Schedule / Horaire
Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30.
Room: TBA.
Leader / Organisatrice
Nathalie Rivere de Carles (France)
Participants
- Timothy Hampton, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Delay, Deferral, and Interpretation in Renaissance Peacemaking - Joanna Craigwood, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (UK)
Diplomacy and King John - Nathalie Rivere de Carles, Université Toulouse Le Mirail (France)
Mutual disarmament and the politics of appeasement in Shakespearean drama
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Timothy Hampton, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Delay, Deferral, and Interpretation in Renaissance Peacemaking
This paper will explore the importance of the manipulation of time in> Renaissance diplomatic theory and in the representations of diplomacy in literature. I will begin with Machiavelli’s diplomatic dispatches to the Florentine /Signoriato stress the ways in which the famous Machiavellian concepts of virtue, and of acting at the right moment are played out in his practical negotiations. Then I will look at several slightly later theorists of diplomacy, notably Montaigne, Hotman, and Gentili to consider the ways in which they discuss diplomatic delay. In particular, I will be interested in how delay is related to the problem of the interpretation — both of actions and texts. I will conclude with some analysis of theatrical representations of timeliness and delay in the work of two often-compared dramatists, Shakespeare and Corneille.
2. Joanna Craigwood, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (UK)
Diplomacy and King John
Drawing on both diplomatic and dramatic examples, this paper will examine the performance of political relations and identity though acts of diplomatic address and naming. The main focus of the paper will be the reproduction — and interrogation — of these legitimizing processes of naming within two dramatic renderings of the life of the medieval King John. This paper investigates relational political identity in these doubled ‘performative spaces’ of stage diplomacy and dramatically re-enacted diplomatic ritual. It argues that Shakespeare’s Life and Death of King John (c. 1596) and the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John (c. 1589) that served as its source both imagine legitimate English sovereignty emerging (paradoxically) from diplomatic illegitimacy or bastardy within the Catholic European diplomatic family.
3. Nathalie Rivere de Carles, Université Toulouse Le Mirail (France)
Mutual disarmament and the politics of appeasement in Shakespearean drama
Whether deadly or leading to an artificially peaceful deadlock, the strategy of ‘mutual disarmament’ is a common feature to both conflict and its diplomatic avoidance. The choreographic nature of the act as well as its paradoxical use as a form of resolution are parts and parcel of the diplomatic office, but it is also an essential feature of the stage representation of the agon and its deflation. Mutual disarmament in single combat or in geopolitical feuds implies the development of paradoxical forms of appeasement. The figure of the ambassador, his verbal and written words are the very weapons leading to a mutual disarmament. They participate in the dramatic deflation of the agon in plays such as Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline. The paper will examine how the ambassador and his material environment are progressively turned into operators of political and dramatic appeasement.