrote Hamlet Q1?
  2. Jeffrey Kahan, University of La Verne (USA)
    “I tell you what mine author says”: A Brief History of Stylometrics
  3. William Lehay, Brunel University, London (UK)
    Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare)
  4. John V. Nance, Florida State University (USA)
    Defining Co-authorship in Shakespeare’s Early Canon
  5. Donatella Pallotti, University of Florence (Italy)
    Issues of (Collaborative) Authorship in Shakespeare’s Poems
  6. Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University (USA)
    ‘Fabricated Lives’: Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms
  7. Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
    Faking It: Imitating Shakespeare in Double Falsehood and Cardenio

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Christy Desmet, University of Georgia (USA)
If the Style is the Man, Who Wrote Hamlet Q1?

Hamlet offers a good a test case for attribution studies because even the editorial patchwork that created the conflated text of modern editions has a recognizable rhetorical style. George Wright has analyzed the style of Hamlet‘s conflated text through the trope of hendiadys. This paper examines Hamlet Q1 through the trope of brachylogia and Hermogenes’ “rhetoric of speed.” I consider early modern habits of composition, imitation, listening, and writing – the processes by which texts interacted – to consider how a text like Hamlet Q1, which may be the product of multiple processes and hands, nevertheless might evince a stylistic ethos.

2. Jeffrey Kahan, University of La Verne (USA)
“I tell you what mine author says”: A Brief History of Stylometrics

It’s been over 230 years since William Richardson first dreamed of identifying Shakespeare scientifically. Since then, we’ve had countless counters, new methods, and endless errors. Cardenio and other hitherto Apocryphal plays may be in part or in full by Shakespeare, but any reliance on mathematics concerning such questions should be deeply sounded. This paper will trace the history of stylometrics and their uneven results from 1774 to the present. The history reveals that many of the same issues crop up again and again.

3. William Lehay, Brunel University, London (UK)
Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare)

In his article ‘What Was He Really Like?’, Stanley Wells imagines Shakespeare’s youth: “As adolescence came on he began to experience erections and to feel desire. He masturbated and, earlier than most of his contemporaries, copulated.” This paper argues that the article by Wells contains many of the problems which biographers have to negotiate, not least the problem of biography becoming autobiography. This is a pervasive trend in Shakespeare biography and can be attributed to the principles which delineate this sub-genre. These principles constrain the biographer and operate in a way that is unique to this form of biography.

4. John V. Nance, Florida State University (USA)
Defining Co-authorship in Shakespeare’s Early Canon

Identifying collaborators in Shakespeare’s plays has not diminished the status of the canon (or of Shakespeare), it has instead enriched our understanding of the productive conditions in the early modern theatre and the types of relationships that were generated by it. This essay extends current debates on the status of the co-author in attribution studies to demonstrate new evidence of collaboration in Shakespeare’s early plays (dramatic works to 1596). By limiting this analysis in terms of Shakespeare’s early period, I will extend current efforts to reassess the beginning of Shakespeare’s career, and provide an original approach for evaluating authorial evidence.

5. Donatella Pallotti, University of Florence (Italy)
Issues of (Collaborative) Authorship in Shakespeare’s Poems

Shakespeare’s poems and those attributed to him were transmitted across a range of texts in early modern England; the forms of these texts, their modalities and structures, inevitably affected the reading of the poems themselves. Therefore the role stationers, printers, compilers and their editorial apparatuses had in the construction of the meaning of Shakespeare’s poems and of Shakespeare’s authorial figure cannot be overlooked. My paper investigates how Shakespeare’s poems were presented to the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reading public, and the part played by the forms of their presentation in the construction of the early modern canon of Shakespeare’s works.

6. Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University (USA)
‘Fabricated Lives’: Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms

My essay examines fictionalized accounts of the collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on those which portray Christopher Marlowe as occasionally Shakespeare’s co-author. Beginning with two novels by Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life (1964), and A Dead Man in Deptford (1994), I then look at Peter Whelan’s play, The School of Night, before concluding with the film Shakespeare in Love (1999). By looking at these popularized renditions of collaboration and biography, I show that they too contribute to the “building up of [a] personality structure.”

7. Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
Faking It: Imitating Shakespeare in Double Falsehood and Cardenio

The Creation and Recreation of Cardenio (2013) demonstrates that Double Falsehood cannot be a forgery, partly by showing that Theobald’s best attempts to imitate Shakespeare can be clearly differentiated, stylistically and statistically, from comparable passages in DF. This paper extends that analysis, by comparing Theobald’s attempts to imitate Shakespeare with the efforts of Stephen Greenblatt, Charles Mee, and Gregory Doran to imitate Shakespeare in their reconstructions of the lost Cardenio. It also discusses ambiguous cases in Double Falsehood, where existing attribution techniques cannot distinguish between Theobald and Shakespeare.

Seminar 2: Biology through Shakespeare

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Rachel Rodman, Durham, NC (USA)

Participants

  1. Chiara Battisti, University of Verona (Italy)
    Richard III and disability studies
  2. Natalia Brzozowska, Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland)
    Merging the biological and the social – the relationship between age,‘choler’ and status in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Romeo and Juliet
  3. John F. Maune, Hokusei Gakuen University (Japan)
    With Love’s Light Wings: Romeo and Juliet in a Life Science Classroom
  4. Nahid Mohammadi, Alzahra University (Iran)
    The Ecology of Human and Nonhuman Nature in Shakespeare: A Reading of Four Elements
  5. Rachel Rodman, Durham, NC (USA)
    Biology through Shakespeare
  6. Lauren Shohet, Villanova University (USA)
    Floral Networks
  7. Michael A. Winkelman, Owens Tech (USA)
    ‘To Preserve This Vessel’: Jealousy, Evolution, and Othello

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Chiara Battisti, University of Verona (Italy)
Richard III and disability studies

My paper aims at analysing Richard III through the perspective of disability studies,
exploring questions concerning the extent to which bodily experiences and physical diseases are constructed or mediated by society and culture. Richard III has been read productively through the lens of his body, which has been connected with the turbulent English history, a monstrous political figure who usurps the throne, and a demonstration of Renaissance beliefs about the continuity between inner morality and outward physical forms. This paper will analyse the more complex relationship between Richard’s physical deformed body and his audience within and outside the play.

2. Natalia Brzozowska, Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland)
Merging the biological and the social – the relationship between age,‘choler’ and status in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Romeo and Juliet

The aim is to demonstrate how the Galenic approach to choler can be supplemented with
the sociological status and power theory of emotions (Kemper) in the analysis of the anger of Shakespeare’s youths (Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet) and the elderly (King Lear). Lear rages against a legitimate loss of power and status, however, others see his actions as those of a senile choleric. Tybalt (as a young man) is considered naturally prone to outbursts of anger, yet must show restraint when admonished by the more powerful (and older) Capulet. The dynamics between the issues of social hierarchy and the humour will be explored.

3. John F. Maune, Hokusei Gakuen University (Japan)
With Love’s Light Wings: Romeo and Juliet in a Life Science Classroom

Romeo and Juliet is used to teach various theories of love and other human behaviors in a biology class for Japanese English majors. The play is rife with excellent, poignant examples that students grasp intuitively, not by the book. A few examples include Romeo’s feelings for Rosaline and Juliet, Juliet’s concerns about Romeo’s intentions, and Mercutio’s and Tybalt’s fiery tempers; these illustrate the hormones implicated in love, female mate selection, and aggression in males and kin selection. Romeo and Juliet always engages the students and piques their interest leading to active learning and better understanding of the subject matter.

4. Nahid Mohammadi, Alzahra University (Iran)
The Ecology of Human and Nonhuman Nature in Shakespeare: A Reading of Four Elements

My research articulates this new eco-literary hypothesis that human and nonhuman agencies of nature are in correspondence. This correspondence can be defined in terms of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—which are included both in the environment and in human. Through this ancient elemental ecosystem, I explain ‘why disordered human nature causes a disorder in the environment.’ In Shakespeare, there are many examples which reflect this correspondence: ambition in Macbeth causes murder and distrust in Othello brings about the violation of another soul.

5. Rachel Rodman, Durham, NC (USA)
Biology through Shakespeare

In this presentation, I outline several creative projects, aimed at incorporating themes from Shakespeare and modern biology. I focus on an academic course, “Biology through Shakespeare,” which uses art-science metaphors to frame a series of introductory biology lectures. I in addition describe a new class of biology-based writing exercises, enabling students to draft their own creative fiction, using Shakespeare’s verse as raw material.

6. Lauren Shohet, Villanova University (USA)
Floral Networks

This paper examines constellations of botanical entities, human subjects, rhetorical tropes, and literary genres from angles that do not assume the priority of the human subject. A Midsummer Nights Dream, Hamlet, The Winters Tale, and Pericles reimagine tropes usually taken as figurative play in service of performative human self-realization as instead instigators and propagators of formal traditions. Flowers serve as a node where nature and culture, given and created, human and non-human, hybridize in all directions. Can we see the Shakespearean stage as an iteration of natural systems that “brim . . . with meanings not of our making” (Pollan 2001: 69)?

7. Michael A. Winkelman, Owens Tech (USA)
‘To Preserve This Vessel’: Jealousy, Evolution, and Othello

Though everyone agrees jealousy is the theme of Shakespeare’s Othello, critics have tended to neglect or misunderstand its significance. The Moor’s infuriated reaction, however, makes sense in light of evolutionary biology, the fundamental explanation for life on Earth—including that branch of hominid primate mammals known as Homo sapiens. My paper explains Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, plus the Biochemistry and genetics involved, and then analyzes Othello’s natural apprehension over the threat of cuckoldry, especially in Act 4, scene 2. In the conclusion, I contend that such a New Humanist approach can help elucidate what makes the tragedy a masterpiece.

Seminar 1: Shakespeare on screen: the Romances

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 16h-18h.

Room: V106A.

Leaders / Organisatrices

Sarah Hatchuel, GRIC, University of Le Havre (France)
and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, IRCL, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France)

Participants

  1. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College (Norway)
    “Most Majestic” or “Baseless Fabric”: The Alternating Utopic (re)Visions of The Tempest
  2. Victoria Bladen, The University of Queensland (Australia)
    Screen Magic in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)
  3. Anne-Marie Cornède, Université Paris Descartes (France)
    Prospero, Ariel, Caliban: Master and Servants or Power at Stake in Tempest on Screen
  4. Sam Crowl, Ohio University (USA)
    Transformation and Adaptation in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest
  5. Jacek Fabiszak, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland)
    Shakespeare’s romances on Polish television: from theatre in/on television to a television show, from bookish Bard to subversive Shakespeare
  6. Kinga Földváry, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
    Ghost Towns and Alien Planets: Variations on Prospero’s Island in Screen Versions of The Tempest
  7. Gaëlle Ginestet, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, IRCL (France)
    The Tempest in Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (1970) by Marc Allégret: Shakespeare Grafted onto Radiguet
  8. Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham (UK)
    Home and Colonial: the Tempest films of Jarman, Taymor and Mazursky
  9. Randy Laist, Goodwin College (USA)
    Hyperreality and the Western Imagination in Prospero’s Books
  10. Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific (USA)
    A Fine Romance: Prospera and the Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction
  11. Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University (Italy)
    Puppetry on Screen: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in The Animated Tales from Shakespeare
  12. Lindsay Reid, the National University of Ireland, Galway (Ireland)
    “This Fierce Abridgement”: Thanhouser’s Two-Reel Cymbeline (1913) and the Question of Genre
  13. Edel Semple, University College Cork (Ireland)
    Looking at Good Daughters and Bad Mothers: Women in the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Pericles
  14. Peter J. Smith, University of Nottingham Trent (UK)
    “Something Rich and Strange”: Jarman and Greenaway and the defamiliarisation of The Tempest
  15. Bob White, University of Western Australia (Australia)
    Elijah Moshinsky’s Television Cymbeline
  16. John Wyver, University of Westminster/Illuminations (UK)
    Scenes from Cymbeline and the language of the early television studio

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College (Norway)
“Most Majestic” or “Baseless Fabric”: The Alternating Utopic (re)Visions of The Tempest

In this essay, I consider several adaptations of The Tempest (1610) and its characters, focusing on Julie Taymor’s 2010 film. I demonstrate that the play’s unique engagement with utopia is what generates its malleable fluidity. Its repeated re-visioning has inspired a fragmentation that, paradoxically, binds the play’s characters to the island, its utopia, and each other; despite their migration, they always appear in relation to each other. Finally, that the The Tempest, its characters, and Shakespeare himself, appear in the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman offers insight into the potential Shakespeare realized through utopia in this play.

2. Victoria Bladen, The University of Queensland (Australia)
Screen Magic in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)

In The Tempest, performing magic involves aspects of knowledge, control, language, illusion, spectacle, and metatheatricality. Exercising supernatural power also invokes a range of implications, moral, political, gendered, and postcolonial, providing rich scope for directors. This paper explores the screen magic of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, considering the aesthetic depictions of magic and their ideological implications, including the way they harness early modern ideas, symbols and signs, and their metafilmic quality. Both adaptations are alert to the central paradox that a play intensely concerned with control is also ultimately about release and the relinquishing of control.

3. Anne-Marie Cornède, Université Paris Descartes (France)
Prospero, Ariel, Caliban: Master and Servants or Power at Stake in Tempest on Screen

Tempest successive screen adaptations show substantive interpretive variations as they handle law and order, power relations between Master and subjects, contractual with ‘servant’ Ariel, non-contractual with slave Caliban often denied duty of care. As Prospero is made either a mad tyrant (Wilcox, Jarman), a disillusioned New Yorker turned Greek (Mazursky), dignified magus (Greenaway) or “sorceress scientist”, Native Caliban a dark monster or picturesque local rebel illustrating “themes of colonization and usurpation” (Taymor), these prismatic visions effectively reflect political and ideological preoccupations of the period.

4. Sam Crowl, Ohio University (USA)
Transformation and Adaptation in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest

Shakespeare’s transvestite theater was absorbed into the European model with both male and female actors. From Sarah Bernhardt (Hamlet) to Harriet Walter (Brutus) female actors have taken the measure of some of Shakespeare’s most powerful male characters. In these instances the script was not reimagined to change the gender of the character. In a remarkable recent film, Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010), the central character is not only played by a female but reimagined to be a female as well. Taymor transforms Prospero and in the process expands the notion of adaptation from a cinematic into a Darwinian context.

5. Jacek Fabiszak, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland)
Shakespeare’s romances on Polish television: from theatre in/on television to a television show, from bookish Bard to subversive Shakespeare

The paper addresses two issues: 1. how technological development of television has affected the way(s) of televising Shakespeare in Poland, illustrating it with romances which were aired from the 1960s to the 1990s within Television Theatre (the romances pose a serious technological challenge for both the stage and the screen). 2. how the productions under scrutiny illustrate the treatment of Shakespeare’s works in a medium that addressed the widest audience possible and one which was supposed to advocate ‘family’ and morally acceptable values particularly in the times of communism in Poland when mass media were strictly controlled by the regime.

6. Kinga Földváry, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
Ghost Towns and Alien Planets: Variations on Prospero’s Island in Screen Versions of The Tempest

In my paper I argue that the various cinematic depictions of the island in The Tempest, while they do not offer much information concerning the films’ textual fidelity to the Shakespearean original, are intricately linked to the films’ cinematic genres, which in turn are tell-tale signs of the socio-cultural issues the films and their creators are trying to address, from post-war financial and social troubles through psychological uncertainties and international political threats. The films used to illustrate my point include Yellow Sky (1948), Forbidden Planet (1956), Age of Consent (1969), and Tempest, directed by Paul Mazursky (1982).

7. Gaëlle Ginestet, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, IRCL (France)
The Tempest in Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (1970) by Marc Allégret: Shakespeare Grafted onto Radiguet

In Allégret’s adaptation of Radiguet’s novel, the three main protagonists rehearse a scene from The Tempest. Why was this second literary text grafted onto the first one in its cinematic adaptation? Allégret intended The Tempest as a mise en abyme of the novel’s plot. The trigger for the graft was probably the characterization of Count d’Orgel, in the novel, as a magician. In the film, Orgel becomes an avatar of Prospero who will throw his wife Mahé (Miranda) into the arms of their friend François (Ferdinand). The Tempest scenes help
characters and audience open “the fringed curtains of th[eir] eyes”.

8. Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham (UK)
Home and Colonial: the Tempest films of Jarman, Taymor and Mazursky

The agendas of the three film-makers differ markedly in respect of their treatment of the play’s (post)colonial dimensions, and the ways in which they characterize the island itself. Both Taymor and Mazursky set up their version of ‘Milan’ – Mazursky’s case, New York – as a contrast with the island. But Mazursky’s film is the only one to return its colonialists to their home territory, albeit with a degree of equivocation. The paper examines the varieties of ‘otherness,’ cultural, sexual and political, articulated in the three films.

9. Randy Laist, Goodwin College (USA)
Hyperreality and the Western Imagination in Prospero’s Books

As pervasive as the theme of ambiguous ontology is throughout the works of Shakespeare, it is in The Tempest that this motif receives its fullest and most complex treatment. Throughout the drama, characters continually doubt their senses, question whether they are awake or dreaming, and wonder whether the people they encounter are real or phantasmal. Peter Greenaway’s adaptation Prospero’s Books (1991) prioritizes the conceptual rather than the narrative structure of Shakespeare’s play, representing The Tempest as a study in what Baudrillard and Eco famously dubbed hyperreality, a condition of vertiginous indeterminacy between representation and reality.

10. Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific (USA)
A Fine Romance: Prospera and the Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction

In the age of biocybernetic reproduction, “individuality,” as Donna Haraway contends, “is a strategic defense problem.” Lacking the a priori authority of her male counterpart, “Prospera,” I argue, opts to pursue biocybernetic alliances that reproduce her as a montage effect in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film—born of the competing imperatives of her imagined progentitors, Prospero and Sycorax, and their protégés, Ariel and Caliban. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that despite Taymor’s claim that The Tempest “is not a feminist tract,” the film repeatedly contests this premise.

11. Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Puppetry on Screen: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in The Animated Tales from Shakespeare

This paper will focus on two 30-minutes screen adaptations of The Tempest (1992) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) in the TV series The Animated Tales from Shakespeare, a S4C production in collaboration with the Russian Soyuzmultfims addressing children or adults not yet acquainted with Shakespeare. Both adaptations are performed by sophisticated puppets belonging to the Russian tradition. These appear to move thanks to an extremely refined stop-motion animation technique that recalls both the magic power of Prospero and the art of Paulina.

12. Lindsay Reid, the National University of Ireland, Galway (Ireland)
“This Fierce Abridgement”: Thanhouser’s Two-Reel Cymbeline (1913) and the Question of Genre

Entitled ‘The Tragedy of Cymbeline’ in the First Folio, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline could—as it has been widely observed—just as easily have been classed as a comedy or history. Known variously in academic parlance as a ‘tragicomedy’, a ‘late play’, or a ‘romance’, this work is notoriously difficult to categorise. This paper focuses on the cuts, expository glosses, and narrative streamlining of the Thanhouser Film Corporation’s silent, two-reel adaptation of Cymbeline (1913). More particularly, it considers how alterations to the play’s plot—along with the technological and conventional constraints of the cinema—impact upon the resultant film’s genre.

13. Edel Semple, University College Cork (Ireland)
Looking at Good Daughters and Bad Mothers: Women in the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Pericles

I examine the BBC Shakespeare TV Series Pericles (1984), the only screen production of the play to date, and explore how it offers fresh and striking insights into the play’s female figures. Throughout, I analyse the representation of women’s roles, the construction of gender and sexuality, the hierarchy of objectification and the ideological power of the gaze on the small screen. Taking women’s looking as a key focus, I argue for the significance of the film’s portrayal of the female gaze which acts variously as a vehicle and an expression of agency, desire, dependence, and authority.

14. Peter J. Smith, University of Nottingham Trent (UK)
“Something Rich and Strange”: Jarman and Greenaway and the defamiliarisation of The Tempest

The Tempest is set on a desert island governed over by a magician whose servants include a fairy and a monster but the strangeness of the dramatis personae barely masks the fact that nothing much happens. Protracted spectacle stands in for intricacies of plot. The inexplicable nature of the events within the play is something that the characters continually remark upon. The word that resonates throughout is strange. Jarman’s The Tempest confronts and exploits this strangeness. Jarman’s punk aesthetic is fuelled by the play’s deep pecularities and so this version is more imperative than ‘naturalistic’ versions such as Taymor’s.

15. Bob White, University of Western Australia (Australia)
Elijah Moshinsky’s Television Cymbeline

Moshinsky’s production of Cymbeline with Helen Mirren and Claire Bloom was one of the more interesting presentations in the otherwise rather tedious and unimaginative BBC/Time Life series in the early 1980s. The director promises a sombre, ‘dark’ production dealing with evil, ‘nightmare realism’ as he described it. I am interested in how this production handles the voyeuristic eroticism in the bedroom scene, and the long ending of the play, to explore what it might reveal about the Shakespeare’s interest in his revival of stage romance.

16. John Wyver, University of Westminster/Illuminations (UK)
Scenes from Cymbeline and the language of the early television studio

Broadcasts of scenes from Cymbeline in 1937 and 1956 were among the earliest British television productions of Shakespeare. Transmitted with multiple electronic cameras from a studio, the excerpts on both occasions from Act I Scene 6 and Act II Scene 2 were taken from contemporary theatrical productions. Neither broadcast was recorded, but for both the BBC archives preserve detailed camera scripts. Grounded in a close reading of these scripts, this paper offers a detailed analysis of the development of the language of television studio drama as applied to Cymbeline.