Schedule / Horaire
Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30
Room: L109.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Dympna Callaghan, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Lukas Erne, Indira Ghose (USA-Switzerland)
Participants
- Lukas Erne, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Reconfiguring Shakespeare: Catholic and Protestant Editing - Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
“All of one communitie”: Shakespeare, Florio and the translation of Montaigne - Indira Ghose, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Shakespeare, Civility, and Identity in Early Modern England - Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University (USA)
Shakespeare and the Culture of Resemblance
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Lukas Erne, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Reconfiguring Shakespeare: Catholic and Protestant Editing
There are two opposed trends in the modern textual reconfiguration of Shakespeare, represented by the respective belief that we need more or less extensive editorial intervention. The thinking that informs these two trends can be understood in terms of the religious differences that divided Europe at the time of Shakespeare, including Catholic France and Protestant England. What may be termed ‘Catholic editing’ holds that editorial tradition leads us to a fuller understanding of the text, whereas ‘Protestant editing’ claims, by contrast, that we need to revert to the text in its original purity.
2. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
“All of one communitie”: Shakespeare, Florio and the translation of Montaigne
That in The Tempest Shakespeare lifted almost verbatim a passage from Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals has long been recognised. My paper will reconsider this passage alongside Samuel Daniel’s ideal of a transnational “one communitie” produced by “th’intertrafique of the mind” in translation. Translation is similarly viewed as it is practised in the play as a utopic site of cultural and linguistic mingling without the “bound[s]” of authorial ownership. Indeed, the dramatist’s stage, like the translator’s page, offers a model of “linguistic and cultural hospitality” for an international community “attuned to internal differences, inevitable mistakes” (Rita Felski).
3. Indira Ghose, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Shakespeare, Civility, and Identity in Early Modern England
Early modern England saw a huge demand for continental literature of all kinds, including manuals of courtly manners. Although aimed at an elite readership, these texts were avidly read by aspiring members of the newly educated classes, who mined them as guidebooks to sophisticated behaviour. This paper seeks to explore the links between elite literature and the public theatre, and the way Shakespeare ironically opens up the cult of manners for scrutiny on stage. At the same time, the increasing importance of what Bourdieu has termed cultural capital in shaping identity is represented and enacted in the early modern theatre.
4. Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University (USA)
Shakespeare and the Culture of Resemblance
This paper takes as its starting point Montaigne’s observations about genetic resemblance in order to explore the Renaissance “culture of resemblance” in Shakespeare. I will argue that within the Shakespearean canon resemblance of all kinds—twins, onomastic identity etc., is discovered in such high concentration because it constitutes a central aesthetic principle. Indeed, Shakespeare’s works themselves might be understood not in terms of chronology — from early to late — in terms of artistic development (important as these ways of reading may be), but rather as uncanny forms of repetition.