Panel 19: ‘This Earth’

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Ruth Morse (France)

Participants

Chair: Indira Ghose, Université de Fribourg (Switzerland)

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

Abstracts / Résumés

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

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

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

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

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

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