Schedule / Horaire
Saturday 26 April 2014, 9h-10h30
Room: V106A.
Leader / Organisatrice
Jackie Watson, Birbeck College, London (UK)
Participants
- Simon Smith, Birkbeck College, London (UK)
Robert Armin on Shakespeare: The Two Maids of More-Clacke - Derek Dunne, Queen’s University, Belfast (UK)
Serious Joking with Shakespeare’s Hamlet - Jackie Watson, Birkbeck College, London (UK)
Satirical expectations: Shakespeare’s Inns of Court audiences
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Simon Smith, Birkbeck College, London (UK)
Robert Armin on Shakespeare: The Two Maids of More-Clacke
This paper will explore an often-overlooked text that makes significant suggestions about Shakespeare’s relationship with the youth playing companies: Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of More-clacke, performed by the Children of the King’s Revels (1606-1608). In this dramatically vital play, Shakespeare’s fool offers direct parody of Shakespearean plotlines, characters and dramatic set pieces, from a son troubled by his mother’s sex life to a supposed female corpse washed ashore and miraculously resurrected. This paper will explore Shakespeare’s presence in wider early modern playhouse culture, positing Armin’s play as part of the immediate cultural afterlife of several familiar Shakespearean texts.
2. Derek Dunne, Queen’s University, Belfast (UK)
Serious Joking with Shakespeare’s Hamlet
As one of Shakespeare’s best known works, Hamlet has been subject to countless parodies and re-workings. This paper looks at plays written during Shakespeare’s lifetime that directly engage with Hamlet, investigating how Shakespeare’s melancholic prince continues to make meaning beyond the bounds of his own play. What do the city comedy Eastward Ho!, the domestic tragedy A Warning for Fair Women, and the revenge play The Tragedy of Hoffman all have in common? They each use Hamlet as a cipher, to be somehow understood by their audiences. The questions remains, what did these plays hope to achieve in the process?
3. Jackie Watson, Birkbeck College, London (UK)
Satirical expectations: Shakespeare’s Inns of Court audiences
The men of the late Elizabethan Inns of Court were regular playgoers and highly engaged with the drama they saw – both at the Inns, and by boys and adult players on private and public stages. In its focus on Middle Templar John Marston’s What You Will, performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1601, and Twelfth Night, staged at Middle Temple Hall in February 1602, this paper will explore plays forged in the heat of the Poetomachia. It will explore the competition between Shakespeare and Marston which allowed the preoccupations of the Inns to make inroads into the playhouse.