Schedule / Horaire
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 11h-12h30.
Room: V115/V116.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Denis Lagae-Devoldère, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Paris 4 (France) and Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Paris 3 (France)
Participants
Chair and respondent: Denis Lagae-Devoldère, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Paris 4 (France)
- Rocco Coronato, University of Padua (Italy)
Wafer-Cakes and Serpents: Melting the Symbol in Antony and Cleopatra - John Gillies, University of Essex (UK)
Calvinism as Tragedy in Othello - Harry Newman, University of Kent (UK)
‘I spake but by a metaphor’ : The Material Culture of Metaphors in Shakespearean Drama - Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Paris 3 (France)
Literal Vienna
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Rocco Coronato, University of Padua (Italy)
Wafer-Cakes and Serpents: Melting the Symbol in Antony and Cleopatra
The early modern symbol often implies the union between the literal and the figurative. This theory is collapsed in Antony and Cleopatra. While Rome is endowed with a fixed system of symbols peaking in Antony, sensuous Egypt is instead marked by image patterns of fluctuation. Antony eventually compares himself to a shifting cloud, “indistinct / As water is in water”, no longer capable of holding “this visible shape”, while Cleopatra sublimates from flesh in the ethereal “fire and air”. The literal and figurative language are dissolved into the awareness that “nature wants stuff / To vie strange forms with fancy”.
2. John Gillies, University of Essex (UK)
Calvinism as Tragedy in Othello
If not literally, Othello is categorically Calvinist in the topsy-turvy proto-modernity of which Calvinism is a theological expression. In dramatizing the confrontation of law and grace, custom and exception, squalor and grandiosity, Othello deploys a logic that is in important respects parallel. On the one hand a tragedy (in the sense of the destruction of virtue), it is equally – to invoke the law-saturated language of Iago – a “preposterous conclusion”. The question of the hero’s virtue is at its heart. That however is richly paradoxical rather than bedevilling if the colour symbolism is grasped in terms of the radical Calvinist destabilization of virtue as an idea.
3. Harry Newman, University of Kent (UK)
‘I spake but by a metaphor’ : The Material Culture of Metaphors in Shakespearean Drama
This paper argues that a number of Shakespeare’s plays explore the capacity of dramatic metaphors to both draw upon and produce material culture in ways that disrupt the binary opposition between the figurative and the literal. In doing so, it focuses on the concept of the imprint, whose figurative and literal forms are intricately connected in Shakespearean drama through references to wax seals and coins as well as printed texts. The paper concludes by proposing metaphor’s centrality to what Puritan anti-theatricalists characterised as theatre’s ability to stamp counterfeit ‘impressions’ on the minds of both audiences and actors.
4. Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Paris 3 (France)
Literal Vienna
The “precise” Angelo in Measure for Measure stands, as critics have repeatedly noted, as the epitome of the “Puritan” spirit and enforcement of the very letter of the law. Through him, Shakespeare dramatizes, as he does in other plays, the biblical exegetical methods of contemporary radical Protestants, criticizing literal interpretations and the monstrous world picture deriving from them. This paper, however, endeavors to show how Shakespeare found in the model of literal exegesis a tool of incredibly dramatic potency for the stage.