Schedule / Horaire
Friday 25 April 2014, 16h-18h.
Room: L106.
Leader / Organisateur
Michael Hattaway, New York University in London (UK)
Participants
- Letitia Goia, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca (Romania)
The Enhancement Of Shakespeare’s Sacred in Verdi’s Adaptation of Othello - Claire Guéron, Université de Bourgogne (France)
‘I would [..] / Have turned mine eye’ (Cymbeline, 1.3.17-22): Shifting to the Mind’s Eye in Shakespeare’s Late Plays - Eric Harber, Independent Scholar (UK)
Ambivalence: fire and mud in Othello - John Langdon, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
Death in Midsummer: the Ritual Death of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Emilio Méndez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
‘Behold the meaning’: Denotements through the Sonnets of Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well - Patricia Parker, Stanford University (USA)
(De)noting and Slander - Kiernan Ryan, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Prosper on the top (invisible)’: Power and Perception in Shakespeare - Ewa Sawicka, Warsaw University (Poland)
Self-mystification in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Letitia Goia, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca (Romania)
The Enhancement Of Shakespeare’s Sacred in Verdi’s Adaptation of Othello
The present research focuses on the adaptation of Othello from play to libretto, focussing on the sacred elements and the religious expressions that were set to music. Othello holds the Shakespearean record for the number of times heaven, or the devil, are mentioned. Although the playwright doesn’t follow a particular theological course, religious elements are scattered throughout the play, either in a clear form or in more subtly crafted expressions. Thus, the sacred, which in Shakespeare’s play is only alluded to, turns, in Verdi’s opera libretto, into an obvious good-evil dichotomy, with Romantic accents and deep musical references.
2. Claire Guéron, Université de Bourgogne (France)
‘I would [..] / Have turned mine eye’ (Cymbeline, 1.3.17-22): Shifting to the Mind’s Eye in Shakespeare’s Late Plays
An often-discussed aspect of Renaissance perspective is its incorporation of the viewer’s position in the construction of the design. Similarly, this paper argues that Shakespeare’s later plays incorporate the distance between audience and performance as a parameter of the drama, in such a way as to encourage a complex, layered vision requiring an interplay between the viewer’s literal eye and his or her mind’s eye. I argue that the plays explore the status of the images so produced, as well as the resulting ambiguities in the semiotic status of the actor’s body, involving a tension between mimetic and emblematic signifying functions.
3. Eric Harber, Independent Scholar (UK)
Ambivalence: fire and mud in Othello
Whereas in Hamlet Shakespeare traces the ambivalences of thought that inhibit Hamlet’s action to opposing powers in the universe at large and repeated in the world — which daunt him — Othello, someone of legendary stature imported from outside European culture, is revealed to have control of those powers, albeit remaining unconscious of the fact. This gives him a singular nature; a lofty authority. Yet the action that unfolds shows how his strengths that emanate from those powers can, once he is made vulnerable, be exploited to corrupt, betray and destroy someone of his heroic stature, who, till then, had led a charmed life.
4. John Langdon, Shakespeare Institute (UK)
Death in Midsummer: the Ritual Death of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play-acted deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe, while usually perceived and portrayed largely as merely comic elements, may also be understood as ritual, mock sacrifices to assuage the threat of death. Mock deaths also provide a symbolic redemption to characters within the play, the audience, and they underscore the sense of renewal underlying the play as a whole. The comic element in Dream adds a cathartic dimension to these ritual deaths, echoing ancient folk customs of slaying the carnival king or queen in order to assuage the perennial threat of a finite mortality.
5. Emilio Méndez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico)
‘Behold the meaning’: Denotements through the Sonnets of Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well
This paper, by examining sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well, explores how characters and spectators become accomplices in denotements that further the plot but which also delve into anxieties regarding awareness, perception and interpretation. In 4.3 of each play, amateur poets are unaware of who is hearing their sonnets being read aloud. The observers ‘denote’ for other characters, as well as for the audience, what they see and hear. These two plays provide earlier and later examples of Shakespearean denotements and how they work in the frame of two comedies with ambiguous endings.
6. Patricia Parker, Stanford University (USA)
(De)noting and Slander
This paper will examine three Shakespeare plays in which denoting and noting figure in relation to a slanderous accusation of female infidelity – Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Cymbeline. Starting from what one of the texts of Othello calls ‘close denotements’, it will move to the darker associations of ‘noting’ itself, including ways in which it produces the note or ‘stain’ it purports more objectively to ‘see’.
7. Kiernan Ryan, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Prosper on the top (invisible)’: Power and Perception in Shakespeare
As A. D. Nuttall has observed, Shakespeare’s mimetic art allows us to see aspects of reality that we could not otherwise perceive. This paper examines the techniques Shakespeare employs to make visible the unconscious imperatives that dictate his characters’ fates. When Prospero commands Ariel, ‘Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else’, the audience is invited to behold personifications of the covert constraints that determine their lives too. The effect of such visualizing strategies is to empower the audience by revealing the unseen forces that disempower them in the world beyond the theatre.
8. Ewa Sawicka, Warsaw University (Poland)
Self-mystification in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline
The paper discusses the Renaissance idea of the self in As You Like It, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. Alluding to Paul Ricoeur’s postulate that self-understanding is mediated by text, I would like to trace a process of departure from an embodied self, presented in those plays as a strategy of self-mystification. The characters’ wilful and conscientious departure from truth about themselves, i.e. their gradual departure from objective reality towards its subjective representation, problematizes the relation between truth and falsity. Filtered through the human mind, the real self is turned into a literary fiction, abstracted from its defining, spatio-temporal setting.