Schedule / Horaire
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.
Room: ENS, salle Dussane.
Leader / Organisateur
Michael Dobson, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham (UK)
Participants
- Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidad do Porto (Portugal)
Secular Saints : Shakespeare in the Camões Tricentenary (1880) - Anna Khrabrova, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“Your changed complexions are to me a mirror which shows me mine changed too”: Shakespeare visualization and monumentalization - Robert McHenry, University of Hawaii (USA)
John Dryden’s Shakespeare: Before Shakespearean Biography - Karen Newman, Brown University (USA)
Shakespeare celebrated in Paris, 1827 - Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
The Blemishes of the Repertoire: Translation as Celebration. The Shakespeare Cult in Nineteenth Century Hungary - Francisco Fuentes Rubio, University of Murcia (Spain)
Mickey Mouse Shakespeare: An apparently conservative postal walk through Stratford - Codruta Mirela Stănişoară, University of Craiova (Romania), and Emil Sîrbulescu, University of Craiova (Romania)
From Global to Local and back to Global: a case-study in Shakespeare’s Romanian after-life - Nataliya Torkut, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“…By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his”: public commemoration of Shakespeare in the Soviet Ukraine - Noemi Vera, University of Murcia (Spain)
Celebrating the man: Spanish biographies of Shakespeare in the tercentenary of his death - Shuhua Wang, National I-Lan University (Taiwan)
The ‘Shakespeare Renaissance’ and the Rise of China
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidad do Porto (Portugal)
Secular Saints : Shakespeare in the Camões Tricentenary (1880)
This paper will look into representations of Shakespeare in the textual and iconographic record of the 1880 Camões celebrations, in both Portugal and Brazil. It will consider transcripts of public speeches included in the solemnities, but also accounts of the festivities in the contemporary press. The political and cultural challenges faced by Anglo-Portuguese relations in the ‘new imperial’ age, and the uses given to Shakespeare in such a context, will be looked into with particular care. I therefore propose to cover an enlightening chapter in the fortunes of Shakespeare within the commemorative practices of European and new-world cultures.
2. Anna Khrabrova, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“Your changed complexions are to me a mirror which shows me mine changed too”: Shakespeare visualization and monumentalization
This paper will explore the significantly changing visual representations of Shakespeare produced at crucial points in the public development of his cult, from the birth of Bardolatry in the eighteenth century to the explosion of publications across many media seen around the 1964 quatercentenary and beyond. Examples will include Andy Warhol’s Droeshout image in several colours, 1962; Pablo Picasso’s numerous variations on the theme of Shakespeare’s face, 1964; R. Olbiński’s Free Shakespeare in Central Park, 1994; K.Chadwick’s William Shakespeare and the 20th century, 1996; R. Steadman’s William Shakespeare, 2000; and M.Glaser’s 25 Shakespeare Faces, 2003.
3. Robert McHenry, University of Hawaii (USA)
John Dryden’s Shakespeare: Before Shakespearean Biography
Although Dryden apparently knew little about Shakespeare’s life, when he received a portrait of Shakespeare from Sir Godfrey Kneller he described the likeness as an inspiration, and the gift crystallized his sense of Shakespeare’s personality. Shakespeare then became not merely a collection of great plays, but a person who embodied wisdom and artistic boldness. This paper will show that Dryden was an influential founder of the eighteenth century’s fashion for possessing and admiring portraits of Shakespeare, and that ultimately Dryden identified himself with Shakespeare, seeing him as a literary father and parent of English drama.
4. Karen Newman, Brown University (USA)
Shakespeare celebrated in Paris, 1827
What sort of figure was the Shakespeare advanced as a focus of celebration in Moreau’s Souvenirs du théatre anglais, the commemorative publication sold during Charles Kemble’s famous visit to the Odéon theatre in Paris in 1827? What sort of Shakespeare did the prefatorial materials and the illustrations to the program present? To what audiences were the Souvenirs directed? This paper examines the Souvenirs in the context of the visit of the English actors to post-Napoleonic/Restoration France.
5. Gabriella Reuss, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
The Blemishes of the Repertoire: Translation as Celebration. The Shakespeare Cult in Nineteenth Century Hungary
This paper will examine the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 300th birthday in Budapest in 1864, an occasion which prompted some scepticism as well as some expressions of Bardolatry. It will pay particular attention to the critic Pal Gyulai and the controversy over the making of new Shakespearean translations for theatrical use.
6. Francisco Fuentes Rubio, University of Murcia (Spain)
Mickey Mouse Shakespeare: An apparently conservative postal walk through Stratford
In 1990, for the international philatelic exhibition Stamp World London 90, Shakespeare was memorialised in a set of ten Disney postage stamps issued by Grenada Grenadines which portrayed a Shakespearean Mickey Mouse along with different views of Disney-like versions of Shakespeare’s home town, Mary Arden’s house and Anne Hathaway’s cottage. These postal documents at first sight hold a conservative position, as they seem to link the author to the spirit of Merry Old England, a utopian view of a past England. Yet, as I shall show, the stamps carry a contradictory political message.
7. Codruta Mirela Stănişoară, University of Craiova (Romania), and Emil Sîrbulescu, University of Craiova (Romania)
From Global to Local and back to Global: a case-study in Shakespeare’s Romanian after-life
Founded by an actor-manager, Emil Boroghina, the Craiova Shakespeare Festival has since 1994 promulgated a cosmopolitan and theatrical Bard. The production of Hamlet performed during the second edition of the Festival (1997) aptly featured the Ghost, strikingly resembling the Droeshout portrait, sitting at a writing desk. The same personage was later to appear as the King-Actor in “The Murder of Gonzago”. This paper will explore the ways in which Craiova’s festival (seen in the wider context of Romanian Shakespeare) has contributed to the (inter)national understanding of Shakespeare, turning him into a simultaneously local and global public figure.
8. Nataliya Torkut, Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“…By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his”: public commemoration of Shakespeare in the Soviet Ukraine
There were three major pan-Soviet Shakespearean festivals during Ukraine’s membership of the USSR: 1939, 1964, and 1966. While official propaganda asserted that only the Soviet reception of his work was correct, the large-scale popularization of the English genius and the multilevel reception of his works contributed to a situation in which William Shakespeare began to occupy a central, pivotal point for ideological dissent. My paper will explore the ways in which his literary heritage, endowed with a strong ethical, axiological and aesthetic potential, stimulated reflective thinking, which itself contained a threat to the basic epistemological foundations of totalitarianism.
9. Noemi Vera, University of Murcia (Spain)
Celebrating the man: Spanish biographies of Shakespeare in the tercentenary of his death
Virtually one third of all Spanish biographies of Shakespeare were published around 1916, and some are still among the most exhaustive lives of Shakespeare ever written in Spanish. My main focus here will be on Alfonso Par’s Catalan Vida de Guillem Shakespeare (1916) and Eduardo Juliá’s Shakespeare y su tiempo (1916), a novelised biography which combines real and fictional events. My aim is to explore the versions of William Shakespeare the man presented to the Spanish readers in this key year, as well as to situate them within a wider context of Spanish works recreating Shakespeare’s life and character.
10. Shuhua Wang, National I-Lan University (Taiwan)
The ‘Shakespeare Renaissance’ and the Rise of China
This paper traces the recent history of celebrating Shakespeare in China, from the 1980s through the recent founding of the Asian Shakespeare Association and the Taiwan Shakespeare Association (2013). As I shall show, from the very first two Shakespeare Festivals in China — in 1986 and in 1994 — Chinese Shakespeareans from both sides of the Taiwan Straits have successfully used the Bard as a mouthpiece for political propaganda and as a way of performing their national crossings into modernization. William Shakespeare then becomes an icon of cultural integration in the global academic community in the first decade of the 21st century.