Seminars
All participants will be notified by convenors about the acceptance of their proposals by 16 December 2024. Please note that the length of the paper and the deadline for submitting the final version of your paper will be determined by the convenors of each seminar, but the recommended deadline for completed papers is 1 May 2025.
New Announcement (05/12/24) - extended deadline:
The Call for Seminar Papers for the ESRA 2025 Conference has reopened for a selected list of seminars**.
Please see below for a description of all seminars, together with contacts for seminar convenors.
All participants will be notified by convenors about the acceptance of their proposals by 13 January 2025. Please note that the length of the paper and the deadline for submitting the final version of your paper will be determined by the convenors of each seminar, but the recommended deadline for completed papers is 1 May 2025.
CONVENORS
Antonio Arnieri
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain
antonio.arnieri@uab.cat
Alexandra Siso
University of Sheffield,
UK
alexandrasiso.m@gmail.com
PARTICIPANTS
Sae Kitamura
Clémence Lescoutre
William Lyons
Esther B. Schupak
Daniel Yabut
1. Shakespeare’s Auditory History: Listening to the Sounds of Early Modern Theatre
Recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the soundscapes of the past, highlighting the importance of acoustic environments in historical understanding. Bruce Smith’s seminal work The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) pioneered the use of sound as a hermeneutic tool to interpret the early modern English world, inspiring new interdisciplinary approaches that fall in the scope of the so called “sound studies.” Along with the developing methodologies of soundscape, acoustemology, and acoustic communities, an auditory history approach is evolving as well. It encourages a multisensorial and interdisciplinary study of the past that focuses on exploring, tracing, and recovering the meanings associated with hearing and sound. Auditory history also combines notions from several fields such as literature studies, history, cultural studies, art history, musicology, social sciences, and history of science.
A paramount feature of Shakespeare’s Theatre is the pervasiveness of sound and music for the dramatic impact and success of its plays. Sound in Shakespeare’s plays can work as a vehicle of (and for) meanings and contexts, and scholars can use it as an instrument to question the epistemological concepts generated on the stage and on the page. Shakespeare’s awareness of the aural dimension of reality unveils a process of appropriation and re-elaboration of the theory and lexicon connected to sound and music.
Our seminar aims to examine Shakespeare’s works to develop and foster new methodologies that highlight a critical sense of hearing and the early modern perception of sound. Through dialogues across disciplines, the seminar will provide deeper hermeneutical insights to enrich our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramaturgical world. We invite readers to contemplate on the different modes of listening in Shakespeare’s time and to reach an auditory awareness that situates and identifies sound beyond a merely acoustic phenomenon.
Ultimately, the seminar seeks to develop innovative approaches to experiencing the sounds of the past and build a bridge between the past and the present by putting ourselves ‘in the ears’ of the early modern theatre’s audiences.
CONVENORS
Richard Ashby
King’s College London,UK
richard.ashby@kcl.ac.uk
Natalia Khomenko
York University,Canada
khomenko@yorku.ca
Georgina Lucas
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
g.lucas@napier.ac.uk
PARTICIPANTS
Salim Mustafa
University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
Nataša Šofranac
Belgrade University
David Maziashvili
Iv. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia
Deborah Leiser-Moore
JMC Academy, Melbourne, Australia
Agnieszka Romanowska
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
Aleksei Semenenko
Umeå University, Sweden
John Joughin
2. “To be or not to be”: Trauma, Crisis, and Shakespearean Fragments
Speaking to the British Parliament two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky famously quoted Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” as a lead-in to expressing his country’s resolve to continue fighting for independence whatever the costs. The assumed cultural weight of Shakespearean quotation is unmissable in Zelensky’s plea for aid. At the same time, as “an act of creative appropriation,” to use Peter Kirwan’s definition (2018, p. 247), this quotation re-contextualized Hamlet’s soliloquy to reflect on – and to contest – a grim potential future in which Ukraine might be erased as a sovereign nation.
This seminar explores the use of Shakespeare quotations and allusions in confronting past cultural and political trauma, and in bracing against the harrowing visions of the future produced by conflicts and crises that threaten the continued existence of individuals, nations, cultures, and peoples. Existing studies of Shakespeare’s potential for memorializing and addressing conflict, as well as its personal and collective traumas, have been largely concerned with histories of performance (Silverstone, 2011; Carla Dente and Sara Soncini, 2014; Anderson, 2016; Lidster, 2023). This seminar shifts its focus to Shakespearean quotations and allusions that float free of their textual or performative contexts. We ask what cultural work is performed by these disintegrated fragments of Shakespeare (re)appearing at the moments of trauma and crisis, and to what extent de-contextualized quotation and/or allusion can support the visions of the past and the future to which it is harnessed.
Contributors might consider why some quotations, such as Hamlet’s widely cited “to be or not to be” speech, are often seen as suited to articulating a response to crisis, including the threat of total destruction and even genocide, and how these familiar lines might be reframed or rewritten in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Contributors are also invited to examine the use of Shakespearean fragments that are less immediately placed or whose origins are deliberately obscured, as well as those that are mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare.
CONVENORS
Michelle Assay
University of Toronto, Canada
michelle.assay@utoronto.ca
Alina Bottez
University of Bucharest,
Romania
David Fanning
University of Manchester, UK
david.fanning@manchester.ac.uk
PARTICIPANTS
Zeynep Bilge
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
Mathieu Duplay
Université Paris Cité Paris
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
Lesley University
Ioana Istrate
University of Bucharest
Benjamin Perriello
University of Limoges
Lisa Quoresimo
Southern Utah University
Andrea Smith
University of Suffolk
Yuriko Takahashi
Tsuda University
3. Shakespeare and Music: Between Time and Timelessness
By its very nature, perhaps more than all other artforms, music is interwoven with time and temporality – psychologically, practically and philosophically. A concept that can be expanded or reconfigured, time may refer to the ages in which musical works are composed, to the length of each opus, as well as to tempo – the pulse and character of this art.
Music exists in time, yet it also affects our perception of time. It represents its age and context, yet also aspires to timelessness. In musical responses to Shakespeare’s works, the interaction between composers, performers, Shakespeare and the audience encapsulates the essence of their time and context – the “soul of the age,” as Ben Jonson put it. Yet it is also the universality and timelessness of Shakespeare that lies at the heart of what is now called ‘Shakespearean’ music: “…not of an age but for all time!” (Jonson); and perhaps also ‘transcending time,’ as is the case in so many references to music in Shakespeare’s works and in music that responds to Shakespeare.
Such responses travel across genres and media and create a sonic expression of Shakespeare’s works in incidental music, film music, opera, ballet, musical theatre, and many other forms through remediation (Bolter and Grusin’s term) or transmediation (Charles Suhor’s term). Adaptation Studies is by definition the field that researches the process of change from the original to the ensuing works as fashioned by the time and space that engender them.
In this seminar, we invite proposals that explore, probe, and reflect on the multifaceted relationalities between music, time, and Shakespeare. We shall address the research directions tackled by the Shakespeare and Music Study Group – music in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in music – encouraging contributions from a variety of perspectives, including literary, musical, philosophical, and psychological.
Paper themes include, but are not limited to:
– The history of Shakespearean music and history in Shakespeare-inspired musical works
– Shakespeare-inspired musical adaptations across the ages: incidental music, film music, opera, operetta, musical theatre, ballet, etc.
– Canon-formation and Shakespearean music
– The reception of Shakespeare-inspired music in different times and historical contexts
– Shakespeare and music and non-linear time
– Fashions in the music of Shakespeare stagings
– Tempo, rhythm, metre, and agogics as means of building character and atmosphere in Shakespeare-inspired music
– The ephemerality of performance in Shakespeare-inspired music
– Nostalgia, retrospection, and future projections expressed by music in Shakespeare-inspired works
CONVENORS
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim – Norway delilah.brataas@ntnu.no
Koel ChatterjeeTrinity Laban Conservatoire of Dance and Music,
London – UK
koel.chatterjee@gmail.com
PARTICIPANTS
Sarah Olive
Aston University, UK
Lisanna Calvi
University of Verona, Italy
Ivona Misterova
University of West Bohemia, Czechia
Kyoko Matsuyama
Komazawa Woman’s University, Japan
4. Global Young Adult Shakespeare Adaptations and Appropriations
This conference on Shakespeare and Time is an appropriate setting to question how current readers of Shakespeare in prose look back at the 16th century play texts, and how they look forward to and adapt them to address the concerns of the current times and the future.
Shakespeare remains the most adapted playwright across mediums and forms, and through those, has also become a means to respond to current global events engaging particularly with BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ discourses. YA texts, in particular, thrive on reimagining Shakespeare and his works through contemporary dialogues as they have proven fertile ground for revisiting themes of love, sexuality, power, and identity. Adaptations have varied across nations and cultures, as well as across and between different media specifically engaging young adults, including films, stage\musical adaptations, graphic novels, and across digital media. Each adaptation attempts to take on or take over Shakespeare and his works, with varying intentions and outcomes. This is potentially why the category’s true audience is deceptively broad. More than half of the people buying YA books today, for instance, are over 18 years old—and the majority of those buyers are between 30 and 44 years old. Therefore, while the genre is oftentimes perceived as being at odds with literary prestige, the flexibility it offers and the nostalgia it seeks to capture at times, makes it more accessible to a diverse readership, viewership, and to adapters giving a voice to diverse characters.
In this seminar, we encourage papers discussing YA adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly ones that engage with the following topics in a global context. We encourage submissions that engage with theoretical frameworks such as genre studies, critical race theory, intercultural translation, feminist theory, queer theory, trans theory, disability studies, and postcolonial studies. Papers can focus on specific YA adaptations, or discuss broader trends across YA adaptations in performances, or across mediums and forms, but we are particularly interested in papers that address underrepresented voices:
– Adaptations or Appropriations of Shakespeare and Discourses of Power
– Representation and Reinvention: LGBTQAI+ and BIPOC
– Freedoms and restrictions of the YA genre
– Ethics in Shakespeare Adaptations
– Genre Mashups and Unconventional Formats
– Shakespeare and/in Translation
– Failures and Successes in Shakespearean Adaptations
– Global Perspectives in Shakespearean Adaptations
CONVENORS
Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk
University of Warsaw,Poland
a.cetera@uw.edu.pl
Raphaël Ingelbien
KU Leuven,
Belgium
raphael.ingelbien@kuleuven.be
PARTICIPANTS
Ceola Daly
University of Oxford
Katarzyna Jaworska
University of Szczecin
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik
University of Lodz
Madalina Nicolaescu
University of Bucharest
Miguel Ramalhete Gomes
University of Lisbon
Eilis Smyth
Trinity College Dublin
Jana Wild
Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava
Alicja Kitlasz
5. Temporalities and geographies of Shakespeare criticism
Shakespeare criticism is one of the oldest forms of reflection on vernacular literatures. Influential pronouncements on Shakespeare have long been recycled across media, genres and languages. At the same time, historical surveys of Shakespeare criticism are still often bound by national and linguistic borders. This is partly understandable, both for pragmatic reasons and because the rise of Shakespearomanie in different countries often went hand in hand with the development of cultural nationalism. The effect, however, has been to compartmentalize Shakespeare criticism into national traditions and to play down how writings on Shakespeare were produced, circulated and consumed across geographical, cultural and linguistic borders. The different temporalities of Shakespeare criticism also await further reflection: under what conditions do pronouncements on the Bard either lapse into the oblivion, or become part and parcel of the discipline and wider public discourse through ‘canonization’ in anthologies, casebooks, critical editions, biographies, advertisements, quotations by public figures, web resources, databases, … ?
ESRA is particularly well placed to investigate the tensions between the national and trans- or international dimensions of Shakespeare criticism, its different histories, and the ways in which new audiences are introduced to influential pronouncements that help shape how they view and approach Shakespeare.
We invite contributors to reflect on those themes, and welcome case studies on
– the extracting and anthologizing of critical pronouncements on Shakespeare, and shifting/conflicting definitions of a ‘canon’ of Shakespeare criticism.
– translations, translators and publishers of Shakespeare criticism in different languages.
– reprints of Shakespeare criticism across national and/or linguistic borders (either within Europe, or in different parts of the Anglophone world / other large linguistic areas beyond the West).
– the resonance that pronouncements on Shakespeare acquire or lose through shifting historical contexts and moments of crisis.
– lectures and lecture tours on Shakespeare (from the days of A.W. Schlegel and S.T. Coleridge to the present).
– new media (from 18th- and 19th-century periodicals to 21st-century digital platforms) and their impact on the dissemination of Shakespeare criticism.
– the tension between scholarly specialization and public outreach in the work of Shakespeare critics, and their role in the public sphere.
– the rise of English as an international academic discipline and its impact on the production of Shakespeare criticism in other vernaculars.
CONVENORS
Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau
Sorbonne Université, France
adeline.chevrier-bosseau@sorbonne-universite.fr
Mattia Mantellatto
Università Kore Enna,Italy
mattia.mantellato@unikore.it
PARTICIPANTS
Anne Nichole A. Alegre
University of the Philippines, Diliman
Sidia Fiorato
University of Verona
Natalia Shabalina
Vaganova Ballet Academy
6. Chronotopic revisions, embodiment, and adaptation in Shakespeare-inspired dance pieces
This year’s ESRA conference invites us to consider temporality from a wide array of perspectives, and this seminar aims at exploring how time and temporality play into adaptations of Shakespeare’s works into dance. Time is essential to dance as an art form: dancers have to keep time, and tempo underpins all aspects of the craft, from exercises in the studio to finding perfect adequacy between music and movement on stage for maximum expressivity. The question of time and temporality can also be raised in terms of the relevance of dance as an art form, particularly classical ballet: ballet has often been deemed “old fashioned”, “traditional”, or out of touch with the concerns and tastes of modern audiences, while contemporary dance, in its essence, engages with the present.
Drawing from Shakespeare’s universal plays and texts, choreographers, dancers, and viewers/spectators have reworked the Bard’s wor(l)ds through new, alternative and mostly unexpected “corporeal chronotopes”, to quote Bakhtin who theorized ‘time’ as a social location. The chronotope, Bakthin explains, epitomizes “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin 1981: 84), thus “time […] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; [and] likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of plot, time, history” (84). Corporeal chronotopes are particularly relevant to describe the intertwining of time and temporality with space and all other features that concur to the realization of a performative, adaptational dancing event. The process does not rely merely on the rendering “into dance” of a Shakespearian text but also encompasses practices of community building, intimacy in motion, metaphoric and corporeal ambiguities, ….
We invite contributors to interrogate dance and temporality in Shakespeare-inspired pieces by proposing papers which address (but are not limited to) issues like:
– compression, condensation, or extension of time: how is dramatic time being transposed on the dance stage? Dance has its own codes in terms of narrativity and story-telling: which involves skipping over some parts of the play, accelerating, or, on the contrary, stretching others.
– temporality and the politics of time in pieces focusing on “co-textual elements”, i.e. the ‘internal regularities’ of the performance text, and “contextual elements”, which cover ‘external aspects’ of the performance, including the cultural context or the setting, the scenario in which the performance will take place.
– temporality, relevance: How do choreographers make stylistic choices that make a piece modern and appealing to the public, or conversely, embrace tradition and the past?
– trauma, memory, past and contemporary issues: Shakespeare’s works often engage with various forms of individual as well as collective trauma (war and casualties in the history plays, betrayal, intergenerational trauma, gender violence, …). Papers can focus on the way dance pieces have addressed these issues – from Preljocaj’s transposition of the war in the Balkans in his Romeo and Juliet to Benjamin Millepied’s recent adaptation of the same play which alludes to BLM, gender and racial violence, as well as violence against the LGBTQI+ community, …
– queer temporalities: how do queer adaptations of Shakespeare’s works into dance disrupt time? Papers can draw from concepts such as Halberstam’s “Perverse Presentism” for example.
CONVENORS
Roma Tre University , Italy michela.compagnoni@uniroma3.it
Urszula KizelbachAdam Mickiewicz University, Poznań – Poland
urszulak@amu.edu.pl
PARTICIPANTS
Mahinur Akşehir
Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turkey
Valentina-Ioana Cadar
West University of Timișoara, Romania
Ilaria Diotallevi
Roma Tre University, Italy
Petru Golban
Tekirdağ Namik Kemal University, Turkey
Tatiana Golban
Tekirdağ Namik Kemal University, Turkey
Tomasz Kowalski
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Vassiliki Markidou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Lindsay Reid
University of Galway, Ireland
7. Exploring New Frontiers through Afterlives: Contemporary Reimaginings of Shakespeare by British and European Fiction Writers
In the tapestry of contemporary literature, the works of William Shakespeare have found new life, texture, and resonance. As A. J. James Hartley points out, “Shakespeare has been a recurring preoccupation of the modern novel for almost as long as it has existed in English. Indeed, the rise of the English novel paralleled the rise of Shakespeare’s own cultural star” (1). However, starting from the idea at the core of ESRA – that is, that Shakespeare is part of the European cultural heritage as much as the British – this seminar delves into the rich landscape of contemporary British and European fiction writers who have boldly appropriated Shakespeare’s plays by weaving his themes, characters, and narratives into the fabric of contemporary storytelling, thus turning cultural appropriations of Shakespeare into a literary genre in their own right.
This seminar seeks to focus on the myriad ways in which Shakespeare’s oeuvre, as an inexhaustible catalyst for afterlives, continues to inspire and shape modern fiction across national borders. We seek to unravel the threads of Shakespeare’s influence on contemporary European and British fiction since 2010 by encouraging a dialogue that bridges the gap between the early modern era and today. We also intend to address the cultural and social politics at stake in revisiting Shakespeare, taking as our starting point the very ideas of the ‘original’ and of authorship as an individual or collaborative process. Although, “unsurprisingly, the particular set of intertexts provided by the dominant, enduring, transhistorical and cross-cultural signifier of ‘Shakespeare’ and his work has provoked considerable intellectual interest” – as Julie Sanders remarks (1) – critical studies with a markedly European take are still lacking. Therefore, this seminar will move from notable examples such as Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (a thrilling reimagining of Hamlet as a self-conscious foetus) and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (which transposes themes and imagery from Shakespeare’s romances to a contemporary setting) to explore how twenty-first-century authors within and beyond the UK navigate the challenges of honouring Shakespeare’s legacy while crafting novel narratives that resonate with today’s readers and feed on European cultural memory as a whole. We invite participants to engage with a range of topics including, but not limited to, the rewriting of biographies, the reinterpretation of historical contexts, and the transformation of Shakespearean plays into contemporary fiction that rethinks them in multiple ways, sometimes even distorting them or shifting the balance of perspective from the main character to another.
References
– Andrew James Hartley (ed.), Shakespeare and Millenial Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018.
– Julie Sanders, Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-century Women Novelists and Appropriation. Machester: Manchester UP, 2001.
CONVENORS
Laura Estill
St Francis Xavier University , Canada
lestill@stfx.ca
Richard Meek
University of Hull, England
r.meek@hull.ac.uk
PARTICIPANTS
Joyce Boro
Université de Montréal, Canada
Joseph Khoury
St Francis Xavier University
Vladimir Makarov
Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Roderick H. McKeown
Yuki Nakamura
Kanto Gakuin University
Jane Rickard
University of Leeds
Jessica Tooker
Indiana University
8. Proverbial Shakespeare: Speech, Sayings and Sententiae
To adapt Hamlet’s quip, ‘What are proverbs, and what are they to Shakespeare?’ Proverbs saturated the everyday speech of early modern England and are recorded in many forms of writing – including letters and sermons, as well as plays and literary texts. Shakespeare used an estimated 4,600 proverbs in his works, employing several as titles (e.g. Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well). And, while many of these sayings are now obscure or obsolete, others have survived into the digital age, reminding us that proverbs are both historically contingent and a transhistorical phenomenon. Proverbs thus offer fertile ways of thinking about questions of shared history and cross-cultural understanding, as well as issues central to the conference theme of temporality – including the relationship between historical wisdom and the present; the influence of classical antiquity in the Renaissance; cultural memory; and Shakespeare’s linguistic afterlives. But, despite the depth and breadth of proverb use in the period, the topic has attracted surprisingly little critical attention. In scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, editors tend to identify proverbial formulations without discussing their relevance or interest in any significant detail. In the 21st century, we have seen a handful of articles on this topic, all of which stress the need for further work in this area.
This seminar will have a dual focus: first, it will consider the creative use that Shakespeare made of proverbs, sayings, and commonplaces. What do they tell us about Shakespeare’s creativity, or the proverbial culture of the Renaissance? Second, it will explore the processes by which Shakespearean phrases have themselves become ‘proverbial’ through textual and oral reproduction. We would particularly encourage papers that consider the ways in which proverbs were collected, disseminated, and translated in the period, and how this process invites comparison between English versions of proverbs with their European equivalents. More broadly, in keeping with the conference theme, we will discuss whether proverbs have currency and relevance today, particularly in relation to Shakespeare’s continuing role in shaping language and thought in Anglophone and European cultures.
A broad range of papers are invited, but possible topics might include: the use of proverbial wisdom, sayings, and/or commonplaces in particular plays, or by particular characters; rhetoric and pedagogy; classical reception; oral and literate cultures; influence and intertextuality; translation and cross-cultural proverbs; digital approaches and/or corpus linguistics; Shakespearean quotations and afterlives; presentist and present-day reflections on proverbial wisdom.
CONVENORS
Rachel E. Holmes
Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK
reh90@cam.ac.uk
Maria Sequeira Mendes
University of Lisbon, Portugal mariafmendes@campus.ul.pt
PARTICIPANTS
Stella Achilleos
Alex Davis
Giacomo Ferrari
Che Flory
Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup
Neslihan Koroglu
Arkadiusz Krupa
9. Shakespeare’s Legal Temporalities
Law and time are never far apart in the early modern imagination. But time’s relations to law, and law’s to time are manifold. In the emblem that tops Samuel Rowlands’ Sir Thomas Overbury, or the Poisoned Knight’s Complaint (1614), the prone, laurelled corpse of Sir Thomas Overbury speaks to one such relation from ‘Within [his] house of death’. Flanked by Truth and an open-eyed, raunchily gartered Justice the eternal epitaph reads: ‘Time hath revealed what to trueth belongs, / And justice sword is drawn to right my wrongs’. Time here, as in the familiar early modern adage, tells all and is the vehicle for truth telling, a salve to law’s inadequacies. However, as we see in Hamlet, time, and specifically the passage of it also ‘knock[s]’ law ‘about the sconce’ (V.1.96). One skull Hamlet highlights in the graveyard scene, ravaged by time, is the skull of a lawyer. Hamlet’s speech to it cycles through an array of legal mechanisms and documents—‘statutes’, ‘recognizances’, ‘fines’, ‘recoveries’, ‘vouchers’, ‘conveyances’, ‘indentures’ (V.1.96–110)—all temporally bound, bureaucracy too abundant to cram in the ‘box’ of the coffin that gives the illusion of security and no protection in the end. Rosalind’s—well, Ganymede’s—playful meditation on Time in the forest of Arden may be less bleak, but it is no less legal. Expounding upon Time’s ‘divers paces’ (III.2.299), Rosalind suggests Time ‘trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemniz’d’ (III.2.304–05), a joke which seems without law to gesture only to how desperate the ‘young maid’ is to leap into bed with her lover. With law in view, though, time becomes either a painful delay to the guarantee of faithfulness, or the laughingstock as a perfectly licit clandestine marriage such as Romeo and Juliet’s would, as the Nurse would encourage, get them to bed within the hour. Time’s self-professed power ‘To o’erthrow law’ (IV.1.8), to borrow from The Winter’s Tale, ‘To plant and o’erwhelm custom’ (IV.1.9), contains within it a sense of the perpetuity of legal temporalities charted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Custom, as Stephanie Elsky shows, itself a legal mode, is simultaneously anchored in the authority imported by time immemorial and the immanence of legal change. Joining the recent temporal turn in legal humanities, this seminar asks how and to what ends Shakespeare and his contemporaries turned to legal temporalities.
CONVENORS
Víctor Huertas Martín
University of Valencia,Spainvictor.huertas@uv.es
Maria Elisa Montironi
University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italymaria.montironi@uniurb.it
Yauheniya Yakubovich
University of Valencia,
Spainyauheniya.yakubovich@uv.es
PARTICIPANTS
Sylvaine Bataille Brennetot
University of Rouen Normandie
Juan José Bermúdez de Castro
University of the Balearic Islands
Jakub Boguszak
University of Southampton
Stephen M. Buhler
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Anna Maria Cimitile
University of Naples L’Orientale
Tommaso Continisio
Tor Vergata University of Rome
Melissa Croteau
California Baptist University
Emma De Beus
Queen’s University Belfast
Jacek Fabiszak
Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań
Remedios Perni
University of Alicante
Beatriz Simões
Literature student at the University of Lisbon’s School of Arts and Humanities and Gulbenkian New Talents Fellow
10. Time out of joint in screened Shakespeares
In Shakespeare’s plays, the tripartite division of time into past, present, and future is, in many ways, mixed up. The past can be, as Lucy Munro claims, ‘historical, mythical or fictional; it may be a site of memory, subjectivity or nostalgia; it can be dynastic or popular in its concerns; the past may even turn out to be simultaneously the present, or even the future’ (‘Shakespeare and the uses of the past’, 2011: 105). The history plays offer narratives of England’s past to celebrate and legitimise its present—and possibly even to shape its future. The idea of translatio imperii anchors England’s present and future to its Trojan and Roman past. Moreover, Shakespeare’s use of medieval literature, folklore and theatre often blurs the distinction between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Anachronisms disrupt time settings, and the plethora of classical sources Shakespeare draws from, mediated by his artistic imagination, is testament to the force and function of literary reception for present concerns.
The categories of past, present, and future are also mixed up in the screened adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. According to Deborah Cartmell, the ‘films of Shakespeare’s plays are not escapist representations of an idyllic past’ but rather meet ‘the need to “concretise”, to make the text “more real”’ (Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, 2000: 3), often with the aim of ‘spread[ing] the word’ of Shakespeare, seen as the ‘national prophet’, and ‘convert others’ (2000: 3–4). Diana E. Henderson termed the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays as Collaborations with the Past (2006), which Reshape Shakespeare Across Time and Media, as the subtitle goes, while (re)producing present and future cultural and historical issues. Shakespearean heritage is what ‘screen Shakespeares from Branagh to Luhrmann invoke and rely on’, according to Pascale Aebischer, who also noticed a ‘latent nostalgia for a “gentle” Shakespeare’ in such cinematic tradition, to which she counterpoises the aesthetic of the ‘preposterous “contemporary Jacobean”’ (‘Shakespearean Heritage’, 2009: 279).
Over the decades, the tripartite division of time has been transformed by the audiovisual media history. To which pasts, presents and futures do the filmmakers, production teams and cinematographies refer? How accurate and prescient are the observations made by these adaptations? In light of the current events, how accurate are the observations about past, present and future made (through a Shakespearean lens) by the present audiovisual industry?
This seminar aims to extend the research on these issues and welcomes papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
– Shakespeare and the making of national pasts
– Questioning the present through Shakespeare films
– Envisaging futures through Shakespeare films
– Genre, time, and cinematic adaptations
– Sexuality, race, class, and time in screened Shakespeares
– Nostalgic / oblivious / irreverent screened Shakespeares
– Time and gender issues on screen
– Tropes of time in Shakespeare films
CONVENORS
Juan F. Cerdá
University of Murcia, Spain juanfcerda@um.es
Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan
University of Murcia, Spain jennifersalud.ruiz@um.es
PARTICIPANTS
Daniel Ambrona
San Vicente Mártir Catholic University of Valencia, Spain
Lyudmila Artemjeva
Independent researcher,Belgrade, Serbia
Elena Bandín
Universidad de León
Kinga Földváry
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary
Xenia Georgopoulou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Sabina Laskowska-Hinz
University of Warsaw and University of Gdansk
Kiki Lindell Tersmeden
Lund University ,Sweden
Vanessa Palomo Berjaga
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Dídac Pujol
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Francesca Rayner
Universidade do Minho
Miсkaël Savchenko
Independent researcher, Paris (France)
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
University of Caen-Normandie, ERIBIA, THALIM, CNRS, France
Erica Sheen
University of York, UK
Burak Urucu
Istanbul University–Cerrahpasa School of Foreign Languages
Veronika Schandl
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary
11. European Performance and Adaptations of Richard III
Although inspired by the rule of the last Plantagenet king and embedded in the changing political climate of late Elizabethan England, practitioners and audiences worldwide have for centuries been captivated by Richard III’s exploration of evil, tyrannical rule, civil violence, and disability. Its global allure has made it the most popular of Shakespeare’s history plays in languages other than English. Historically, interpretations have favoured critical responses and representations that have exaggerated the protagonist’s physical “deformity” to visually highlight his Machiavellian nature. But since the rise of Disability Studies a more nuanced and humane approach has been adopted to portray Richard instead as a victim by examining the way that his disability negatively affects his self-image and his relationship with the outside world. The seminar intends to explore this and other shifts in the cultural circulation of Richard III throughout Europe by concentrating on non-anglophone contexts to expand our understanding of the play’s global reception from its 16th-century inception to the present. We particularly favour contributions which relate particular interventions (artistic or otherwise) to broader regional, national or transnational concerns and to the history of Shakespeare’s reception in these contexts. We are looking for innovative work that explores the performance and adaptation of the play worldwide. Contributions on any of the following are welcome:
– Richard III in European theatrical, operatic, cinematic, televisual or online performance;
– Different European versions (adaptations, rewritings, appropriations, updates) of Richard III;
– Translations of Richard III into non-Anglophone languages: the importance and impact of those translations in their target cultures and in intercultural contexts;
– The reception of Anglophone Richard III in non-Anglophone contexts, or the reception of non-Anglophone Richard III in Anglophone contexts;
– Traveling Richard III: international tours, intercultural performances;
– Richard III in global digital culture;
– Theoretical reflections on Richard III as a case study of “global Shakespeare”.
CONVENORS
Karen Raber
University of Mississippi, USA kraber@olemiss.edu
Monika Sosnowska
University of Łódź, Poland monika.sosnowska@uni.lodz.pl
PARTICIPANTS
Kaitlyn Culliton
Shannon E. Kelley
Dr. Fabiny Tibor
Susan C Staub
Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu
Sara Soncini
Daniel Brayton
Rebecca W Bushnell
Guillem Mas Solé
Thomas Kullmann
Jeffrey Theis
Liz Oakley-Brown
Natalia Zelezinskaya
12. Nature’s Time
In As You Like It, Rosalind describes time for Orlando in animal terms: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal” (3.2. 260-262). Reaching for a metaphor that can convey the subjective experience of time, what Rosalind comes up with is what we might call “horse time,” which is measured via equine paces. Rosalind’s zoomorphic imagery is only one way in which time is described in terms of the nonhuman in Shakespeare’s works: Ferdinand’s “devouring cormorant time” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.4) or “worm time” in Sonnet 71 when the poet goes “with vilest worms to dwell (4) join instances of “plant time” in in Macbeth, when Banquo refers to the “seeds of time” that may or may not grow in future (1.3.58-59), or in Sonnet 15’s advice that “men as plants increase” though even those without offspring can live on if “engrafted” by the poet. Heavenly bodies like the moon might dominate characters’ sense of time passing as is the case for the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while in that play the conflict between Titania and Oberon confuses the seasons, which change “their wonted liveries” (2.1.113), as if they were costumed bodies. Human time—whether abstract, or clock-driven, or expressed in human bodily change—is situated through these moments as only one version of what time can be, perhaps even as a construct that is hollow, not truly available as a thing in itself.
This seminar takes up the question of how “nature’s time,” imagined broadly as any version of temporality that is associated with nonhuman entities and phenomena, functions in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What kinds of “time” are found in forests, rivers, animals, oceans, rivers, landscapes, the heavens and other aspects of the natural world? What divergent kinds of time does nature supply and what are the consequences of each version of time for our understanding of the plays and poems, of history, of time itself? How do personifications like bald “Father Time” or the god Chronos with his harvester’s sickle, embody or encompass natural processes, and how might they articulate with or oppose nonhuman incarnations of time? What alternate histories about Shakespeare’s world can we tell based on “nature’s time”?
CONVENORS
Nely Keinänen
University of Helsinki, Finland
nely.keinanen@helsinki.fi
Per Sivefors
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
per.sivefors@gu.se
PARTICIPANTS
Nely Keinänen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Per Sivefors
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Reut Barzilai
University of Haifa, Israel
Natalia Khomenko
York University, Canada
Zoltán Márkus
Vassar College, USA
Anna Swärdh
Stockholm University
Kohei Uchimaru
Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan
13. Shakespeare and European Democracy: Routes, History and Futures
Over time, Shakespeare has had a divisive relation to European democracy. Appropriations by democratic as well as overtly anti-democratic forces in European history have created a heterogenous picture that is in particular need of discussion at a historical moment when democratic institutions are perceived as under threat or eroding. Historically, some of the more extensive discussions of Shakespeare and democracy took place at the time of modern democratic breakthroughs and at times when democracy was at its nadir (e.g. the Second World War), and we believe that this discussion has to be re-vitalized, both in terms of the uses of Shakespeare for political purposes, and in terms of the views of Shakespeare as a democratic or anti-democratic writer. Which plays and characters emerge as significant in political discussions about democracy at different time periods and for what purposes? How are themes such as tyrants/tyranny, absolutism, political consent, citizenship, the body politic, and mob rule discussed in relation to Shakespeare more generally, or in connection with specific performances? Was Shakespeare mentioned in connection with debates about female suffrage, or other expansions of voting rights, and/or did specific productions highlight this issue? Are there cases in which Shakespeare was taught or studied—e.g., in schools, workplaces, adult education centers—for democracy?
We welcome paper proposals on how Shakespeare has been historically integrated into European democratic institutions (e.g. systems of education, publicly funded theatres) and how Shakespeare has been approached, in performance, translation or criticism, as a political thinker on the question of democracy. Although we do not impose a strict chronological framework, we are particularly interested in contributions that deal with European Shakespeare from the so-called “first wave of democracy” and onward, i.e. from the first half of the 19th century until present time.
CONVENORS
Sarah Lewis
King’s College, London – UK sarah.lewis@kcl.ac.uk
Kristine Johanson
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands k.a.johanson@uva.nl
Alison Findlay
Lancaster Univ., UK a.g.findlay@lancaster.ac.uk
PARTICIPANTS
Evrim Doğan Adanur
Fenerbahçe University
Jordi Coral
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Kate De Rycker
Newcastle
Lynn S. Meskill
University of Toulouse II
Agnes Matuska
University of Szeged
Tobias Doering
LMU Munich
Sélima Lejri
University of Tunis
Mike Ingham
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Miryana Dimitrova
Jessica Chiba
Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Öz Öktem
Istanbul Aydin University
Shankar Raman
MIT
Manuel Portela
University of Coimbra
Daniel Vitkus
University of California, San Diego
14. The Present in the Instant: Shakespeare and ‘the now’
What are the meanings of ‘now’ in Shakespeare and early modern studies? Using as a starting point a transhistorical interest in the significance of ‘now’ in the early modern period and in our contemporary moment, this seminar invites contributions from scholars working on any aspect of ‘nowness’ in Shakespeare and early modern literature and culture studies. Papers might consider how the concept of ‘now’ was understood in Shakespeare’s own historical moment and in early modern cultures more broadly. What was the temporal experience of ‘now’ for early modern writers, readers and playgoers? Which cultural frameworks (religious, literary, performative, colonial, political etc.) made use of the idea of nowness, and what work was ‘now’ made to do? They might also explore the ways in which Shakespeare scholarship is relevant to our own cultural moment: is ‘now’ the right time for Shakespeare? How – if at all – are Shakespeare and his works rendered an essential part of our ‘now’?
The notion of ‘now’ could include, but is not limited to: Kairos (opportunity, occasion, right-timing, proper measure); the concept of the present and its relationship with past and future; momentary time (as it might be opposed to longevity or periodisation) and the concept of the moment or instant (in terms of revelation, transformation, epiphany etc.); the development of a material ‘now’ (e.g. through temporal technology); or other temporal concepts including ephemerality, immediacy, pause, stasis, continual presence (and therefore eternity), or the idea of timing itself.
CONVENORS
Imke Lichterfeld
University of Bonn, Germany
lichterfeld@uni-bonn.de
Oana-Alis Zaharia
University of Bucharest, Romania
oana-alis.zaharia@lls.unibuc.ro
PARTICIPANTS
Zsolt Almási
Budapest, Hungary
Louis Andre
Université de Poitiers
Dominic Gilani
University of Bristol
Jennifer Low
Florida Atlantic University
Julie Raby
York St John
Gabriella Reuss
Budapest, Hungary
Raffaella Sero
Cambridge University
Asseline Sel Namur
15. Hegemonic, Legitimate, Toxic, Queer? – Shakespeare and Masculinity in Time
Connell and Messerschmidt coined the phrase ‘hegemonic masculinity’ seen as “ideologically legitimat[ing] the [patriarchal] global subordination of women to men” (Raewyn Connell) but its more recent specification includes “a gender inequality that recognizes the agency of subordinated groups as much as the power of hegemonic groups” (James Messerschmidt). This draws on intersectional issues not only concerning gender but also race, class, age, sexual orientation, and questions of nationalism. How is manhood represented in early modern drama? What is masculinity in Shakespeare? How is it refashioned, revisited, reworked in modern adaptations?
Hegemonic masculinity seems to encourage a ‘toxic’ model which demands appearing mentally and physically dominant, eschewing weakness, and supressing emotions (Jennifer Vaught, Coppelia Kahn). It is often based on patriarchal expectations, and it involves ambition, authoritarian rule, and tyranny (Bruce Smith). Rulership is embedded in a dynamic system of values. What are the dimensions of strength and power in a nation? Weak leadership was connected with the idea of ‘effeminate’, ‘illegitimate’, or ‘queer’ behaviour which can cause anxiety in the ‘legitimate’ masculine-oriented society (Mark Breitenberg). ’Effeminacy’ in early modern England included virtually everything that was not claimed as distinctively masculine (Alan Sinfield). Does sovereignty have to be masculine and display ‘the heart and stomach of a king’? How are intrinsically patriarchal gender expectations, inequality, and masculine images of violence displayed in plays?
Shakespeare presents individual characters both adhering to and struggling against heteronormative ideals, such as being strong, masculine, and Machiavellian. His drama seems to gauge possibilities on how to play with masculine, physical, and possibly toxic power structures. Our seminar aims to explore different ideas of masculinity in the histories and tragedies of Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights, examining how modern adaptations challenge or critically engage in reimagining masculinity and its intersections.
We are seeking paper proposals for a seminar discussion based on the following aspects of text and performance:
– Local, regional, national, European, and global adaptations
– presentation of strong and weak leaders or heirs apparent and non-apparent (younger and illegitimate siblings)
– politically explosive circumstances of adaptations
– war ethics, patriarchal responsibilities, questions of lineage, villainy, pressure, trauma
– gender, effeminacy, heteronormativity
– historiographical establishment of ideals, memorials, adoration
– new models of masculinity, sustainable governments, and balanced societies
CONVENORS
Daria Moskvitina
Zaporizhzhia State Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Ukraine
daryamoskvitina@gmail.com
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
oana.gheorghiu@ugal.ro
Bohdan Korneliuk
Khortytsia National Academy, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
korneljukbogdan@ukr.net
CANCELLED
16. ‘Till I have learned thy language’: the challenges and prospects of translating Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama in Eastern and Central Europe
In Central and Eastern Europe, historically, the process of translating Shakespeare meant not as much the establishment of cultural dialogue and promotion of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, as fashioning the political discourse and shaping national consciousness. After the fall of the Berlin Wall which marked the reunion not only for East and West Germany but for all Europe, Shakespeare in translation remains a crucial topic for many countries of the region, since not all of them have the Complete Works in their native language (especially given the recent extension of the Shakespearean canon). The dynamic of the new translations is quite non-uniform ranging from a very successful The New Romanian Shakespeare series to only a few 21st-century translations in Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Armenian… At the same time, a lot of Central and Eastern European cultures have developeda one-legged view of Shakespeare as a single shining genius amidst the desert because little is known in the public domain about his fellow playwrights and very few of their works have been translated to enter the national repertoires. Thus, the map of translated Shakespeare and Early Modern English Drama in Central and Eastern Europe is seen as quite patchy, with certain lacunae which this seminar may help to identify.
The seminar aims to elucidate modern issues of translating the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries into the languages of Central and Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the following questions:
– What has changed in the selection of plays for translations, and how have the translators’ approaches evolved?
– Has the Complete Works in a national language been published? What challenges have the publishers faced and what coping strategies have they used?
– How do translations shape the national reception of Shakespeare as a lonely genius or, on the contrary, reproduce the diversity of the English Elizabethan and Jacobean drama?
– Which new approaches to Shakespeare are employed by the translators; are they justified?
– What type of translation prevails – that for the stage or that for the page; how (can) they correlate?
– How does the book market influence the upsurge or the drop in translations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries?
CONVENORS
Isabel Karremann
University of Zurich, Switzerland
karremann@es.uzh.ch
Kirsten Sandrock
University of Würzburg, Germany
kirsten.sandrock@uni-wuerzburg.de
PARTICIPANTS
Pascale Aebischer
Exeter
Allison Lemley
Frankfurt /Bamberg
Anna Louri
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Efterpi Mitsi
Athens
Mikkel-Theis Paulsen
Aarhus
Hannah Persson
Lund
Steve Rohan-Jones
University of Queensland
Katrina Spadaro
Freie Universität Berlin
Annamária Fábián
Eötvös Loránd Univ., Budapest
17. The Temporal Affordances of Shakespeare’s Drama – Time, Space, and the Senses
When Lear asks the blinded Gloucester on his way to Dover how the latter is able “to see how this world goes” without relying on his eyes, Gloucester famously answers: “I see it feelingly” (4.6.143-45). In a play deeply embedded in the negotiation of multiple temporalities – past, present, and future – the fusion of the sensual and the spatial in the exchange between Lear and Gloucester is telling. Gloucester not only experiences the world “feelingly”; he also sees “how this world goes,” i.e., how it develops and changes over time. Put differently, the fusion of the sensual and the spatial has a clear temporal connotation in King Lear that opens up multiple possibilities for understanding the play’s polychronic timeframes.
In this proposed seminar, we examine these and other kinds of temporal affordances of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre, focusing especially on the intersections of spaces, senses, and temporality. How do Shakespeare’s plays enact the embodied experience of time and space on the early modern stage? How are the multiple temporalities of his dramas negotiated through spatial and sensual understandings of the world? To what extent does the material environment in the play and in the playhouse afford certain experiences of the passing of time? How are, for instance, experiences of movement through time and space, such as speed or of falling, articulated as well as staged? And what can we learn heuristically when focusing on intersections of space, sense perception, and temporality? In addition to analysing representations of time, space, and the senses in Shakespeare’s plays, our seminar encourages participants to explore these concepts through intersectional approaches that generate a profound understanding of Shakespeare’s creative and theatrical practices. We are particularly interested in exploring novel ways of linking these frameworks together and thinking about the temporal affordances that the interplay of time, space, and the senses unfold in Shakespeare’s plays and in the early modern theatre.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– embodied geographies of past, present, and future
– the materialization of time in (objects of) the environment
– intersectional approaches to time/space
– sense studies and time/space
– spatial studies and cultural geography from a temporal perspective
– cognitive approaches to Shakespeare and time/space
– the body in time and space: proprioception and kinesic intelligence on the Shakespearean stage
– movement and mobility in Shakespeare’s plays and in the theatre
– transhistorical approaches to embodiments of time and space
CONVENORS
Emanuel Stelzer
University of Verona, Italy
emanuel.stelzer@univr.it
Evgeniia Ganberg
Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK
eg603@cam.ac.uk
PARTICIPANTS
Jemma Forster
Chiara Di Dio
Wanjie Feng
Atsuhiko Hirota
Eric Nicholson
Nicholas Luke
Janice Valls-Russell
Yves Peyré
Carla Suthren
18. “O ye immortal gods”: The Time of the Gods in Shakespeare
Peter Saccio wrote (when talking about the portrayals of pagan gods in Lyly’s comedies) that “the long tradition behind [the gods] makes them compelling centers of energy in generating potential significances for the episodes in which they appear” (1969, 97). Shakespeare stages theophany in several ways: through poignant dream visions (Diana in Pericles and Jupiter in Cymbeline), through spectacle and metatheatrical masque (the gods played by Ariel and the other spirits on Prospero’s orders in The Tempest and Hymen’s blink-of-an-eye appearance at the beginning of The Two Noble Kinsmen), as characters proper (Hymen in As You Like It and cf. Middleton’s Hecate in Macbeth), and through a more indefinite sense of the manifestation of the sacred (e.g. Apollo, Time, and “great creating Nature” in The Winter’s Tale). Shakespeare’s characters often invoke the gods in oaths and prayers but are also themselves deified or juxtaposed with gods and goddesses (“O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!” in A Midsummer’s Night Dream; “Which is that god in office, guiding men? / Which is the high and mighty Agamemnon?” in Troilus and Cressida;“If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer: his glory shall be ours, for we are the only love-gods” in Much Ado About Nothing). This seminar wishes to address questions such as the following:
– Which temporalities do the gods serve, disrupt, or represent in Shakespeare’s plays?
– Does the time of epiphany/hierophany/theophany puncture natural time? Does it coexist with it?
– Which pasts do the gods represent? Which “unpath’d” futurities do they promise?
– Can the future be prophesied in Shakespeare?
– Is euhemerism a relic of the past? Or is deification the future awaiting certain characters?
– Do prayer and invocation affect the course of time in Shakespeare?
– In what ways do the “Roman gods” feel out of time on the Elizabethan and the Jacobean stages? What are the functions of their representation?
– Is the time of the gods in Shakespeare a metatheatrical time?
– How is the sacred temporally signified?
– How does genre structure the time of the gods in Shakespeare?
– What is the relationship between divine time (or lack thereof), silence, and music?
CONVENORS
Carolyn Sale
University of Alberta, Canada
sale@ualberta.ca
Amy Tigner
University of Texas, Arlington, USA
atigner@uta.edu
PARTICIPANTS
Claudia Richter
David Goldstein
Stephanie Shirilan
Elizabeth Freestone
Peter A Parolin
Katarzyna Burzyńska
Saraya Haddad
Miriam Jacobson
19. Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis
When the UK’s Extinction Rebellion occupied Westminster Bridge in 2019, they brought with them potted shrubs and trees, an action mirroring that of Birnam Wood marching upon Dunsinane. Shakespeare here served as a form of insurgency aiming to protect life on Earth from the depredations variously described as that of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Eurocene. The last two approaches would make all of humanity in our century the inheritors of a legacy shaped by developments in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. Will this “line” of developments continue to “stretch out to the crack of doom” or has “doom” already arrived in what seem to be the “end times”? How might Shakespeare help us ensure that our own historical moment is not that of a “peak humanity” from which there cannot be anything other than a dreadful regression?
Taking as its emblem Janus, the figure who looks to the past to orient present considerations and decision-making to the future, this seminar asks participants to engage Shakespearean drama to articulate understandings of our global ecological crisis that might position humanity to write hopeful futures for itself and non-human species. How does Shakespeare assist us in discussing the worlds we have made and the worlds we might make, as we interact with “the creative anime of all things” (Grove, Savage Ecology)? How can we put Shakespeare to work now, with an acute sense of our historical conjuncture, to make his drama speak to our global ecological crisis?
We encourage both traditional scholarly work and work that experimentally orients to ecological crisis in its myriad dimensions. Where might we turn in the Shakespearean drama for instances of poetic imagination to aid us in cultivating critical and creative capacity and in navigating us through crisis to new social possibilities? What innovative forms of teaching, scholarship, and performance might assist in creating a sense of the urgency and the hopefulness of the necessary action? How does Shakespeare enable us to visualize the new forms of sociality and the new geopolitics that would triumph over continuing climate change denial and ecocide? What demands does Shakespeare help us make of law, both within national jurisdictions and across them, to meet the exigencies of “crisis”? And what other literature might we mobilize in conjunction with Shakespeare’s work to imagine a transformation of humanity that would allow for reciprocal and mutually sustaining relations among human, non-human, and extra-human “nature”?
CONVENORS
Ema Vyroubalová
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
vyroubae@tcd.ie
Natália Pikli
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
pikli.natalia@btk.elte.hu
PARTICIPANTS
Irwin Appel
University of California Santa Barbara
Stephanie Shirilan
Syracuse University, USA
Yael Bassan
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
Sarah Crover
Vancouver Island University (Canada)
Dixon Graham
Charleston/South Carolina and Trinity College, Dublin
Maria-Clara Versiani Galery
University of Toronto/Ouro Preto
Ramji Yadav
H.E.S Haryana, India
Nancy Yadav
School of Languages Galgotias University, India
20. Trauma, memory, and commemoration in Shakespearean theatre
This seminar invites proposals for papers discussing Shakespearean performances that focus on the processing of national and/or communal trauma(s). In case of such politically charged productions, theatre-makers must often perform a precarious balancing act between the Scylla and Charybdis of the propagandistic/didactic and the over-aestheticized; therefore, the seminar invites papers that pay special attention to how the performances negotiate between these two tendencies. Contributors are encouraged to include a discussion of professional-critical and ‘lay’ reception of the performances as well, with attention to the commemorative and/or trauma-processing impact on wider audiences. The productions discussed should date from the 1990s or later and may originate in any country although the seminar is particularly interested in productions connected to the East-Central European region. In case of non-English-speaking performances, the paper should also address the question of translation or any other linguistic adaptation and its relationship to the trauma-processing or commemorating element.
The seminar invites contributions addressing any of the following questions:
– What theatrical forms serve the purpose of processing national and/or communal traumas best?
– How close can these productions remain to the original early modern texts? Do looser adaptations or more strictly “Shakespearean” play-texts feature more frequently in such productions?
– How are these politically charged productions received by professionals in comparison with the wider media and non-professional audiences?
– What kinds of national/communal traumas lend themselves more (or less) easily to theatrical processes?
– Can any universal features be identified in such productions, or do they tend to remain more local in concept? How ‘transferable’ is one theatrical form of processing trauma to different cultures/times/countries/languages?
– How can theatre help a wider audience or a whole community in the processing of trauma?