ESRA Conference 2019 – Abstract Book

Home , 2019 World Cup of Pool, Alice Birch, Amleto, Braham Murray, Characters in Hamlet, Dating Hamlet

ISBN 9788894370812

Convenors

Prof. Maria Del Sapio Garbero Roma Tre University

Professor Emerita of English Literature at Roma Tre University, former Vice President of the School of Humanities and member of CROMA Council (Centro Studi su Roma). She is a member of the ESRA Board, founding Honorary President of the “Shakespeare’s Rome International Summer School” (SRISS), co- General Editor of the series “Biblioteca di Studi Inglesi” (ESL). She has coordinated the “Shakespeare’s Rome Project” since 2004. Other current research areas: Shakespeare and early modern theories of bodies and epistemology, Shakespeare and the visual arts, Shakespeare and gender, Hamlet’s appropriations. Among her book publications: Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances, Rome in Shakespeare’s World (ed), Shakespeare and the New Science in Early Modern Culture (ed), Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (ed), Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (co- ed), La traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea(ed). She was in the Steering Committee of the International Conference “Shakespeare 2016. The Memory of Rome”.

Prof. Maddalena Pennacchia Roma Tre University

Associate Professor of English Literature at Roma Tre University, where she is also Director of ‘Shakespeare’s Rome International Summer School’ (SRISS) and Project Director of the digitized Silvano Toti Globe Theatre Archive. She served in the Board of IASEMS (Italian Association of Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies) from 2009 to 2012 and is in the editorial and advisory board of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. She was in the Planning Team of the International Conference “Shakespeare 2016. The Memory of Rome”. She has published extensively on the re-use and re-mediation of Rome in Shakespeare’s plays as well as on Shakespeare on screen and in performance. Selected publications: Shakespeare intermediale. I drammi romani, Tracce del moderno nel teatro di Shakespeare, Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (co-ed), Literary Intermediality (ed), Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (co-ed).

Advisory Board

Prof. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Roma Tre University (Convenor) Prof. Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University (Convenor) Prof. Rui Carvalho Homem, University of Porto Dr. Lisanna Calvi, University of Verona

ISBN 9788894370812

General Guidelines

ESRA 2019 deals with processes of remapping, with consequences for early modern discourses on borders, nations, territories, the world. It prompts discussions of the place held by such processes in the culture of the period, but it also foregrounds the various ways in which they are relevant for current preoccupations and concerns.

As we know, early modern European geography was shattered by a series of disruptive events which resulted not just in a remapping of borders, nations, and world, but had a bearing in problematizing the very notion of space and the place human beings held in a changing order of the universe. Discoveries of new lands and new perimeters, originating from a thirst for knowledge, political ambition, wars, not to mention wars of religion and the reshuffled and transversal geographies designed by faith in post-Reformation Europe, were such as to redefine the sense of belonging, physically as well as mentally, and spiritually.

Questions related to this topic are at the core of Shakespeare’s figurations of multifaceted physical and mental landscapes. And the geographical turn of the past few decades has made us aware of the wide range of thematic, ideological, and theoretical issues related to it.

Our European contemporary geography, constantly redefined by new walls as well as the trespassing movement of massive flows of migrant human beings, invites us to interrogate anew the heuristic and ethical potential of that turn; it also encourages us to bring to the fore and reassess the pervasiveness and problematics of the experience of exile, displacement and dispossession in Shakespearean drama. Thus the topic should be found engaging and compelling by the ESRA community, now that our geopolitics and sense of belonging are being challenged and readjusted, daily, by the crises of human mobility.

All in all the chosen topic provides ample scope for epistemological approaches as well as for discovering new proximities with the Souths of the world and between Northern and Mediterranean seas, daily crossed and redesigned by thousands of stories of outcasts and shipwrecks.

The topic also invites to discover new contiguities between past and present. Ancient Rome, with its expanded geography, looms large on Shakespeare’s imagination. Rome was a world-wide stage on which to project the performances of the Elizabethans’ growing imperial ambitions, in a logic of translatio imperii, or of “cultural mobility” in the terms it is being re-conceptualized nowadays. But Rome was also a global stage on which to address issues as crucial as centre, periphery, edges, borders, landmarks, elsewheres, otherness, hybridity, cross-cultural encounters and dynamics. Thus the topic suits productively the variety of Shakespeare’s geographies as well as the chosen Roman venue.

Keynotes

Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard University)

Lecture: Survival Strategies: Shakespeare and Renaissance Truth- Telling

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fourteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare. He was named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and has been elected to membership in the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi.

Silvia Bigliazzi (University of Verona)

Lecture: Fluid Borders: Rethinking Power Centres in Shakespeare’s Rome

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at Verona University. Her interests span early modern English drama with a focus on Shakespeare and the classical legacy, Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry, early modern scepticism and the culture of paradox, interart, translation and performance studies. Her publications include volumes on Hamlet, nothingness in Shakespeare, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, as well as the editions with Italian translations of John Donne’s poetry and Romeo and Juliet. She is co-General Editor of Global Shakespeare Inverted (Bloomsbury), Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, Skenè. Texts and Studies, and Anglica (ETS).

Andrew Hiscock (Bangor University)

Lecture: Shakespeare and his World: Testing Us to Our Very Limits

Andrew Hiscock is Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales, and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. He has published widely on English and French early modern literature. He is a Fellow of the English Association, English literature editor of the journal MLR and series co-editor of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. His most recent monograph is entitled Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press) and in 2018 he co-edited (with Helen Wilcox) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion and (with Lina Perkins Wilder) The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory.

Loredana Scaramella (Silvano Toti Globe Theatre – Stage Director)

Lecture: ‘O brave new world’: Dis-placing Shakespeare at the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome

Loredana Scaramella is actress, director, casting director and writer for theatre and television. She has collaborated with some of the major figures of the experimental theatre, such as Mario Ricci, Giuliano Vasilicò and Benno Besson. She was assistant director of Romeo e Giulietta (2003 and 2013) and Edmund Kean (2016) both directed by Gigi Proietti at the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome, where she also directed and translated Molto rumore per nulla (2006 and 2014), Come vi piace (2007), Il Mercante di Venezia (2008 and 2015), and La bisbetica domata (2018). She authored and directed Playing Shakespeare, a lecture performance on Elizabethan theatre.

Forum

Coordinated by Ton Hoenselaars (University of Utrecht) with Mariacristina Cavecchi (State University of Milan) and Pavel Drábek (University of Hull)

Ton Hoenselaars is Professor English Renaissance literature at Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and was the first president of ESRA.

Books include Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (Arden, 2004). More recently, he published the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (2012), Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (with Dirk Delabastita [John Benjamins, 2015]), Shakespeare Forever! Leven en mythe, werk en erfenis (Wereldbibliotheek, 2017), and Shakespeare and Commemoration (with Clara Calvo [Berghahn, 2019]). He is currently completing a monograph on Shakespeare and World War I.

Mariacristina Cavecchi is associate professor of British Theatre and British Literature at Milan University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays for theatre and cinema, Prison Shakespeare, Shakespeare in contemporary popular culture and Shakespeare in street art. She published Shakespeare mostro contemporaneo (1998) and co-edited Shakespeare & Scespir (2005), Shakespeare Graffiti. Il Cigno di Avon nella cultura di massa (2002), EuroShakespeares. Exploring Cultural Practice in an International Context (2002) and Shakespeare 400. Will Forever Young! (2017). She was on the board of IASEMS, Italian Association of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies, from 2012 to 2018.

Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull (UK), specializing in Shakespeare, early modern theatre, translation, adaptation, and theatre theory. He also writes and translates for opera, radio, and theatre. Selected works: České pokusy o Shakespeara(2012), Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (co-ed. M. A. Katritz-ky, 2019). Currently he is working with Ondřej Kyas and Josh Overton on a new opera enti-tled Bylo nebylo / You Wish (2020), a book on Adapting and Translating for the Stage, and as a contributing editor on The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography.

ISBN 9788894370812

List of Seminars

A World Without Hamlet

Convenors Eleine Ng, De Montfort University Varsha Panjwani, NYU London Anne Sophie Refskou, University of Surrey

Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Convenors Shaul Bassi, Ca’Foscari University of Venice Christy Desmet, University of Georgia Nora Galland, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia

Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Convenors Sophie Chiari, Universite Clermont Auvergne Janet Elizabeth Clare, University of Hull

Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Convenors Luca Baratta, University of Florence Alice Equestri, University of Sussex

‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Convenors Silvia Bigliazzi, University of Verona Elena Marie Pellone, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham David Jonathan Schalkwyk, Queen Mary University of London

“Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Convenors Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University Alessandra Squeo, University of Bari “Aldo Moro” Reto Winckler, Chinese University of Hong Kong

“Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Convenors Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Tischner European University

Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Convenors Dana Monah, University of Iasi Estelle Rivier-Arnaud, Grenoble-Alpes University

Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Convenors Francesca Rayner, Universidade do Minho Kirilka Stavreva, Cornell College

Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Convenors Sergio Costola, Southwestern University Michael Saenger, Southwestern University

Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

Convenors David J. Amelang, Freie Universität Berlin Carla Della Gatta, University of Southern California

Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

Convenors Alina Bottez, Universityh of Bucharest Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau, Université Blaise-Pascal, F- Clermont-Ferrand Nancy Isenberg, Roma Tre University

Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Convenors Michelle Assay, Université Paris Sorbonne David Fanning, University of Manchester Aleksei Semenenko, University of Stockholm

Shakespeare and Music

Convenors: Michelle Assay, Université Paris Sorbonne (FR), University of Huddersfield David Fanning, University of Manchester

Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

Convenors Maria Luisa De Rinaldis, University of Salento Paul J.M.C. Franssen, Utrecht University

Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Convenors Monica Alcantar, University of Bergamo Mika Eglinton, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

Convenors Natalia Brzozowska, IRCL – University of Montpellier 3 Jacek Fabiszak, Adam Mickiewicz University

Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Convenors Victoria Bladen, University of Queensland Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University Márta Minier, University of South Wales

The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

Convenors Camilla Caporicci, University of Padova Armelle Sabatier, Panthéon-Assas University, Paris

Shakespearean Migrations

Convenors Maria Elisa Montironi, University of Urbino Stephen O’Neill, Maynooth University Cristina Paravano, University of Milano

Seminar

A World Without Hamlet

Eleine Ng1, Varsha Panjwani2, Anne Sophie Refskou3

1(De Montfort University); 2NYU London, United Kingdom; 3University of Surrey; [email protected]

For centuries, the misogyny of the Danish court from Hamlet to Claudius and from Polonius to the Ghost, has informed the portrayal of Gertrude as lustful and self-indulgent and Ophelia as mild and ineffectual. But, what happens when actresses, directors, artists, and writers refuse to let the assessments of these male characters colour their interpretation? The result is Gertrudes in Haider (an Indian Hamlet film), The Banquet (a Chinese Hamlet film), or in Gertrude and Claudius (an American novel). These adaptations give us an insight into Gertrude as character who is politically shrewd, aware of her sexual prowess, loving, and authoritative. Similarly, the result is Ophelias like those in HamletScenen’s 2017 Danish/UK theatrical adaptation of the play or in Brazilian artist Lucia Castanho’s photo essay which present her as a thoughtful, clear-sighted, observant, supportive, heartbroken, and even defiant character. These Gertrudes and Ophelias are not there just to expand the world of Hamlet but rather are integral in understanding the play and its fatal ending. We are interested in these layered interpretations from different parts of the globe.

We argue that such a trans-cultural focus on the sociopolitical contexts of women both within and outside the world of the play does not run counter to the text but instead gives us a new lens to reimagine the play and re-configure its meanings. Moreover, it ensures that we broaden the scope of Shakespeare studies by adding diverse feminist voices to the performance and critical history of the play - a history that will inspire future interpretations that are much more empowering for the twenty-first century pedagogical, artistic, and research environments.

In 2007, Margreta de Grazia wrote 'Hamlet' without Hamlet thereby illuminating the value of taking an approach to Hamlet which does not start with the titular character. Whereas her stance was materialist, ours is feminist. The interpretation of women characters in Hamlet is ripe for reassessment and we want to do this by inviting papers on adaptations and extensions of Hamlet from around the world where the women characters take centre-stage.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Lindell, Kiki University of Lund, Sweden Jones, Nesta Rose Bruford College, United Kingdom Chatterjee, Koel Trinity Laban, United Kingdom Spera, Silvia University of Salerno, Italy Panjwani, Varsha NYU (London) Bandín, Elena University of León, Spain Leroy, Elisa University of Munich, Germany Khair, Tabish Aarhus University, Denmark Flaherty, Jenny Georgia College and State University 4

Ratkiewicz- Syrek, Anna University of Gdansk/Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, Poland

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

‘Ruthless Mother!’: The role of Gertrude in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (2016)

Elena Bandín

University of León, Spain; [email protected]

Ian McEwan published his novel Nutshell in September 2016 on the occasion of the fourth centenary of Shakespeare's death, giving new lease of life to Hamlet. Nutshell deals with an unnamed thirty-eight-week old foetus gifted with the ability of eavesdropping from the womb everything that goes on around him. Thanks to this secret listening, he relates from his own point of view the adulterous affair his mother, Trudy, maintains with her brother-in-law, Claude. There are not many direct references throughout the novel to the figure of Hamlet (apart from the name Nutshell), not even the baby is bound to be called this way; but anybody familiarised with the original play would identify the unborn narrator with Shakespeare's main character. This novel attempts to fill an important gap that Shakespeare left unclear and unexplained and that is integral in re-configuring the meaning of the play: the love triangle of Gertrude, Claudius and King Hamlet.

In this appropriation of Hamlet without Hamlet, I will explore how the character of Trudy (Gertrude) takes centre stage by representing the archetype of the monstrous mother. She is depicted as a lustful and unfaithful woman, unable to repress her sexual desires and, consequently, unable to accept the passive role of female behaviour. Not only does Trudy cause psychological harm to the foetus by being unfaithful to his husband, but also physical, because she is a great drinker despite her advanced state of pregnancy. McEwan also presents Trudy as a symbol of beauty. She is constantly eroticised and conceived as a modern Lolita, corrupted and corrupting, and her genitalia are negatively described as ''the Wall of Death'' until she eventually gives birth. Nevertheless, the unborn baby cannot prevent himself from loving his evil mother: ''the mystery of how love for my mother swells in proportion to my hatred'' (McEwan, 2016, p. 109).

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks": Gertrude as a Drama Critic and Performer in Indian Hamlets

Varsha Panjwani

NYU (London); [email protected]

After the first scene of ‘the Mousetrap’ in 3.2, Hamlet asks Gertrude, ‘Madam, how like you this play?’ The Arden edition of Hamlet (2006) suggests that Gertrude’s response, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’ can be ‘played so as to indicate her discomfort, her self-control, or her innocence’ but what if this line is played as Gertrude voicing her critique of the Player Queen’s performance? Two Indian screen adaptations of Hamlet explore this performance possibility.

Although taking different routes, both films put ample pressure on Gertrude’s assessment of the Player Queen. In Hamlet (directed by Kishore Sahu in 1954), the translation of her response creates a Gertrude who has as much claim to interiority and private grieving as Hamlet despite what she is forced to show outwardly. In Haider (directed by Vishal Bhardwaj in 2014) Ghazala (Gertrude) can disparage the Player Queen’s exaggerated performance because she is a better actress – Ghazala in this film a naturalistic performer par excellence.

These Indian Gertrudes have attracted admirers as diverse as the Shakespearian actress Sybil Thorndike who described Gertrude in Sahu’s Hamlet as ‘magnificent’ and Rachel Saltz in The New York Times who wrote that Ghazala ‘has such depths and mystery’ that she ‘hijacks’ Haider. Through a close study of these performances and their Indian intertexts, my paper argues that these films both offer fresh readings of Gertrude and give us a different lens with which to view the mother-son relationship in this play.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

(Re)writing the character of Gertrude: a subversive recasting of female agency in Atwood’s Gertrude talks back.

Silvia Spera

University of Salerno, Italy; [email protected]

The aim of this paper is to explore the character of Gertrude through the analysis of Margaret Atwood’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, entitled Gertrude talks back. In particular, it sets out to investigate the depiction of female agency.

It is widely known that Hamlet is a play, so to speak, run by men where there is no room for Gertrude’s voice. Her personality and actions emerge from the various discussions of other characters – male characters. With her rewriting of Shakespeare’s famous closet scene, Atwood gives Gertrude the chance to rebut to her son’s accusations in a one-sided dialogue where she is the one who speaks and Hamlet the one who simply listens.

Starting from a brief overview on the traditional portrayal of Gertrude as a weak, lascivious, sensual and deceitful woman, I argue that Atwood subverts and at the same time reassesses this standard reading. Taking examples from this short story characterised by verbal playfulness and sharp witticism, I will discuss how the Canadian writer challenges the received concepts of womanhood and empowers the character of Gertrude (by asserting her right to choose and allowing her to take on responsibility of her actions) without emancipating her from the limitations of her gender role.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

(There is) Nothing Like a Dane: Gertrudes at Elsinore Castle

Kiki Lindell

University of Lund, Sweden; [email protected]

I’ve thought a lot about the nature of Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius. Were they having an affair or not? Was it a one-night fling that suddenly blossomed into something else? Was it something they had been nursing for years from a distance? How bad was the marriage with Old Hamlet? Was it arranged, a marriage they had to suffer?

Sara Kestelman, Gertrude in the 2004 National Theatre/Elsinore production with Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet (quoted from Jonathan Croall, Performing Hamlet, 2018)

/…/ those critics who have dealt specifically with the Queen have traditionally seen her as well-meaning but shallow and feminine, in the pejorative sense of the word: incapable of any sustained rational process, superficial and flighty.

Carolyn G. Heibrun, “The Character of Hamlet’s Mother”, 1957

A character without a single soliloquy to match her son’s seven, whose only long speech says not a word about her own feelings, Queen Gertrude remains enigmatic, a vessel to be filled with content – by actors and scholars alike, as witnessed in the above. Is she naïve or deep, selfish or self-effacing, or (as suggested by A.C. Bradley in 1949) is her problem that “the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth”? As a wife and queen, is she powerful or powerless? A reluctant Lady Anne, steamrolled into second marriage to become part of her new husband’s alibi for seizing the crown – or perhaps a pushy Lady Macbeth, a husband-puppeteer?

As for Gertrude as a mother, there are perhaps even more options and possible choices. She can be a Titania or a Tamora, a tiger wrapped in a woman’s hide (truly a mobled Queen); a Yummy Mummy, a fussy Big Mama, or a Medea – the possibilities are endless.

All of these Gertrudes I believe I have seen on stage – and quite a few of them at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore. In my paper, I want to discuss some of these ‘beauteous Majesties of Denmark’, and the sense of place brought to these particular performances by the ramparts, the cannons, the ‘bitter cold’, and the castle itself.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

A new role for Ophelia: Rewritings of Hamlet in contemporary German theatre productions by Katie Mitchell (Ophelia's Zimmer, Schaubühne Berlin, 2015) and Christopher Rüping (Hamlet, Münchner Kammerspiele, 2016)

Elisa Leroy

University of Munich, Germany; [email protected]

When asked to participate in Christopher Rüping's production of Hamlet in 2016, Katja Bürkle, established actress with the Münchener Kammerspiele for almost a decade, opened the conversation by refusing to play Ophelia. Jenny König, actress with the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and starring as Gertrude and Ophelia in Thomas Ostermeier's staging of Hamlet, also starred in Katie Mitchell's Ophelia's Room, a production aiming to „interrogate[...] our fascination with these old historical plays whose male heroes repeatedly crush or destroy women“1. For both actresses, Ophelia represents a vision of womanhood that, as their career evolves, they are no longer ready to represent on stage. Enhanced by the newly heightened attention to unequal representation of gender roles in dramatic literature, but also in theatre schools, ensembles and staff2, directors who stage Hamlet are confronted with actresses who refuse to expose their bodies and minds to the violence they are susceptible to suffer from their acting partners in the time and space of a theatre performance of Hamlet. Rather than calling for a 'modern' interpretation of Ophelia's appearances and lines in the play, their position requires rewritings of Hamlet.

In her 2015 staging of Ophelia's Room (written by Alice Birch) for Schaubühne Berlin, Katie Mitchell imagines the events of the play solely from the perspective of the young girl who spends the time between her brief appearances in Shakespeare's text in her room, attempting to tackle the experiences she has gone through outside of her room in silence. Jenny König interprets the moments that are left out of her performance in Ostermeier's Hamlet, in an attempt to not only complete the imagined trajectory of the dramatic character, but to illustrate the effects of the physical and mental confinement the text and many stagings force a performer of Ophelia into. Christopher Rüping, in whose production actors and actresses all switch between roles, stages the violent encounter between Hamlet and Ophelia in act III, scene one of the play with reversed gender roles. Katja Bürkle is given the opportunity to improvise her own address to Ophelia in order to recreate the experience of that aggression for her male colleague Nils Kahnwald and the audience alike.

In a comparative reading of Mitchell's and Rüping's theatrical rewritings, I would like to investigate the implications and possibilities of the role's performance on contemporary stages for gender representation, with particular attention to the physical and verbal space that both productions attempt to create for the actresses concerned, and its effect on audiences within the time and space of the performance.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

Fiction, Truth and Post-Truth in Hamlet

Tabish Khair

Aarhus University, Denmark; [email protected]

Employing a consciously anachronistic perspective, this paper will examine the nature of ‘truth’ and ‘post- truth’ in Hamlet, especially as it encounters the prism of gendered perspectives. Is Hamlet’s truth necessarily that of his mother, or of Ophelia? What is required to ascertain a ‘truth’ that crosses over to the Other as well? The paper will look at how Hamlet, in the play, determines the ‘truth’ (or fails to do so), and what it says about the nature of fiction and fact in general. From there, the paper will move on to explicate the vital role of literature as a thinking device, an engagement with the Other, and a particular use of language that goes beyond syntagmatic communication.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

Fighting Frailty: The Women of Golden Glitch’s Elsinore

Jenny Flaherty

Georgia College and State University; [email protected]

In the short history of video games inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the emphasis has been on Hamlet himself and the “actions that a man might play” (to borrow the title of Matthew Harrison and Michael Lutz’s chapter on Hamlet games). But the recent GamerGate scandal demonstrates the importance of studying and expanding the representation of women in gaming, and representations of Shakespeare’s female characters in games have particular resonance given the significance of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in studies of girlhood such as Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. The video game Elsinore, by Golden Glitch, uses Ophelia as the protagonist, putting her in a position to affect the lives of the other characters as the events of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are played and replayed with minor variations according to the actions of the player. The game focuses on Ophelia’s struggle to break out of a time loop by making new choices that enable her to save (or destroy) everyone in Elsinore. The game also expands the role of Gertrude, gender-swaps the characters of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, and adds two new female characters to the action of the game (in addition to inserting backstories for Ophelia’s mother and Hamlet’s grandmother). The result is a story with a far greater emphasis on female agency than either Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the previous games based on the play. My paper will analyze the actions of the female characters in Elsinore, demonstrating how the game challenges gender representation in both Shakespeare and gaming, contributing to more diverse representation in both fields.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

Gertrude: Desire and Catastrophe

Nesta Jones

Rose Bruford College, United Kingdom; [email protected]

How might a contemporary actor approach the title role in Gertrude – The Cry, Howard Barker’s re-writing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, first staged by The Wrestling School at the Riverside Studios in 2002? A year after its premiere Barker described the play: ‘in this climate, revolutionary work’; and is a piece rooted in the playwright’s notion of Theatre of Catastrophe, a form of tragedy that repudiates catharsis or moral enlightenment. Later, however, Barker considered the play ‘his greatest work on love’; and at its heart is the character of Gertrude and her ambiguous, primal ‘Cry’. Gertrude is portrayed not as a queen ridden with guilt but as a shameless and magnificent woman, an agent of desire empowered by her sexuality, defiant of social mores and, seemingly, the architect of her husband’s murder.

Elsinore is relocated in an apparent ‘present’, a place bereft of principle, wisdom or mercy, a damaged world. Certain characters survive from Shakespeare’s original play namely, Gertrude, a Queen, Claudius, a Prince, and Hamlet, an Heir. Barker reinvents Ophelia as Ragusa, a Young Woman, and creates the role of Isola, Mother of Claudius; investing both of these women with influence and individual power, the former admired by Gertrude and the latter her foil.

Barker’s demands on the actor are, as always with his work, considerable: intellectually, imaginatively, emotionally, physically and technically; and requires in the playing an understanding and command of the playwright’s heightened style and his sense of the absurd. The paper analyses the character of Gertrude as written by Barker, addressing its challenges and rewards for the actor but also appraising the play’s resonance and possible reception in today’s ‘climate’. It will draw on the experience of practitioners, reviewers and critics, as well as my own memory of the premiere production and my current reading of the play.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

Ophelia strikes back and tells (her)story in Claire McCarthy’s film adaptation of Lisa Klein’s novel Ophelia

Anna Ratkiewicz- Syrek

University of Gdansk/Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, Poland; [email protected]

The paper will analyze the character of Ophelia contained in a recent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The movie titled Ophelia had a world premiere in America in 2018 during the Sundance Festival. It is based on a novel from 2006 by Lisa Klein. Both works tell Shakespearean history from the perspective of two women – Ophelia (mostly) and Gertrude. In the paper I intend to focus on the eponymous heroine, not the queen, although the latter is a significant figure as the two character develop a very unique relationship.

The film is indeed woman-centred. It is an adaptation of a novel written by an American writer Klein, directed by the Australia born Claire McCarthy, and the major roles are performed by British actresses: Daisy Ridley (Ophelia) and Naomi Klein (Gertrude). Ridley, known for her role as Rey in latest series of Star Wars, here plays a strong female character, who changes the rules of the world of the medieval Danish court with all its entourage – fancy gowns, royal jewellery, stone castle and raw nature in the background. More than that, she strikes back.

We can discover the inner life of Ophelia, what she feels/wants/ desires, whom she loves, who she is afraid of, why she has decided to fake her death in the water and why she eventually went to the nunnery.

Thus, it is an example of a feminist version of the world – not a world (completely) without Hamlet, but a world in which Ophelia’s presence is strongly marked. She ‘strikes back’ because she has a story to tell and the world can give her the space for this voice now. As she says: “You may think you know my story…”. The novel and the film alike put Ophelia and Gertrude, the woman, back on the map of Hamlet.

Seminar - A World Without Hamlet

Taking centre stage: Ophelia in Young Adult fiction

Koel Chatterjee

Trinity Laban, United Kingdom; [email protected]

"Motherless and completely circumscribed by the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others' desires.”

- Dane, Gabrielle. 1998. “Reading Ophelia’s Madness”

Despite being overshadowed by the male protagonist of Hamlet, Ophelia has a thought-provoking afterlife in the popular culture imagination in paintings, music and literature. While traditional representations tend to focus on her struggle (as compared to Hamlet’s) between the twin impulses toward murder and self- destruction and the ambiguous resolution of the conflict between what Hamlet calls in "To be or not to be" "conscience" or "resolution" and "opposing" or "suffering", Young Adult (YA) fiction refuses to see her as a ‘frail woman’, a victim of circumstances. In Dating Hamlet (2002) and Ophelia (2006), Fiedler and Klein respectively re-create Ophelia by presenting her as a capable, headstrong teenage girl who can survive the painful circumstances that drive her Shakespearean predecessor to madness and early death. By revising Ophelia and creating newer, more assertive versions in their novels, Fiedler and Klein subvert the critical tradition of Hamlet and invert the popular perception of Ophelia in an effort to create relatable role-models for their young readers. This essay will examine this revisionist approach to one of Shakespeare’s best known tragic heroines and consider how giving Ophelia centre stage affects our understanding and teaching of Hamlet in the context of the twenty-first century.

Seminar

Cultural Mobility around Shakespeare's Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Sujata Iyengar1, Shaul Bassi2, Nora Galland3

1University of Georgia United States of America; 2Università Ca’Foscari Venezia Italy; 3Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III France; [email protected]

Theatre affords cultural mobility to performers, audience members, and authors. Cultural mobility encompasses figurative and physical transfer (literally, metaphor); acculturation, the process of cultural exchange and transformation; liminal space between flexibility and fixedness; and new analysis of a "sense of place" or lineage (Greenblatt 2009). By creating new worlds in real time through spontaneous community- creation, theatre enables potentially new or unworldly racial and national categories. Since "Rome" is for Shakespeare already an imaginary space in the distant past, a mythos rather than a history, the ancient worlds of the Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus) offer perfect loci for this kind of world-building and to investigate alternative ways of making or unmaking empire. Such imagined spaces can perhaps offer a way out of what seems like a global crisis of resurgent racialisms: nationalism in Europe, caste-prejudice in India, anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and so on.

This seminar asks participants to consider the implications of race, ethnicity, or nation on stage, on screen, and in installations, happenings, or other performance venues in Shakespeare's Roman plays and how such perceptions of identity shift in different venues, at different historical moments, and even from person to person. Seminarians could consider, for example, Gregory Doran's all-black Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012; the controversies surrounding Rob Melrose's self-styled "Obama" Julius Caesar in Chicago in 2012 and what Donald Trump, Jr. deemed a "Trump" Julius Caesar at the Public Theatre in New York in 2017; the imbrication of race and nation in Cesare Deve Morire (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 2012; Bassi 2016); and readings of local productions that investigate how race, nation, ethnicity, and the concept of "Rome" resonate in different "liminal localities," whether European, Asian, or North American (Matei-Chesnoiu 2009; Valls-Russell and Vienne-Guerrin 2017).

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Galland, Nora University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France (IRCL UMR 5186 CNRS) Pandit Hogan, Lalita University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA (Dept. of English) Mihanovic, Andelko IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy Gillen, Katherine Texas A&M University-San Antonio, USA (Dept. of English) Feracho, Lesley University of Georgia, Athens (UGA), USA (Dept. of Romance Languages and Institute of African-American Studies) Iyengar, Sujata University of Georgia, Athens (UGA), USA (Dept. of English) Bassi, Shaul Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Italy (Dept. of English and Postcolonial Literature) 17

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: Cleopatra, liminality, dancing, crossgender, interracial

‘Let Rome in Tiber Melt, here is my Space’: Emotion and Affect in Prabal Gupta’s Kathakali Cleopatra

Lalita Pandit Hogan

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA (Dept. of English); [email protected]

In the proposed paper, I should like to orient the discussion on liminal space created by theatrical practice towards Prabal Gupta’s Kathakali Dance Drama, Cleopatra, the Last Pharaoh of Egypt (2015). I will frame the discussion by drawing attention to Prabal Gupta’s internationally disseminated Kathakali Macbeth underscoring Gupta being an exponent of stree-vesham kathakali, a dance form where the male Kathakali dancer plays women characters on stage. This type of crossing of a gender binary, a topic on which Gupta is very eloquent, has a striking parallel in the Early Modern theatre practice (as we know!). Drawing on cognitive neuroscience as well the traditional Indian aesthetics of emotion (which elaborates on many more emotions than just pity and terror), I will focus on basic emotions and their relation to higher cognitive emotions to explain how this networking constitutes the narrative, the dramaturgy and stage poetry of Prabal Gupta’s depiction of Cleopatra (and Lady Macbeth, for comparison). I will conclude with a brief discussion of the National Theatre’s Antony and Cleopatra (2018-19), commenting on its inter-racial cross-gender casting, to examine what difference the changes make in re-inventing inherited figurations of Rome and Egypt. The live asp that was used in this production foregrounds liminality it its most bio-scientific sense, where the term stands for liminal space (and time) in the brain between sensation and perception, in this case, representational perception. My argument is a) that higher cognitive emotions define cultural difference through stories and performance arts because the represented reality shows how a culture elaborates, ornaments, reifies and denigrates basic emotions following cultural norms and value systems; b) that racial bias, and other bias, is superimposed on denigration of the evolutionary baggage of brain and the body; c) that theatre invents a liminal space where homogenizing abstractions of race, nation, gender and class are contested and reaffirmed differently. Not only is Shakespeare and his “Rome” an example of this, but also the newer, global phenomenon of Kathakali Shakespeare.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Ackermann, Zeno Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Colombo, Rosy University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ Drouet, Pascale University of Poitiers Elam, Keir Douglas Bologna University Lucking, David University of Salento Nicholson, Eric New York University Patricia, Anthony Guy Concord University Vitkus, Daniel University of California, San Diego 18

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: boundary, Julius Caesar, Doran, race, power, Pan-Africanism

“Mapping Race and Performance in Shakespeare’s Rome: Gregory Doran’s Julius Caesar (2012)”

Lesley Feracho

University of Georgia, Athens (UGA), USA (Dept. of Romance Languages and Institute of African-American Studies); [email protected]

One of the gains of dramatic restaging, creating new physical and cultural frameworks is, a refashioning and repositioning of boundaries and identitarian categories (Bassi 2016) that allows for alternate configurations of categories like race and nation. This paper will explore how Gregory Doran’s staging of Julius Caesar (2012) set in a post-independent African nation-state uses local racial thinking (both consciously and unconsciously) to comment on the complexity of power and justice. I will specifically explore how the physical spatial framing and performance of the fluidity of place (through physical cues of dress, music and movement [ie. dance]) reframes race and challenges the strictures of national boundaries to perform both a specific (post-Independence Francophone African) and Pan African commentary on power, democracy and excess.

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: prison performance, Cavalli, Caesar Must Die, subversion

“Sorry, Fabio, I Don't Have a Dialect. I'm a Citizen of the World” – Subverting Race, Ethnicity and Nation in the Film Caesar Must Die (2012)

Andelko Mihanovic

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy; [email protected]

Unlike famous adaptations that explicitly emphasize racial, ethnic and national or governmental aspects within Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, like those by Oskar Eustis and Rob Melrose, or those by historical reenactors, I argue that Taviani brothers in the film “Caesar Must Die“ take the aspects of race, nationality and ethnicity to the individual, personal level. Building on the studies of Bassi (2016) and Calbi (2014), who are the only scholars that analyise the aforementioned aspects of the film, in this paper I argue that these aspects are inflected and subverted by the film directors. Although both the Tavianis and theater director Fabio Cavalli aim with their adaptations to project the present rather than the past, I argue that the inmates think deeply about the actual historical events in the background of the play, and they identify themselves with the historical personages, as they are described by Shakespeare. Therefore, my goal is to analyse the directors' choices, as anticipated by Bassi (2016) and Calbi (2014), and contrast them with the reception of the play and the historical events and personages by the prison inmates, in order to show how Shakespeare's Rome is actualized by the performers themselves. Finally, the aim of the paper is to analyse the cultural and social value of the adaptation for the prison inmates.

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: Cleopatra, black British actress, Beyoncé effect, casting

Beyond the “Beyoncé effect”: 30 Years of Black British Cleopatras

Sujata Iyengar

University of Georgia, Athens (UGA), USA (Dept. of English); [email protected]

Pauline Black (1989) and Doña Croll (1991) each claim to have been the first black actor to play Cleopatra on a British stage, the former in Cleopatra and Antony, a four-actor, radically cut touring production that interpolated lines from Dryden’s Neo-Classical adaptation All For Love, the latter in an all-black professional production by the Talawa theatre company. “Since [Croll’s performance], it has been impossible to cast Cleopatra as white without implying that blackness is somehow denied a body and a voice,” asserts Sarah Hatchuel (2011, 48). Black Cleopatras since Croll include Cathy Tyson under Michael Bogdanov’s direction for the English Shakespeare Company (1998); Josette Bushell-Mingo at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, directed by Braham Murray (2005); and Joaquina Kalukango in Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s heavily edited text, set to 18th-century Haiti, in 2013. The past twelve months alone have given us Josette Simon at the RSC (2017) and Sophie Okonedo at the National (2018). Critics had long complained that productions of this play starring white performers as the queen “deflected” Cleopatra’s blackness on to her attendants or on to exotic surroundings. Yet many productions starring black Cleopatras similarly bedeck the queen with an elaborate, enormous set and showy entourage. The current National Theatre production clothes its cast in high fashion and its Cleopatra in a tiered-dress similar to the one Beyoncé wears in Lemonade; she is a Cleopatra firmly of the “1%.” To what extent, then, does today’s color-conscious casting of Cleopatra as black obfuscate the racialization of poverty in present-day Britain and the US? This paper contrasts the simpler, pared-down, touring versions of 1989 and 1991 with the extravagant, bravura, live-cast events of 2017 and 2018, in order to investigate H. Neville Davies’ suggestion that, despite the famous, world-breaking magnificence of the play’s language and backstory, Shakespeare’s text calls for a domestic tragedy, intimate, small-scale, and personal – and to suggest that it more profoundly calls for an exploration of justice.

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: the multitude, Coriolanus, racialization of the populace, racial contract

Coriolanus’s Racial Publics

Katherine Gillen

Texas A&M University-San Antonio, USA (Dept. of English); [email protected]

This paper explores the racial identity of the “the people,” “the public,” or “the multitude” in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play’s racialization of the public is complex, owing in part to Shakespeare’s (and Thomas North’s) Anglicization of Plutarch’s account. In one sense, the public is depicted as raceless, a move that implicitly links England to Rome in a shared lineage, increasingly understood as white. However, Coriolanus himself racializes the Roman people, depicting them as animalistic, monstrous, and barbaric. As such, I argue, the play dramatizes the development of racial democracy and, more broadly, of what Charles Mills calls the racial contract, in which the social contract (depicted primarily as Hobbesean in Coriolanus) governs relations among white people while simultaneously policing the boundaries of whiteness.

Performances and appropriations of Coriolanus, therefore, reflect not just tensions between patricians and the 99%, a common interpretation in the wake of the Occupy Movement, but also localized visions of racialized publics. Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 film (filmed largely in Serbia and Montenegro), fuses Coriolanus’s politics with Eastern Europe’s history of racial and ethnic conflict, elucidating the contested boundaries of whiteness. Alternately, Stephen Bannon’s appropriation of the play, The Thing I Am, uses Coriolanus to explicitly racist ends. Set during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising following the beating of Rodney King (and performed in 2017 in a table reading produced by NowThis News), The Thing I Am draws on Coriolanus to depict its Black populace as an unruly mob and to stoke fears of a coming race war. Though they use Coriolanus to very different ends, Fiennes’s and Bannon’s appropriations illuminate the contours of the play’s racial politics and, more broadly, the potential of Shakespeare’s Roman plays to create “new or unworldly racial and national categories.”

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: race, violence, pharmakon, scapegoat, Aaron

Mapping violence onto the body of the racial Other in Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus: the cultural mobility of the scapegoat

Nora Galland

University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France (IRCL UMR 5186 CNRS); [email protected]

In her adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1999), Julie Taymor explores physical and verbal violence affecting both the community and the individual. Rome is threatened from within and without—experiencing a political crisis. The very nation of Rome is jeopardized from the beginning of the play; the political space is as broken as the body of the characters. In this context of systemic crisis, the racial Other is both discarded and needed—he is turned into a scapegoat. Through the insult, the body of the racial Other is first identified as a cultural taboo deserving the verbal violence of Roman citizens, and then sacralized as a cultural totem whose sacrifice brings Romans together. Taymor points out the cultural mobility of the racial Other who is assigned different roles throughout the plot through insults. As a symptom of nationalism, the racial insult enables to racialize the nation in a speech act that brings Romans together against a common enemy— symbolizing a shift from fragmentation to uniformity that is emphasized by filmic techniques. In Taymor’s adaptation, violence is presented as a pharmakon, being a poison and a remedy for Rome. It is a poison when Roman citizens are injured, but it becomes a remedy with the sacrifice of a racial Other. The complexity of the pharmakon is mapped onto the body of the racial Other who is materialized as a liminal space for the city of Rome. The paper aims at examining the dialectics of the scapegoat fabricated by nationalistic violence through insults, and the extent to which Taymor turns the body of the racial Other into a marginal space that walls the city of Rome.

Seminar - Cultural Mobility Around Shakespeare’s Rome: Mapping Race, Ethnicity, and Nation through Performance

Keywords: Julius Caesar, French multiculturalism, Europe, citizenship, Algerian descent

Shakespeare dans le métro: Julius Caesar and European multiculturalism(s)

Shaul Bassi

Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Italy (Dept. of English and Postcolonial Literature); [email protected]

When in Paris, do as the Romans do. Shakespeare’s Rome makes an unexpected appearance in the heart of Paris, in a French comedy film that explores the conundrums of French multiculturalism. In Le Brio (2017), directed by Yvan Attal, the protagonist Neïla is a young student of Algerian descent who lives an underprivileged life in the Paris banlieue, the suburbs that have come to represent the ethnic and class fault lines that beset French society. When she enrolls at university to become a lawyer, she is publicly taunted by a renowned professor for being late in class with strong racial overtones. The teacher is then converted into a reluctant Pygmalion who will have to mentor Neïla for a rhetoric competition: one of her tasks is to recite Marc Anthony’s speech “Friends, Roman, countrymen” in the Paris Metro. Taking the cue from this episode, I will consider different ways in which Julius Caesar has been used to signify contending models of European citizenship, and ask whether Shakespeare can help us bring into focus different approaches to cultural and ethnic pluralism in the US, the UK, and other European countries including France and Italy.

Seminar

Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Janet Elizabeth Clare1, Sophie Chiari2

1University of Hull, United Kingdom; 2Universite Clermont Auvergne, France; [email protected]

In the In the final scene of The Tempest, Gonzalo draws attention to the cosmographical thinking that has underpinned Shakespeare's play: ‘one voyage’, he suggests, has not only enabled more than one dynastic Mediterranean marriage, but also allowed Prospero to find ‘his dukedom / In a poor isle’ and prompted self- discoveries at a moment ‘when no man was his own’ (5.1.208-13). In its closing actions, the play’s microcosmic and macrocosmic relationships come into peculiar focus: the ‘bare island’ to which Prospero refers in his Epilogue clearly encompasses both the play’s fictional island and the theatre in which it has been conjured; and this layered space, we perceive, has served as a stage on which interweaving allegories—political, psychological, colonial—have been played out.

Seafarers, merchants, travellers, and pirates people Shakespeare’s worlds; storms, shipwrecks (disastrous and fortuitous), and miraculous rescues propel his dramatic narratives. Our seminar is concerned with how Shakespeare’s plays variously refract early modern cosmography—manifest in maps and atlases, writing on climes and zones, treatises on the arts of navigation, accounts of voyages and shipwrecks, and a new awareness of cultural relativism—and how, in particular, this is accomplished through microcosmic and macrocosmic modes of thought. How, for example, might horizontal, surface mapping—and its cognate images—translate to vertical mapping (of heaven or hell) or to questions of the ‘inner’ life? How might voyages provide ways of thinking about individual heroism or transgression—or, alternatively, about providential order? Asking these and related questions, the seminar will explore how Shakespeare’s work is fashioned by and responds to the dramatic potential of the new geography. Topics to be explored might include sea-voyages, mariners and cultural encounters; weather conditions; maps onstage and the stage as map; the place of the heavens and the underworld; the body as map/world.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Badcoe, Tamsin University of Bristol, UK "Cetera-Włodarczyk, Anna; Culliton, Kaitlyn Trinity College, Dublin "Dunnum, Eric (1); Johnson, Laurie (2)" "1: Campbell University, US; 2: University of Southern Queensland" Ekmekcioglu, Neslihan Cankaya University, Turkey Goy-Blanquet, Dominique Université de Picardie, France

Kullman, Thomas University of Osnabrück, Germany Lawrence, Jason University of Hull, UK Lichterfeld, Imke University of Bonn, Germany Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania Matthews, Jemima King’s College London, UK Meriel, Cordier Université Clermont Auvergne, France Preedy, Chloe Kathleen University of Exeter, UK Publicover, Laurence University of Bristol, UK Raber, Karen University of Mississippi, USA Rybko, Ivan Russian State University for the Humanities Šofranac, Nataša University of Belgrade, Serbia Sophie, Lemercier-Goddard Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France Stanton, Kay California State University, Fullerton, USA

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

‘“What country, friends, is this?”: Displaced Identity and Homoerotic Desire in Twelfth Night and its Sources

Jason Lawrence

University of Hull, UK; [email protected]

The shipwreck that strands and separates the twins from Messaline on the coast of Illyria at the start of Twelfth Night has its closest analogue in Barnabe Riche’s tale of Apolonius and Silla (1581), where the love- struck heroine Silla has to assume a male disguise, wearing the clothes of her drowned servant Pedro, to serve the eponymous Duke of Constantinople. The English prose tale has often been considered ‘the play’s most immediate source’, broadening the geographical reach and elevating the social status of the principal characters from the Modenese mercantile setting of its source, the anonymous Italian play Gl’Ingannati (1531), as Shakespeare does in his later dramatization. The sense of displaced identity is already present in the original Italian play, however, set in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome in 1527, where the lost brother Fabrizio has to return unrecognised to his place of birth as a tourist in the company of his tutor, the Pedant, to resolve the complex homoerotic love triangle between his cross-dressed twin sister Lelia, Flamminio and Isabella. It is even more pressing in Matteo Bandello’s Italian prose version of the story in the Novelle (1556), where the Marquis of Esi’s son Paolo, twin brother of Nicuola, is initially taken prisoner by a German soldier, who later becomes the boy’s ‘padrone’ (patron) in Naples, before the return to his hometown. The hint of pederasty in the original play is developed much more fully in the various master- servant relationships in this Italian prose version, which will be the principal focus of this paper, in order to demonstrate how it provides a hitherto neglected direct source for Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of dislocated identity and homoerotic desire in the relationship between Viola / ‘Cesario’ and Orsino, as well as that of Antonio and Sebastian, in Twelfth Night.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

“Untune that string": String Theory and the Music of the Spheres in Shakespeare

Kay Stanton

California State University, Fullerton, USA; [email protected]

In As You Like It, Duke Senior, finding that the melancholy Jaques became ‘merry, hearing of a song’ (II.vii.4), states that ‘If he, compact of jars, grow musical. / We shall have shortly discord in the spheres’ (II. vii. 5-6), poetically referencing the concept of the ‘music of the spheres’, developed by ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who had used mathematics to develop music theory, which he extrapolated into cosmological theory. Such music was held to be usually inaudible on Earth, unless a person was in a state of exalted consciousness.

In Pericles, learning of the title character’s lethargy, Lysimachus recommends the healing ministrations of ‘a maid’ whose ‘sweet harmony’ could ‘make a batt’ry through his deafened ports’ (V.i.41, 44). After learning that this maid is his supposed-dead daughter, Marina, Pericles becomes jubilant, insisting that he hears ‘The music of the spheres!’ (V.i.232). Himself hearing nothing and believing that Pericles is delusional, Lysimachus recommends humoring him, and Pericles falls into ‘thick slumber’ (V.i.236). But the play suggests that he did indeed hear it, as he then experiences an interaction with the goddess Diana, who advises him to go to her temple at Ephesus and tell his story. He does so and is reunited with his thought- dead wife, Thaisa, bringing the long-suffering man to pure joy.

The concept of the music of the spheres was built upon not only by Boethius, who postulated a corresponding internal music of the human body, but also by Shakespeare’s near-contemporary Johannes Kepler—and it has made a comeback in contemporary string theory (a specialty area within quantum physics), which credits Pythagoras as developing some of its foundational principles. This paper will demonstrate that Shakespeare’s works are in tune with the macrocosmic and microcosmic theoretical elements of string theory.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

A Change of Air: Travel and Spiritual Transformation in Shakespeare’s Drama

Chloe Kathleen Preedy

University of Exeter, UK; [email protected]

For many in early modern England, to travel was to experience striking – and potentially deadly – variations in aerial environment, with geographical movement complemented by aerographical translation. Contemporary travel accounts warned that in ‘hot Countries… the aire is more intemperate and pestilent’ (Vaughan, B4v), while others drew attention to non-corporeal threats: thus Joseph Hall identifies ‘the poisonous aire of Italie’ as a source of spiritual contagion (G4v). Even local travel involved comparable risks since, as Robert Burton notes, ‘[m]any times we finde great diversity of ayre in the same country’ (X2v). If to encounter the ‘distempered’ air of cities or marshes might endanger one’s health (Bullein, E6r), however, changes of air could also be beneficial: as Francis Bacon reports, ‘[t]here be Aires, which the Physitians aduise their Patients to remoue vnto’ (Ii4r).

Such issues are frequently referenced in Shakespeare’s drama. During a period in which theatres were accused of spreading contagion and often located in areas notorious for their poor air quality, Shakespeare’s plays regularly evoke polluted and polluting environments. Yet such atmospheres are themselves fluid, with Shakespeare also exploring the transformative effects of changing one’s air. I propose to explore the positive and negative impacts that different aerial environments have on the spiritual development of those Shakespearean characters who are forced to live ‘[u]nder the canopy’ (Corionalus 4.5.39): an experience that, as Alexandra Walsham argues, acquired new religious significance in post-Reformation England (Reformation of the Landscape). In particular, I will compare the transformative effect of environmental “weathering” in the forest of As You Like with Timon’s efforts to generate contagion from the ‘sea of air’ that surrounds Athens (Timon 13.22), and evaluate the implications for Prospero’s extreme, cosmographical, changes of air in The Tempest.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Hamlet’s Vertical Axis

Laurence Publicover

University of Bristol, UK; [email protected]

This paper examines—and attempts to make sense of—references to ascent and descent in Hamlet, linking these suggestions of a vertical axis to the play’s celebrated concern with ‘that within’. Episodes and images to be analysed include: the Ghost’s ascent from a deep space (possibly purgatory) in Act 1; Horatio’s description of the promontory overlooking the sea in 1.4; Polonius’s fishing imagery (‘Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth’) and the play’s wider interest in the act of ‘sounding’; Hamlet’s concern with tragic falls and with the providential ‘fall of a sparrow’; and the descent into Ophelia’s grave in 5.1.

The paper argues that as Hamlet unfolds the scope of its vertical axis diminishes: measureless drops are replaced, in the play’s imagination and its imagery, by fathomable distances. Complementing this transformation is a turn towards the material, as speculations on the afterlife and on an infinitely receding ‘inner self’ give way to concerns with the rotting body. In short, the paper tries to understand how and why the play’s emblematic figure ceases to be the incorporeal Ghost rising from the deep and becomes, instead, the skull of Yorick tossed upwards by the gravedigger.

Demonstrating that Shakespeare draws, in his ‘deep’ thinking, on Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the paper explores the ways in which both plays meditate on afterlives and underworlds—and on deep spaces more generally—to explore ‘inner’ questions of grief and mental disintegration. It constitutes part of a wider study of the meaning of deep spaces and vertical axes in tragedies composed within and beyond early modern England.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Mapping an Aqueous Christmas Season

Jemima Matthews

King’s College London, UK; [email protected]

On 6 January 1605 the interior of the Banqueting House at Whitehall was transformed into a landscape of liquidity for Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness. This oceanic investment was not limited to the masque culture of the 1604-5 Christmas season. The plays performed at the festivities that year included several preoccupied with storms and shipwreck: Shakespeare’s Othello, Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice (which was performed twice). This season took a distinctly oceanic turn as the King’s men performed plays preoccupied with different degrees or different modes liquidity. These liquid landscapes were complemented by the urban and bodily liquidity of Merry Wives of Windsor as well as Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour and Every Man In his Humour. These plays mapped and remapped the performance environment with different horizontal and vertical aqueous environments using various performance practices. This paper considers what I am calling the ‘aqueous season’ of the 1604-1605 Christmas performances. Considered as part of the same season these aqueous landscapes were interconnected and through performance they were also intertextual. This was a season of experiment and display but also one which exploited the collective memory practices of this community. What happened within and between these performances drew on new and remembered modes of hydrographical mapping. By considering the order in which the audience encountered these different liquid landscapes this paper explores how the site was mapped, remapped, and layered both linguistically and practically. This facilitates a discussion of the unique strata of this collective performance. By doing so this paper locates the 1604-1605 performances not only within the scales of vertical and horizontal geographies but their unique temporal geography and important temporal moment of 1604-1605.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Mapping King Lear: Seeing and Understanding Chaos

Imke Lichterfeld

University of Bonn, Germany; [email protected]

[W]e are not ourselves

When nature, being oppress’d, commands the mind

To suffer with the body.

King Lear is primarily concerned with the inheritance of land: the country through the ‘division of the kingdom’ among Lear’s daughters becomes chaotically fragmented. The duchy of Gloucester is likewise plunged into chaos when the bastard son of Gloucester Edmund does not adhere to the rules of legitimate primogeniture but by ‘unnatural dealing’ defies the customs that would have his brother Edgar inherit.

This upheaval of customs and morals is of course reflected macrocosmically in the heavens’ tumultuous storm scenes and cosmic eclipses, often portrayed in paintings, and the paradigmatic storm scene on the heath is a defining moment of the tragedy.

The staged play offers a political heterotopia of hereditary chaos where the theatre becomes a place of confusion, the battlefield for Britain and its divided dynastic geography: the map is literally torn apart, the tree of legitimate inheritance deliberately uprooted.

Only through exploring themselves can Lear and Gloucester understand and receive catharsis. Revelation is only reached by experiencing expulsion and catastrophic destruction; caused by their offspring, they are exiled in their own country. Their discoveries are not achieved by undertaking voyages to other countries but those of the microcosmic self The blinded Gloucester and the tragic Lear only then can ‘see better’.

It is these scenes of fragmented macrocosms and explorations of the self as well as subsequent cathartic epiphanies that this paper would like to investigate.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Mapping the North in Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Lemercier-Goddard Sophie

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France; [email protected]

Critics have long emphasized how early modern drama contributed to the development of cartographic literacy and sensibility—what John Gillies calls mapmindedness (1998, 21). Maps became an increasingly common material object on stage, from Lear’s map to the memory of Ortelius’s map of Utopia (ca. 1595) in The Tempest. Simultaneously, while mental or material maps helped a domestic audience imagine long- distance traveling and an expanding world of commerce and colonial conquests, the metaphor of the map for the face as an index to the body and soul (Richard II, Sonnet 68) became a widespread conceit. Maps are anamorphic objects which display both the absence and the remote and yet a sense of possession; physical space and geographical places, but also dramatic interiority.

I propose to look at the strange geographies of some of Shakespeare’s fantastic travellers, like the Masque of the Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s Lost, at the intersection of cartographic knowledge and Petrarchan discourse: I would like to examine in particular how the stage interpreted the specific topography of the far North, which early modern explorers of the Artic or Muscovy (Willoughby in 1553 for instance) were often at pains to convey otherwise than as a confounding and chaotic mess of whiteness.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Midsummer’s Hounds, Ecology, and the Order of Things

Karen Raber

University of Mississippi, USA; [email protected]

In Act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus and Hippolyta debate the relative merits of Theseus’s hounds whose ‘musical confusion’ represents, in Robert N. Watson’s reading, a restored order, a concordia discors or ‘sweet thunder’ that reconciles confusion and disharmony. I propose to read this moment, however, in a more ominous vein than have prior scholars focused on the links between the hounds, marriage, and the cosmos of the play: rather than finding in the play a ‘wonderful tangle’ of elements, as does Watson, that emphasizes the union of diverse and sometimes conflicting things (from microbes to classical allusions to husbands and wives), I consider the play’s resistance to models of ecological equilibrium and balance. Hippolyta’s memory of Cadmus and Hercules’ Spartan hounds, who chided ‘the groves / The skies, the fountains’ with ‘musical discord’, overlays her present environment with a dream-like memory of a golden past—but one that is countered in Theseus’s insistence that his own hounds are descendants of those heroic canines and more beautiful than their ancestors. While Theseus intends to claim superiority for his Spartan get, their matched voices require their diminishment as hunting animals, made slower than the quick Spartan type; moreover, forced into a hierarchy, ‘each under each’, their voices fail to rise to the cosmic level of Hippolyta’s memory in which all nature engages in ‘mutual cry’ while Hercules’ hounds bay the bear.

The microcosmic model of concordia discors that informs the debate in Act 4 is meant to suggest that the macrocosmic environmental disruptions caused by the failed marriage at the heart of the fairy world will be healed by establishing ‘proper’ hierarchy and order through Titania’s humiliation, while the civil disruptions inflicted by Hermia and Lysander will likewise be solved through the tradeoff of two love-matches established at the cost of female obedience and silence. I argue, however, that Shakespeare’s play offers another possibility: that the ‘natural’ state of the cosmos is rather disequilibrium, violent unpredictability, and evolutionary decline. In a reading that resists the temptation to erase the hounds themselves in favor of their metaphoric or mythic function, I link them to the play’s representation of dearth, upheaval, and discord that defines the macrocosmic ‘order’ their baying is supposed to herald.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Of Whales and Men: An Ecocritical Approach to William Shakespeare’s Pericles (act 2, scene 1

Cordier Meriel

Université Clermont Auvergne, France; [email protected]

In Act 2 scene 1, Pericles’ voyage at sea is brought to an end by a deadly tempest. Lost on the shore of a faraway land, with no court and no crown to proclaim his wealth and status, he is nothing more than a man among men, and is compelled to interact with a group of fishermen who tend to his needs before sending him on his way. As is often the case in Shakespeare’s plays, the encounter of a nobleman with lower-class individuals becomes an opportunity to provide comic relief through the representation of the (apparently) simple conversation of (apparently) simple men.

The political criticism and social realism expressed by the fishermen is “watered” down by what appears to be the comedic banter of humble individuals: what could be a severe indictment of the political and economic structures of power is toned down by the audience’s perception of the social condition of the speakers. However, this scene is also the site of a significant reflection upon what it means to be a man, and what it means to be human: I argue that the comic exchange between the fishermen is not only a fascinating example of how a pastoral setting can facilitate the voicing of a subversive social commentary, but also exemplifies the paradoxical way in which men interact with their environment.

The fishermen’s use of the marine world to construct an allegorical representation of human social hierarchy is emblematic of a tension between the growing belief in an anthropocentric world-view and in human exceptionalism (implied, for instance, by the fishermen’s very activity, i.e. the killing and consumption of animals) and the deep-rooted need to use the animal kingdom as a constant point of reference in human discourse. What is more, by comparing human interactions to practices that are supposedly found in nature, the fishermen’s socio-political criticism is paradoxically turned on its head, since such a comparison serves to justify, and thus legitimize, a set of inherently cultural behaviours. Nature is exploitable because it is perceived as foreign, and yet political discussions, literary texts and linguistic habits participate in the creation of an illusory familiarity with a world that is, all at once, distant and proximate to human society. An ecocritical approach to Pericles will enable us to explore, if not explain, this contradiction.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

On the Exploration of Dream Cosmoses in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Ivan Rybko

Russian State University for the Humanities; [email protected]

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could seem to look modest either in geographical span when compared to certain works of his direct predecessors (e.g., to a novella by Masuccio Salernitano), or in geographical inclusiveness when associated with the creations of some of his distant followers (say, M. Levin’s Brooklyn Babylon suits well this judgement), and, yet, I assume, Shakespeare’s tragedy presents a story of explorations which exceeds the majority of them in breadth: it presents a story of explorations of the self, which is of genuinely cosmic scale. A complicated dream experience that is intricately woven into the play’s texture is partly the means making these explorations possible. Carefully placed in the points of the play’s junctures (a banter between Romeo and Mercutio before the Capulets’ mask, 1.4; Romeo’s love catharsis of the balcony scene, 2.2; Romeo’s recollections of his second dream at the point when news on Juliet’s destiny arrives from Balthasar, 5.1), it transforms the nature of the play’s action and performs as a true vehicle of Shakespearean imagination. Thus, as I primarily argue in this paper, it furnishes the Shakespearean chronotope of the play, in fact, reconfiguring in all the three instances the simplest linear journey from spot A to spot B of a protagonist crossing a border to enter a remote alien locus (Capulets’ mask; Capulets’ orchard; Capulets’ vault), a movement that is too well known from the old epic tradition, into a complicated zigzag curve which in the most treacherous way mingles the real with the unreal, aspirations with fate, and so deceitfully equals the ‘star-crossed’ (Pr.), of macrocosmic dimensions, realm of the lovers to the most microcosmic whimsical bluff of the tiniest Queen Mab (1.4).

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Peering into the Crystal Orbs: Shakespeare’s imagery and the disseminations of new astronomical ideas in the early modern London

Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk

Warsaw University, Poland; [email protected]

London at the turn of the 17th century appears to be one of the most fascinating places to investigate the reception of the new concept of the Universe propelled by the Copernican revolution. The repeated references to Copernicus, the credit given to the astronomical tables calculated on the basis of his theory and the English translation of the First Book of De revolutionibus along with its subsequent regular publication in the popular almanac A Prognostication euerlastinge... by Leonard and Thomas Digges (at least seven editions in London in the years 1576–1605) – all these facts have been acknowledged relatively early and thoroughly discussed. Naturally it is also the multitude of astronomical references in Shakespeare’s plays which attracted scholarly attention, usually anchoring the Bard in the traditional geocentric cosmos derived from Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy.

And yet the last decades have witnessed a surge of new inquiries which strive to position Shakespeare’s plays in the broader context of literature and science of the age, acknowledging the inherent heterogeneity of the evolving cosmological concepts. The proposed paper outlines the intensity of the discussions in Shakespeare’s London which questioned the existence of celestial orbs on which the planets were fixed in the geocentric system of the Universe and argues that the recurrent image of the stars and planets falling off their orbs may be inspired by these scientific disputes. It proceeds to argue that the proper acknowledgment of these inspirations significantly enriches our understanding of Shakespeare’s cosmic metaphors, and comments on the irrelevant representation of these images in translation.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Recovering Classical Geography: Shakespeare and Dionysius Periegetes

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania; [email protected]

My study applies the rhetorical concepts of topothesia and ekphrasis in aligning the 1572 classical geography text by Dionysius Periegetes (in Lawrence Twayne’s translation) to Shakespeare’s representations of geographic space. I look at ancient Roman and early modern English geography from the perspective of geocriticism and spatial literary studies and compare Twayne’s English translation with Latin versions of De situ orbis by Dionysius Periegetes, published in sixteenth-century Europe (Basel, 1523; Antwerp, 1529; Colonia/Köln, 1530; Geneva, 1577). I observe a triple polarity in the progressive rendition of space through discourse: geographic, poetic, and performative. These texts create shortcuts for readers/audiences and give them a compressed glimpse of the places depicted. I have termed the dramatic/performative conversion of geographic space as telemesic space: a view of distant locations that audiences can imagine as if they were in the middle of things. By means of window allusions, conflation, and combination, a-topicity, polytopicality and polychronicity, and even anachronisms and geographic inaccuracy, I argue that Shakespeare’s imaginary spaces are invested with emotion and motion, as dramatic discourse progresses.

Seminar - Explorations and Geographies of the Self: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Shape of the World

Dominique Goy-Blanquet

Université de Picardie, France; [email protected]

Medieval cartographers sometimes wrote ‘Here be dragons’ in the gaps between the countries they were able to locate and identify. Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the developments of contemporary cartography appears in several playful allusions, to ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’, or Dromio of Syracuse’s claim he ‘could find out countries’ on the ‘spherical’ body of the kitchen wench Nell. The comparisons between maps and human shapes were common enough, illustrated for instance in the early modern ‘Europa regina’ iconography, or in John Donne’s ‘new found land’. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies lend them a more sinister tone when the body of the realm stands in danger of being carved between voracious rivals. This paper will aim to explore the poet’s infinite variety in the mapping of his dramatic universe.

Seminar

Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Alice Equestri1, Luca Baratta2

1University of Sussex, United Kingdom; 2University of Florence, Italy; [email protected]

In “The Tempest”, Trinculo calls Caliban ‘puppy-headed monster’, an expression which not only dehumanises the island native and reduces him to an object of ridicule, but also points at the early modern view of the non-normative body and intellect as two related and often coexisting manifestations of reality. The fool and the monster were similar figures: their deviation from the ‘norm/rule’ made them protagonists of analogue narratives of stigmatisation, rejection or subjugation. They were seen as social outcasts; they attracted comments on the extraordinariness of their aspect or behaviour; they prompted similar explanations for their coming to the world, for instance with the focus on sin as the main cause of their ‘deformity’; the fool’s body was very often described as an external projection of his intellectual capacity, therefore also characterised by visible peculiarities or utter monstrosity. Moreover, in an age of increasing contacts with foreigners, the characteristics of the monster and the fool were also exploited, in medicine and society alike, to describe the exotic and more in general what felt threatening or simply ‘different’ in terms of appearance, customs, language or political structure.

This seminar seeks to probe representations of intellectual or bodily difference in Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in adaptations of early modern plays. Possible topics might include:

Fools and/or human monsters in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The non-normative body and/or intellect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Juxtaposition of physical and intellectual disability.

Fools or monsters and class, honour or gender.

Medical, legal, religious, social or political evaluations of folly and monstrosity.

The fool, the monster and the supernatural.

The fool, the monster and travel: between curiosity and xenophobia.

Border conflicts or crossings between normativity and non-normativity.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Burzyńska, Katarzyna Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland) Guéron, Claire University of Burgundy and Franche-Comté "Roberts, Tanya (1); Laskowska-Hinz, Sabina (2)" "1: London South Bank University; 2: University of Warsaw" Schack, Anna-Rose University of Amsterdam Swan, Jesse University of Northern Iowa, USA Vural Özbey, Kübra Hacettepe University, Ankara (Turkey) Yip, Roweena National University of Singapore Yurttaş, Hatice Istanbul Şehir University

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Starowieyski’s Poster: Medusa’s Head and Physical Non-Normativity in Macbeth

Tanya Roberts1, Sabina Laskowska-Hinz2

1London South Bank University; 2University of Warsaw; [email protected]

Starowieski’s poster, introducing a head of undulating interwoven snakes, suggests a connection between the story of Macbeth and the Greek Myth of Medusa; a link which has been discussed by literary theorists such as Marjorie Garber, who posits the idea of Macbeth himself as a Medusa type figure.

In the Greek tradition, the female head embraced with snakes was recognised as an emblem for warning off enemies. The zoomorphism combined with the myth of transgression behind the image, creates a jarring effect on the viewer, of dissemblance and unconformity. The poster then encourages us to perceive the characters in the context of their transformation from beautiful to monstrous. From normative and familiar, to strange and uncanny.

In Starowieyski’s work, we are confronted with a round shape, giving the semblance of the back of Medusa’s snake-woven head, rather than the front view of the face commonly depicted in classical art, perhaps encouraging us to understand Medusa not as a direct allegory

for one particular character in Macbeth, but as an underlying motif throughout the play.

Feminist theorists such as Cixous, ask us to consider Medusa as monstrous only by subjugation through male narratives. Thus, here the female figures are montrosized for their non-conformity. The Witches - often compared to the three Gorgons in the Medusa myth - are feared for not conforming to homogenous signifiers of gender. They are cast as outsiders; women who live together without men. Lady Macbeth - who like Medusa, is initially cast as a beautiful and sexual companion, only to later be depicted as aberrant as a result of her sin- is characterised as unnatural in her lack on compliance to maternal gender roles.

Through iconographic studies of this poster, along with related artworks that suggest monstrosization of the non-normative, we will explore themes of non-conformity and stigmatisation in the play.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

A Phenomenology of Shakespearean Revulsion

Jesse Swan

University of Northern Iowa, USA; [email protected]

In Worldly Shakespeare, Richard Wilson advances a postmodern appreciation of a premodern Shakespeare largely by means of demonstrating the offensiveness of Shakespeare’s drama, not least its characters and their actions. The offensiveness is of a piece with Shakespearean generation of a worldly, engaged, ethical, and playfully participative wrestling, a wrestling that is mostly figurative yet powerful, while also often enough, in the plays as in life, literal. The offensiveness further connects the premodern with the postmodern in a generative manner. In Wilson’s words, “Shakespeare’s antinomian strategy ‘to offend / But with good will’ has affinities with the ‘agonistic pluralism’ that has projected out of the deconstruction of Derrida, as well as the existentialism of Schmitt, by the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe” (9).

Essential to appreciating this offensiveness with good will, imaginative experience of the offense and the humane purpose or intention of the disturbance is required. Such an intellectual disposition shares with historical phenomenology and resists contemporary conceptualizations of a global or globalizing Shakespeare: to use Wilson’s words, to “create an interdependent worldliness, mondialisation, as opposed to a globalization, involves thinking a world [as Shakespeare does] without mastery” (48). Modernizing Shakespearean criticism thinks for mastery and in doing so, Wilson explains, misrepresents Shakespeare’s actual accomplishments.

Relinquishing mastery and adopting mutual participation in offensiveness but with good will offers a vital complement to certain literary and historical phenomenology, such as that of Bruce R. Smith (e.g., in his The Acoustic World of Early Modern England) and Gail Kern Paster (e.g., in her Humoring the Body), especially in understanding in historically accurate and ethically attentive ways certain repulsive Shakespearean characters. In my paper, I explore the differing experiences of repulsiveness of Angelo (Measure for Measure), Regan (Lear), Tamora and Aaron (Titus Andronicus), Falstaff (Merry Wives), and Nell (Comedy of Errors) so as to distinguish early modern repulsiveness from modern or late modern senses of the repugnant and, most importantly, so as to sketch a sense of how a premodern Shakespearean repulsiveness informs some contemporary, worldly experiences of the repulsive over and against contemporary globalizing mandates and protocols of tolerance and mastery.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

The Epistemic Agency of Disabled Subjects in King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III

Roweena Yip

National University of Singapore; [email protected]

I shall use theoretical perspectives from disability studies to intervene in textual analyses of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III—particularly concerning the epistemic agency of disabled subjects: the extent to which disabled subjects participate in the production of knowledge about their environment, as well as knowledge about themselves as knowledge-producing agents. The epistemic agency of disabled subjects is always already inscribed and enacted within the dramatic texts in spite of prevailing attitudes in the reception of non-normative bodies, and I argue that these plays demonstrate concerns regarding both the exclusionary socio-political structures of a disabling society, and the possibilities for characters with non-normative bodies to resist containment. Each section examines how bodily difference produces forms of knowledge. In King Lear, possibilities are raised in the Dover scene for a different phenomenological experience of the world based on multisensory perceptions after Gloucester is blinded. Although this is complicated by Edgar’s rhetorical manipulation of his father’s sensory perceptions, I argue that the condition of blindness ultimately questions the ethics of theatrical representation, which is shown to privilege the sense of sight in the imaginative construction of space. Meanwhile, Lavinia’s dismemberment in Titus Andronicus initially subjects her bodily condition to patriarchal and ableist readings of ideal feminine corporeality. However, she is able to transcend these readings, establishing hybrid modes of non-verbal communication that rely upon the shared collective knowledge of classical mythology.

Ideas concerning the socio-political agency of the disabled subject come to fruition in the figure of Richard III, whose self-conceptualisation of his body facilitates not only self-recognition, but self-determination and political agency—precisely by reinforcing stereotypical moralistic interpretations of the non-normative body in order to fulfil his political ambitions. The plays demonstrate the ways disabled subjects disrupt normative expectations concerning bodily integrity by exercising their own ability as epistemic agents—albeit with varying degrees of success.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

“How foolish are our minds”: ('Othello'; 4.3.21): inclusive and restrictive uses of the first person plural in Shakespeare’s Othello

Claire Guéron

University of Burgundy and Franche-Comté; [email protected]

Othello’s cast of characters is traversed by a number of salient fault line, including race, gender and city- nationality. As has been discussed by such scholars as Gail Kern Paster and Mary Floyd-Wilson, the play’s discourses of “otherness” are underpinned by Galenic humoural theory, as when Desdemona speaks of how the warm weather of Africa must have sucked all “jealous (…) humours” (3.4.28) out of her Moorish husband’s temperament. This paper will discuss how the use of the inclusive “we” intersects with, and sometimes undercuts, such humoural discourses of difference. In several of the play’s key episodes, beginning with Iago’s “our bodies are our gardens” (1.3.316) speech, the generic use of “we”, “our” and “us” is subtly pitted against more restrictive – and sometimes ambiguous - uses of the pronoun.

This paper argues that such tensions, in addition to supporting an Augustinian model of human frailty, tend to remap the dividing lines between self and other drawn by Aristotelian and Galenic climatic and humoural theory, thereby questioning the foundations of such theories. Drawing on performativity theories, I will also discuss the fluidity of “we” in relation to that of “man”, and suggest that the play explores the way language, and pronouns in particular, may play a normative role by empowering the speaking subject to establish him- or herself as a representative of a larger group than he or she may traditionally be associated with. In particular, this occur when Desdemona uses “we” to position herself as a generic human being, thus destabilizing the male-female divide. The discussion of Othello will be supplemented by examples from Cymbeline and Henry V.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

“Plucked into the swallowing womb”: malevolent pregnancies, deadly births and abject babies in Titus Andronicus (Titus Andronicus, 2.3.239)

Katarzyna Burzyńska

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland); [email protected]

Titus Andronicus has been a notorious play in the Shakespearean canon. Its supposedly low-quality poetry and unpalatable brutality made many critics question Shakespeare’s authorship, while the play itself has been radically cut or rewritten for the stage. However, it is important to note that Titus Andronicus prefigures Shakespeare’s preoccupation with malevolent maternal forces; a theme which will find its full realization in his mature tragedies like Macbeth and King Lear. Not only does Titus Andronicus problematize early modern conceptualizations of race and interracial sexual relations in its portrayal of Tamora and Aaron but it also investigates the topic of female insatiability, capitalizing on Renaissance obsessive fear of female corporeality.

Moreover, it is one of few early modern plays featuring a pregnant woman, who actually turns out to be a driving force of the whole tragedy. For early modern standards, Shakespearean material in Titus Andronicus is indeed explosive. Following in the footsteps of feminist researchers preoccupied with Shakespeare’s vision of maternity (Adelman, Callaghan) and utilising ideas proposed by philosophers of pregnancy (LaChance, Kristeva, Irigaray and Beauvoir), I wish to focus on Tamora and her creative and, at the same time, monstrous potential. The play seems to revolve around the issues of pregnancy, which is subversively equalled with imprisonment, while birth becomes death. Hence, this paper also investigates the structure of the play in the context of the reversed pregnancy metaphor, whereby male characters in the play seize and usurp maternal forces, transforming creativity into destruction.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

“He’s more than a creeping thing” - The ‘monstrous’ soldier in Coriolanus

Anna-Rose Schack

University of Amsterdam; [email protected]

Returning from war a hero, Coriolanus fails to conform to the Roman custom of showing his wounds to the people, leading to his banishment. It is an “idealised self-sufficiency” (Gray 178) that underpins his failure to adequately perform the part expected of him by others and which exemplifies the difficulty of “finding the place for the soldier in the state no longer at war” (Holland 2).

The irony is that it is precisely his desire to stay true to “the man I am” (3.2.17) that precipitates his metamorphosis “from man to dragon” (5.4.13) in the eyes of others. This paper proposes to examine the relationship between the dehumanisation of Coriolanus and his performance of selfhood, specifically engaging with the vast amount of imagery deployed to ‘other’ the former hero.

Furthermore, this paper will suggest that dehumanising Coriolanus, or turning him into a monster, stems from anxieties pertaining to the performance of military identity in a civilian context and the role of the soldier in the body politic.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

The Malady of the Trojan War from a Fool’s Record: Thersites in Troilus and Cressida

Kübra Vural Özbey

Hacettepe University, Ankara (Turkey); [email protected]

William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) Troilus and Cressida (1603) is one of the most disputed works of the playwright as the play is problematic in terms of its genre and its subject matter.

The atmosphere of the Trojan War illustrates the vanity of struggle, the decay of heroism and complex dynamics of love. In the cauldron of this war, Thersites, the fool, comes to the fore as an outcast figure whose voice unveils the ugly truths about early modern concepts of

heroism and love in the play. On the one hand, his status as a fool gives him a liminal state, wavering between wisdom and madness. On the other hand, his deformity establishes his marginal identity in his community. Albeit his ambiguous position, Thersites liberates himself in his speeches and comments on critical issues and problems during the war. Ostensibly, his position grants him this freedom of speech, and his harsh criticism comes forth with his vulgar dialect which is teemed with disease references and animal imagery. On this basis, it appears ironic that the deformed fool deprecates and marginalises other figures around him although they are the heroes with physical and intellectual capacity, shaping the destiny of their societies. This paper sets out to analyse Thersites’s discourse in his vision of the Trojan war through which the fool blatantly gives an account of the rotting ideals and others the significant figures.

Seminar - Forms and Geographies of Physical and Intellectual Non-Normativity in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

The Grotesque Realism in William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Hatice Yurttaş

Istanbul Şehir University; [email protected]

This paper discusses the grotesque elements in William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida around the character of the fool, Thersites, as a borderline character in the play who throws a satirical look on the chivalric values, idealism, love and cult of honor of the medieval culture in the well-known war story, the fall of Troy and love story. The fool’s connection to the problem of the play, the absurdity and hypocrisy of the concept of honor can be read along the lines of Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the fool as the expression of the worldview of medieval culture that he describes as a carnivalesque folk culture and festive spirit in his Rabelais and His World. This worldview and truth appears in certain idioms of symbols and imagery related to the material body as an entity conceived in its existences as that which comes to life, grows up, ages and dies. These images which constitute the grotesque realism of medieval times, highlight the material body in such a way that what emerges is a body politics, being, and definition of time in contradiction to the ecclesiastical teaching. Within this perspective, Thersites is more than a tool of satire in Troilus and Cressida. He represents the bodily aspect of being where the body is most excluded: among the characters striving for honor, immortality, and ideal love. The imagery in his language which is related to diseases, sex and culinary brings everything down to earth, to the body. The body intervenes to show that nothing is eternal, the body has a life and in life there is body, and also death. This imagery, which reinforces the bodily principle, links Thersites to carnivalesque spirit that celebrates death as much as life and sanctions the body and life cycle.

For Bakhtin, this carnivalesque spirit is crucial for the emergence of the Renaissance and Shakespeare rises in the soil of this folk tradition on which the literature of future could grow. Shakespeare’s importance lies in his skillful use of the new and the old in his works, in his bringing the folk tradition into the official culture, the canon, in the spirit of rebirth and renewal.

Seminar

“Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Alessandra Squeo1, Maddalena Pennacchia2, Reto Winckler3

1University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy; 2University of Roma Tre, Italy; 3Chinese University of Hong Kong; [email protected]

In the light of the Conference's wider focus on 'remapping the borders' of Shakespeare's multifaceted physical and conceptual territory, the Seminar's main aim is to explore the new frontiers of textual and performative spaces opened up by digital media, paying particular attention to how Shakespeare is experienced today by digital natives in the “here and now” of the cyberspace.

We invite papers from different fields of study that may bring new understandings to the potentialities of such textual/performative spaces, with an eye to the specific cognitive, reading and learning abilities of digital natives (Prensky 2001, 2010; Gazzaley-Rosen 2016).

In the context of a wide-ranging critical debate, we are mainly (but not only) interested in the following issues:

• Shakespeare's early modern textuality in new media and post-print perceptions of textual spatiality (digital facsimiles of the Folio and quarto editions; new tools for visualizing the texts in iPad apps and multi- dimensional spaces allowed by digital technologies)

• Changing notions of the performative space in intermedial and cross-media performances, adaptations and remediations

• The web as a stage and the reconceptualization of the time/space of the cyber-performance (You Tube, Twitter)

• The interaction of textual and performative spaces in cross-media digital editions and archives

• The approach of digital natives to Shakespeare's textual/performative spaces

• The potentialities of digital tools and resources for teaching/apprehending Shakespeare

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Boro, Joyce Université de Montréal, Canada Brucoli, Valeria Independent Scholar Gatto, Maristella University of Bari, Italy Nigri, Lucia University of Salford Manchester, UK 53

Orfini, Anita Roma Tre University, Italy Sharrock, Elizabeth Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham, UK "Richmond, Robert; Peterson, Gabrielle" University of South Carolina, USA Winckler, Reto The Chinese University of Hong Kong Woods, Orlagh Maynooth University, Ireland

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Back to the Future: Hamlet Encounters and the Immersive Virtual Reality Applied to Theatre

Anita Orfini

Roma Tre University, Italy; [email protected]

Back to the Future: “Hamlet Encounters” and the Immersive Virtual Reality Applied to Theatre.

Technology is changing us and the world we live in, so why not use it to approach Shakespeare in a whole different way? Hamlet Encounters is a project by the Belgian multidisciplinary artist Eric Joris and the Professorial Fellow at RCSSD Robin Nelson that combines theatre and virtual reality. Through the use of an HTC VR headset the spectator, guided by one of the two inventors, can explore the scenes and walk through the Elsinore Castle thanks to a special remote control. By using high technologies such as HDV and MoCap, the audience can choose where to go and how to move through the scene, and therefore not follow the play in chronological order. Thus, wearing a VR to experience a play leads to question not only how the digital media might be reconfiguring both the performance and the text, but it also challenges the role of the actor and the one of the audience in particular. In a reality that is as much concrete as fictitious, the spectator ceases to be a mere and passive receiver of the tragedy but actively enters the scene and becomes part of it. Therefore, the world of the virtual reality opens new whole opportunities to enjoy and address Shakespeare with new media technologies.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Framing the Fringes: Canonical Anxiety in Shakespearean Live Theatre Broadcast Paratexts

Elizabeth Sharrock

Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham, UK; [email protected]

My paper will explore the ways in which contemporary live theatre broadcasts of Shakespeare plays are framed by digital paratexts. Since the National Theatre’s debut live theatre broadcast venture in 2008, and especially since the Royal Shakespeare Company began regular broadcasts in 2013, Shakespeare has saturated the event cinema market for almost a decade. Conventionally, these performances are framed by live or prerecorded paratexts, often in the form of interviews and short films. I contend that these follow from a long history of Shakespearean paratexts in print, inviting comparisons with early printed title pages and the prefatory paratexts to the first folio. Therefore, live theatre broadcasts constitute a contemporary manifestation of the historical paratextual mediation of Shakespeare, creating a uniquely liminal performative space. The focus of my paper will be on two areas of (para)textual marginality and their intersections: plays which have been marginalised in the performance canon, and the ways in which their alterity is manifested in paratexts, which are themselves situated on the fringes of a live theatre broadcast. Focusing on broadcasts of lesser-known and lesser-performed plays, I will consider the mediating function of their paratexts. For example, what kind of expository work does a paratext perform for a broadcast of Cymbeline or Timon of Athens, when compared with better-known plays such as Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet? In doing so, I hope to explore anxieties surrounding the margins of the Shakespearean canon, Shakespeare’s contemporary cultural value, and the liminality of the live theatre broadcast experience.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Hacking Hamlet; Mr. Robot, or what happens to Shakespeare in the digital age

Reto Winckler

The Chinese University of Hong Kong; [email protected]

What happens to Shakespeare’s plays and characters under digital circumstances? My contention in this paper is that Sam Esmail’s television series 'Mr. Robot' (2015-present, USA: Showtime), which focuses on a mentally disturbed hacker who takes on a gigantic corporation in the present day, performs an unacknowledged, complex reworking of Shakespeare’s 'Hamlet', updating the narrative to fit into our own algorithmic age. More specifically, I want to consider whether it makes sense to think of Esmail as a transmedial hacker and of 'Hamlet' as the script he hacks, a perspective which would make 'Mr. Robot' the product of a complex hack performed by post-modern, digital means on an early modern theatrical text. I will attempt to read 'Mr. Robot' through the lens of 'Hamlet', hoping thereby to discover the alterations made by Esmail on the Shakespeare text, as well as the parts of the original that he chose to leave in place.

My preliminary thesis is that in spite of the crypto-anarchist politics, cutting-edge technology and postmodern narrative trickery pervasively on display in 'Mr. Robot', the differences in characters and themes are surprisingly small when compared to Shakespeare’s 'Hamlet'. By focusing on three interconnected themes which are pervasive in both the play and the television series – namely madness, meta-drama and the nature of the ghost – I will try to show how Esmail’s hack proceeds by updating the framing of the themes and characters while leaving many of the fundamental parameters of Shakespeare’s original intact. Ultimately, I hope to approach, by means of 'Mr. Robot', the curious question: what would a digital 'Hamlet' look like?

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Locating Shakespeare: The digital remapping of Shakespeare in light of Emma Rice controversy at The Globe

Orlagh Woods

Maynooth University, Ireland; [email protected]

Marjorie Garber has succinctly claimed that: “Every age creates its own Shakespeare” (3). Garber weaves together various strands of literary theory to counter the popular accusation that Shakespeare’s plays are “timeless”, and moves toward an understanding of the works’ enduring timeliness, in that they can be adapted in ways that already seem modern. More recently, Geoffrey Way has mapped how theatrical institutions have sought – and struggled – to negotiate the new digital environment. His proposition is especially prescient in light of the recent controversy at The Globe, when Emma Rice was asked to step down as creative director, due to her perceived threat to Sam Wanamaker’s founding vision in 1949. The Globe concluded that Rice’s use of contemporary sound and lighting technology was not conducive to the unique theatre space they have created, and by implication positioned themselves as custodians of the essential Shakespeare. This paper situates the Rice controversy in the context of The Globe’s negotiation of digital environments, and in particular the intuition’s construction of its online profile. Through a brief analysis of The Globe’s online footprint, and reactions in the Shakespeare online community to Rice’s departure, my paper identifies an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, The Globe’s online commitment to broadening access, generating and sustaining audiences for Shakespeare and, on the other, The Globe’s reactive treatment of Rice. Adaptations and popularized Shakespeare’s are ghosted by a more traditional understanding of the Bard. This paper argues that this controversy is indicative of both a creeping conservatism within the Shakespeare multiverse and also an implicit gender bias within some productions. Furthermore, it highlights the gendered dimension of fidelity critique and considers to what extent the Globe’s reaction to Rice signaled, despite Garber’s argument, an untimely Shakespeare, one that risks being out of touch with its age.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Looking for ‘Shakespeare(s)’ in the Digital Space

Lucia Nigri

University of Salford Manchester, UK; [email protected]

Against a complex theoretical background which investigates the concept of authenticity (related to an idea of presence in time and space; Benjamin 1936), singularity (against uniqueness), and iterability of a literary work (Derrida 1969; Calbi 2013; Anderson 2016), this contribution investigates the connections between Shakespeare’s oeuvre and its digital afterlife. In an increasingly participatory culture, where “content, news, or media [are] tokens used to initiate or maintain a conversation” (Manovich 2008), digital iterations of Shakespeare encourage new discussions around the temporality of the linguistic event, the performativity of literature, and the re-appropriation and re-location of “meaning and effectiveness” in new contexts (Derrida 1969). It is indeed through the myriad of fragmented, rhizomatic, and multicultural digital Shakespeares that “suit the here and now” (Modenessi, 2018) that an assertion of those “unchanging truths of the human condition” (Ryan, 2018) revealed in Shakespeare’s work is ultimately possible.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Shakespeare au/in Québec: Reading Shakespeare across Digital, Linguistic, and GeoTemporal Spaces

Joyce Boro

Université de Montréal, Canada; [email protected]

Shakespeare au/in Québec (SQ) is an open-access digital humanities project co-edited by Jennifer Drouin and Joyce Boro. It is dedicated to producing a critical anthology and an interactive performance database of approximately 40 dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare written in Québec (Canada) since 1960. SQ, currently in beta form, is an Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) partner site. My paper will explore how this digital space opens new pedagogical and research potentialities by extending the Shakespearean

corpus across linguistic and geo-temporal frontiers. By editing, digitizing, and publicly disseminating these adaptations, SQ renders them accessible to scholars, teachers, theatre

practitioners, and the general public. Currently, only 12 of the plays are in print, and none exists in a critical edition that comprehensively annotates both the Shakespearean intertexts and the historical and political allusions, as SQ does. Moreover, our bilingual platform enables this predominantly French-language corpus (just 2 plays are in English and 2 are bilingual French-English) to be accessed by Anglophone Shakespeare scholars and, consequently, to participate in important conversations about transnational adaptation and Global Shakespeare. These plays engage with and contribute to Shakespeare scholarship, while also reflecting contemporaneous issues in Québecois culture and society. Early adaptations are deeply entrenched in nationalist political and linguistic debates, however, since 1990, playwrights from more diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, including women, queers, and aboriginals, have enriched the corpus and widened the scope of its aesthetics and socio-political concerns. As Quebecois adaptations, these plays all bear witness to postcolonial, marginal subjectivities, united by the plurality of identity positions they foreground. In addition to expanding the parameters of Shakespeare Studies by giving space to these voices, SQ reveals new facets of how Shakespeare “is experienced today by digital natives in the ‘here and now’ of the cyberspace.”

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Shakespeare in Jail. Hamlet in Rebibbia: from stage to live streaming performances

Valeria Brucoli

Independent Scholar; [email protected]

“Since I have known art, this cell has turned into a prison” is the last line of Caesar must die, the film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani and winner of the Golden Bear for best film at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. Now, after six years, the doors of Rebibbia open again to the world to let art in. The company of prodigious inmates/actors, directed by Fabio Cavalli, come back to Shakespeare in order to stage Hamlet in Rebibbia: the tragedy of revenge.

If Caesar must die was a perfect blending of theatre and cinema, where everyday life in jail was mixed with theatre rehearsals, in an alternated montage of colour and black and white scenes, that culminated in a film disguised as filmed theatre, Hamlet in Rebibbia is a completely different kind of experiment.

The tragedy of Hamlet is representative about the matter of Revenge and Justice and has a radical connection to the questions that concern the life in jail and the origins of many inmates. For this reason the tragedy perfectly suits this company and the place where it is staged. Anyway the aim of the director Fabio Cavalli is to bring the play outside the jail, in order to reach as many people as possible, showing the play all around the country through a full-HD live streaming performance.

Following the example of the National Theatre Live, Fabio Cavalli experiments a new kind of theatre that, with the help of new technologies, goes beyond the physical borders of the stage and meets cinema halfway. The aim of this paper is to take Hamlet in Rebibbia as a case study to investigate the relationship between theatre and cinema when one medium meets the other in order to create a new, vibrant and meaningful work of art.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Keywords: Shakespeare, digital natives, online learning, digital performance

To Thine Own Selfie Be True: Producing Shakespeare for the Digital Age

Robert Richmond, Gabrielle Peterson

University of South Carolina, USA; [email protected]

With the shift in education toward online digital learning, considering how the performing arts will adapt to this changing landscape is tantamount. In this paper, we engage with Shakespeare’s works both as theatre practitioners, online program developers for both the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC and the University of South Carolina, and as educators. We consider how visual elements of performance can be communicated through aural methods and the ways in which an art form that is defined by its live performance nature can be adapted to digital spaces. As researchers, we are examining digital formats as a part of our wider research on the ways that Shakespeare is adapted for 21st century audiences and practitioners.

First, we address the shift towards presenting digital performance in and outside of the classroom and its implications on the art of the theatre. We consider the “supply and demand” nature of this type of audience interaction vis-à-vis digital natives. Secondly, we discuss the experience of directing and developing the Folger Luminary Shakespeare Apps with the Folger Shakespeare Theatre (an iPad app educational tool that presents Folger Shakespeare Library editions with fully produced performative audio recordings and commentary) and the considerations and alterations that were made by producing practitioners and the audience’s reception of the app. Some of the issues addressed include presenting physical action through audio recordings, creating a fully produced performance in a digital form, the role of providing commentary and creating tools for response, and ways of providing different interpretative performances to compensate for the loss of live interaction. Finally, we discuss the effects of this kind of digital performance in the classroom, addressing universal design methodologies, accessibility, and our experiences with developing online coursework in the performing arts.

Seminar - “Here is my (cyber) Space”: Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment

Vertical and distant reading of Shakespeare with digital natives. The case of The Merchant of Venice

Maristella Gatto

University of Bari, Italy; [email protected]

Over the past decades the myth of the digital natives being ‘naturally’ fluent in the use of ICT has been repeatedly rehearsed, revised and eventually challenged (Prensky 2001; 2009; Tomas 2011), but probably not yet comprehensively explored on the basis of empirical evidence. Especially in a teaching context such competence has been more assumed than tested, and the gap between imagined and actual skills runs the risk of leaving a grey area where neither the potential is fully exploited nor the limitations are fully addressed.

Indeed, recent research has shown that digital natives are not necessarily information literate, and that it is most often the case that proper ICT literacy should be explicitly promoted with hands-on and minds-on courses (Sorgo 2016).

It is against this background that the present paper reports and discusses the result of a teaching experience carried out with university students with specific reference to the exploration of Shakespeare’s plays in digital format. While the pervasiveness of digital technology in everyday life has been seen as having a strong impact on the interaction with text from a very young age (Levy 2011), it seems that new digitally enhanced reading skills still need to be self-consciously developed in learners. The use of digital resources

and tools in the literature class can therefore be seen as a useful contribution to the development of such skills. In particular, by experimenting with vertical (Tognini Bonelli 2001) and distant (Moretti 2013) reading, and engaging with quantitative and qualitative analysis of language data from the perspective of corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics, students can both attend to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare’s innovative use of language and develop useful reading skills that can be profitably exploited in different contexts.

Seminars

‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

David Jonathan Schalkwyk1, Elena Marie Pellone2, Silvia Bigliazzi3

1Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom; 2Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; 3University of Verona; [email protected]

In the opening scene of Antony and Cleopatra, questions of identity contrast Antony’s Roman “buckles on his breast”, symbolic of masculine, soldierly honour and power, with Egypt’s volatile and excessive feminine “lust”, identified with the inconstant, unreliable but fascinating gypsy queen’s “infinite variety”. But identities are continuously negotiated and (de)constructed performatively through Antony and Cleopatra’s fluctuating attitudes towards each other. Their speech acts deploy mutual, passionate, perlocutionary tensions involving contradictory emotional stances through which they experience dialectically the variable possibilities of their selves. Who are Antony and Cleopatra, and to what extent do they display and (de)construct themselves performatively in relation to the fluidity of “passionate utterances”? How does this dynamic involve geographies of the self interdiscursively, and what does ‘geography’ mean with regard to the broader ideological investment of the Rome/Egypt opposition? How is the mobile self of the interacting lovers situated in relation to their respective cultural positions and Western/Eastern perspectival mobility, and how is this issue conveyed performatively in terms of space imagery, stage business and acting? When Antony claims, “Here is my space” (where ‘here’ is the space of the ‘gypsy’), he conflates ideas of otherness and sameness, suggesting an ‘ontology’ of mobility that situates the self in a continuously mutable performative relation with the other. This makes the wider ‘world’, and its geography, an accessory to his own singularity, but not in a Romantic way.

The seminar explores ideas of belongingess and foreignness, and maps discursive and performative trajectories of the self by discussing how Eastern and Western binaries are questioned and reconfigured through experiences of ‘individual (and mutual) geographies’.

It also addresses a further binary: the divide between intellectual analysis and performance. It will therefore combine academic discussion with a practical workshop process in which the text will be tested through performance.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

“This knot intrinsicate [...] untie”: (Dis-)Articulation in Antony and Cleopatra

Zeno Ackermann

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg; [email protected]

Even more than other plays by Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra foregrounds an interest in the complex relationships and momentous disjunctions between speech, subjectivity and reality. Several passages in the play explicitly address discontinuities between intellectual processes, emotional impulses and the act of locution. Prompting Antony to withdraw to Egypt, the soothsayer explains: " I see it in / My motion, have it not in my tongue" (2.3.17-18). Antony, whose own tongue tends to babble on in contradiction to his mind, finds a striking image in order to interpret both the power and the powerlessness of Octavia's silence: "Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can / Her heart inform her tongue, – the swan's down-feather, / That stands upon the swell at full of tide, / And neither way inclines" (3.2.56-59). Significantly, Octa-vius – as the masterful controller of himself and others – fears the tongue-splitting influence of alcohol: "Gentle lords, let's part; / You see we have burnt our cheeks: strong Enobarb / Is weaker than the wine; and mine own tongue / Splits what it speaks: the wild disguise hath al-most / Antick'd us all. / What needs more words? Good night" (2.7142 46).

What these passages allude to is the problem of articulation, i.e. the question of how body, mind and social position are brought together (or are disjoined) in the act of speaking, thus producing an interpretation of the world and placing the subject within it. My contribution to the seminar will attempt to deploy the concept of articulation – according to both its linguistic meanings and its usage in cultural studies – in order to better understand the confused con-structions and interrelations of self, erotics and politics thematized in Antony and Cleopatra.

My hypothesis is that the concept may allow us to retrace the contours of the emancipatory problem at stake in the play: the problem of articulating a distinct and self-possessed individu-ality within and through the persistent set of oppositions that the play stages in terms of the binary of 'Egypt' vs. 'Rome' – i.e. 'somaticity' vs. 'intellectuality,' 'nature' vs. 'culture,' 'femininity' vs. 'masculinity,' 'individuality' vs. 'collectivity', 'desire' vs. 'obligation' and 'erotics' vs. 'politics.' Arguably, what Antony and Cleopatra, as the tragic protagonists, can be seen and heard to perform in their attempts at validating the exalted status of their love is feats of both articula-tion and disarticulation. And the paradoxical kind of victory that audiences are encouraged to discover in their double suicide is probably in its character as a partially successful act of dis- sociating/disarticulating themselves from the new articulatory regime for which Rome stands. In its longing for the dissolution of binding ties of sociable existence and for a fresh language, Cleopatra's address to the asp supports such a reading:

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool

Be angry, and dispatch. O, couldst thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass

Unpolicied! (5.2.361-365)

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Antony the Actress and Cleopatra the Director

Eric Nicholson

New York University; [email protected]

For the censorious Caesar in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the “lascivious wassails” he denounces would include the gender-juggling histrionics of the play’s title characters, recalled by the Egyptian queen herself: “Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed,/ Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst/ I wore his sword Philippan” (2.5.21-3). An evident allusion to the Amazonian Queen of Lydia Omphale’s cross-dressing sport with the ultra-virile Greek superhero Hercules—Marc Antony’s reputed ancestor—this passage also evokes the “woman warrior” model of such well-known characters as Ariosto’s Marfisa and Tasso’s Clorinda, performed by professional actresses on late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century European stages. This evocation gives added irony to the much-celebrated, metatheatrical mise en abime of Cleopatra’s prediction that she shall see a young English-style actor “boy my greatness/ I’th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.219-20): as I will argue, this queen’s “infinite variety” involves her own resemblance to an Italianate theatrical virtuosa, expert at playing parodies and transfigurations of gender.

Moreover, this same diva-like status bears a twofold quality, pertinent to the focus of this panel: one, it reinforces but at the same time complicates Cleopatra’s identification with the non-Western Other, and two, it enables her to play the “woman on top,” in the usually masculine role of director. In this context, I also propose that Antony becomes cast as an actress, subject to the drama coaching of Cleopatra, with the consequent effect of challenging and reconfiguring conventional binaries of the self. In keeping with the approach of this seminar, my paper will extend into a practical workshop, where Cleopatra and Antony’s mobile, dissolving, and transformative re-mappings of identity will be tested and discussed through live, experimental performance.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Becoming Cleopatra

David Lucking

University of Salento; [email protected]

This talk investigates the implications of the word “becoming” as it is explored in Antony and Cleopatra, the term being invested in this play with several distinct meanings which Shakespeare pursues the implications of and, at the same time, plays off against one another. It is argued that Antony and Cleopatra is a drama deeply concerned with questions of being and of coming to be, of what being consists in, and of whether identity is essentially static or fluid in character. The opposition between the rival perspectives of Rome and Egypt is of central importance, as the play enacts a tension between the different conceptions of personal as well as cultural ontology that are exemplified respectively by the two locales, prismatically refracting the vision of each culture through that of the other in such a way as to effectively preclude any possibility of arriving at a single authoritative point of view. Whereas Cleopatra, true to her character as queen of a Nile in perpetual flux, is a personage whose being consists in endless becoming, the Romans cleave to an ideal of rigidly coherent selfhood which, at least on the surface, does not admit of variation or alteration. Antony, divided between the worlds of Rome and Egypt, is seen as a figure fatally caught between these contrasting conceptions of what authentic being consists in and what, in the different senses of the word, it means to be becoming.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Death in Alexandria

Rosy Colombo

University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’; [email protected]

“Death in Alexandria” investigates Shakespeare’s aesthetics of death, focussing on the crisis of tragic suicide as conceived by the Roman tradition; a theme articulated in Antony and Cleopatra in three different modalities culminating with Cleopatra’s apotheosis, simultaneously in her roles as lover, actress, queen. A specific issue of the paper is that Cleopatra’s ‘monumental death’ in her Egyptian Mausoleum in Alexandria takes the form of a negotiation between paradigms which are constitutive of Western and Eastern cultures, thereby challenging their ideological (and political) incompatibility as explored throughout the play, up to the final clash at Actium.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

From Rome to Egypt (and back): Roundtrips and one-way journeys in Antony and Cleopatra

Keir Douglas Elam

Bologna University; [email protected]

The narrative and geopolitical dynamics of Antony and Cleopatra are centred on mobility between Rome and Alexandria, and more occasionally across the interstitial places and spaces named in the play. Plutarch, in his Life of Antony, dedicates considerable attention to the movement of armies and their leaders across continents; Shakespeare, instead, focuses events either in Egypt or in Rome as points of departure and arrival, while movement between these relatively static spaces is usually delegated to onstage narration. One of the crucial dramatic and political distinctions in Antony and Cleopatra is between roundtrips and one- way journeys. Antony’s first journey to Alexandria turns out to be – much to Cleopatra’s chagrin - a roundtrip; his second, with the help of the Egyptian queen, proves to be a one-way journey ending in his death and burial. This contrasts pointedly with Octavius’s two-way expedition to Egypt and back, designed to signify Rome’s successful colonization of Alexandria. This opposition is powerfully constrained, however, by Octavius’s failure to impose on Cleopatra his plan for her one-way, and definitive, journey to Rome as political and military trophy: she is the only figure in the tragedy whose strategy is founded on the refusal of mobility.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Performing Selfhood and Discontinuous Identity in Antony and Cleopatra

Daniel Vitkus

University of California, San Diego; [email protected]

This seminar paper will focus on the concept of “discontinous identity” as it is figured through the title characters in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. First, the paper will trace a genealogy of fluid, unstable selfhood from its philosophical origins in Plutarch and other ancient authors, through its adaptation by Montaigne in his Essays (translated into English by Florio), to its representation as part of Shakespeare’s script for theatrical performance. Through the adaptive strategies of Shakespeare’s Renaissance humanism, the paper argues, a modern definition of subjectivity and consciousness begins to emerge. Building on Janet Adelman’s classic reading of Antony and Cleopatra in The Common Liar, and Michael Neill’s introduction to the Oxford Classics edition of the play, the paper goes on to provide a concise account, not only of the pattern of discontinuous identity in the play, but of the “properties of the self” that are exhibited by the tragic couple, both in terms of identity as defined by external action in the public gaze and by a “elasticity of becoming.” While the former tends to be associated with masculine virtu(e), and the latter is frequently connected to Cleopatra (and to her feminine manifestations of “infinite variety”), both characters exhibit a slipperiness and an inconsistency that resists stable identity while offering a model for understanding human identity in general as unstable. Thus, the paper will show, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is both a humanist rebooting of ancient philosophy and the beginning of something new. This interpretation of the text also has implications for current performance practice: it will be of interest to those who would stage the play in a manner that goes beyond a traditional theater based on stable, readily legible “character.”

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

The (de)territorializing power of Cleopatra’s barge (Shakespeare and Mankiewicz)

Pascale Drouet

University of Poitiers; [email protected]

In his 1963 film production of Cleopatra (part 2), Mankiewicz shows Cleopatra in her private apartments, naked in her bathing pool. While Rufio, sent by Antony, ‘summons’ Cleopatra from behind the partition, Cleopatra is nonchalantly playing with a bath toy, a miniature plastic barge. This apparently minor detail serves as a astute transition to her spectacular arrival on the Cydnus River to meet Antony (a scene reported by Enobarbus in Shakespeare’s play). From the barge that is “like a burnished throne” (2.2.201) to the Queen’s final claim to be “again for Cydnus” (5.2.227), not forgetting her “fearful sails” (3.11.55) in between, this paper aims at examining the royal barge, a transitional and mobile space, as both a metonymy and extension of Cleopatra’s protean self and boundary-moving territory—on symbolic and poetic levels, but also on a geopolitical one. The processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation that the barge favours (either emotionally or politically) are also taken into account, and unexpectedly bring into scope reminiscences of the ship of fools.

Seminar - ‘Here is my space’: Geographies of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

The Geographical Poetics of the Self in Antony and Cleopatra

Anthony Guy Patricia

Concord University; [email protected]

When Antony is in Egypt, engaging in sensual pursuits with Cleopatra, he is not the Roman he would be—is supposed to be—in other circumstances in which he would be free of her effeminizing influence; for this he is upbraided and ridiculed. In a similar way, Cleopatra fears that she will be upbraided and ridiculed by some squeaking boy on the stages of Rome if she allows herself to be taken there as Octavius Caesar’s prisoner. At the same time, one Cleopatra is not the same as another when Antony is gone from Egypt and tending to his affairs in Rome. Like chameleons, the selves of Antony and Cleopatra change and change again depending on their literal and imaginative geographies (e.g. where they are in actual space and time; where they are in the thoughts of each other). Thus, Antony and Cleopatra is an excellent exemplar to use for, as this paper does, crafting a poetics of the self with the title characters serving as test cases. It will draw on close reading, character study, and theories such as self-fashioning; race gender, and sexuality; Orientalism; in order to lay bare how the geography of the self is constructed as far as Antony and Cleopatra are concerned. And it will consider the influence of readers, audiences, directors, and Shakespeare himself contribute to—are significant parts of—the geographical selves of Antony and Cleopatra.

Seminar

“Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays”

Estelle Rivier-Arnaud1, Dana Monah2

1Grenoble-Alpes University, France; 2University of Iasi, Romania; [email protected]

The various contexts in which Shakespeare’s plays are set cross borders. Some places are easily spotted on maps, some others are imaginary and insubstantial. As we read the plays, our minds travel; as we attend the performances, our eyes explore materialized areas thanks to either elaborate or suggestive scenographies. Shakespearean characters are often attracted by the outside, either to conquer new territories or to flee from their own. Whether in tragedies, histories, romances or comedies, they contribute to shape new horizons, beyond the stage copes and the sixteenth-century’s audience’s imaginary borders.

In this seminar, we would delightfully welcome proposals on the way these sea routes and tormented travels are tackled, from the textual and metaphorical approach but also from the performative angle. How did Shakespeare describe the places that neither he nor his audience knew? How did different practitioners position themselves with respect to the showing vs. telling dichotomy or to the relationship between the verbal and the non-verbal component of theatre performance? The papers may focus on the impact of seas and oceans in Shakespeare’s plays: how for instance water battles (against the enemy or against nature) are dealt with, on page and on stage; how female compared to male characters react when they are the victims of a shipwreck and, as a consequence, when they are lost and exiled; how the sea routes are key elements in the praxis; how they were possibly performed in Shakespeare’s time and after; how they inform us about the European geography Shakespeare and his contemporaries had in mind; how today new technologies in stage scenery can produce images and convey the illusion that the performance travels indeed, and finally how these stage devices address cultural and political issues of the performance.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Dionisio, Fiammetta Roma University Tre, Italy İzmir, Sibel Department Of English Language And Literature, Atılım University, Ankara/Turkey Kaczynski, Daniel University Of Warsaw, Poland Kucab, Mateusz Jagiellonian University In Cracow Leboeuf, Patrick Bibliothèque Nationale De France Markova, Maria Russian State University For The Humanities Martinez, José Facultad De Filosofía Y Letras Mcadams, Alexander Lowe Rice University, Houston, Usa Mitsi, Efterpi University Of Athens, Greece Monah, Dana University Of Iasi, Roumania Reuss, Gabriella Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary Rivier-Arnaud, Estelle Université Grenoble-Alpes, France Schwartz-Gastine, Isabelle Université de Caen, France 76

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

‘Trip no further, pretty sweeting’: routes of sea, routes of love in Twelfth Night

Maria Markova

Russian State University for the Humanities; [email protected]

Illyria of Twelfth Night is often considered an imaginary place dominated by illusion and lyrics, and not a real spot on a 16-century map. However, as Elizabeth Pentland argued, Illyria, a part of the Adriatic coast, was well-known to Shakespeare’s audience for its piracy, trade and female rule, all three motives quite evident in the play. Which is more, all three of them become interconnected when Viola, originally from Messaline – most probably standing for Massilia, the Latin name for Marseille, another important sea port and merchants’ city – blazes her trail on Illyrian coast in quite a pirate-like way, conquering the hearts of both Olivia and Orsino. She and her brother, finding themselves shipwrecked, separate, and in an unknown place, are now free to chart their own routes, this time on land. Twins separated by a shipwreck – a motive taken by Shakespeare from Plautus twice, first in The Comedy of Errors, and then in Twelfth Night – are now of different sexes, presenting two different strategies of conduct. Viola immediately formulates the plan that would supposedly provide her with both job and husband, while Sebastian relies heavily of his friend’s purse and loyalty. But both twins’ journey does indeed end ‘in lovers meeting’, and neither hesitates to abandon their previous life and heritage left in Messaline. This paper aims to discuss the ways in which the structure of Twelfth Night contrasts with earlier comedies and later romances, where heroes leave society in order to be transformed by Nature, but always return to reclaim their rights. Here, Viola and Sebastian stay in Illyria, even though this coastal place had not been their destination, and manage to metaphorically conquer it, building their new life on the very spot where it was destroyed in the beginning of the play.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: Tempest-Doran-Taymor-Digital image-cinema

Doran’s and Taymor’s Tempest: Digitalizing the Storm, a Dialogue Between Theatre and Cinema”

ESTELLE RIVIER-ARNAUD

Université Grenoble-Alpes, France; [email protected]

In 2017 on the Barbican stage, London, Gregory Doran presented a very daring production of The Tempest. Working hand in hand with Intel Pentium, he created an outstanding set made of digital images that would give the vivid impression that the boatmen were actually diving in the depth of the stage during the shipwreck (I.1). Though extremely challenging such a process, whereby artificial images and theatrical immediacy were combined, was not new. Virtual technology had already been used in Julie Taymor’s film adaptation starring Helen Mirren (Prospera) and Ben Whishaw (Ariel) in 2010. Both productions had received mixed critical response as the poetical momentum of the script sometimes vanished to the benefit of the powerful images.

Borrowing terminology from Gilles Deleuze’s Dialogues (2), and Marguerite Chabrol’s & Tiphaine Karsenti’s Théâtre et Cinéma, Le Croisement des imaginaires (1-among others), we shall question the way such cinematic artefact influences the reception of Shakespeare’s play today, and how indeed high-tech, while solving the difficult mise en scène of the shipwreck, may belie the efficiency (and sufficiency) of word- sceneries.

The purpose of this paper will be to compare and contrast both productions and see how artificial images increasingly dominate the Shakespearean stage in order to create a more spectacular illusion of the watery world, the bodies lost at sea and the metamorphoses of the décor. On a broader scale, what are the consequences of the ‘invasion’ of cinematographic art and I.T. in theatre? How does it shape the evolution of Elizabethan drama in the future of theatrical performance, beyond the borders of seas and oceans?

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

“News/Tidings, Tears, and Water: Speech metaphors, emotions and the giving and receiving of news in Shakespeare’s plays”

José MARTINEZ

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; [email protected]

This paper – which is part of an ongoing larger project whose main objective is to explore the metaphors that underlie the giving and receiving of news in Shakespeare’s plays– reports on a survey of the words news and tidings. By concentrating on these two words, the paper seeks to show that even though both nouns are normally glossed in dictionaries as synonyms or near synonyms, the latter seems to be stylistically marked, as it often occurs in contexts in which water imagery seems to be evoked by the formal similarity of this term and others related to water.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

“Pascal Rambert’s Antony and Cleopatra (1995): deep in love and in water”

ISABELLE SCHWARTZ-GASTINE

Université de Caen, France; [email protected]

In 1995 Pascal Rambert (born in 1962) was one of the young upcoming actors, theatre directors and dramatists of his generation. His reputation on the French stage was already well-established and full of prospects, especially for the production of his own texts which were staged in the main national venues. Then he turned to Shakespeare, as many theatre directors did in the 90s in France, but his perspective baffled the actors and was rather badly received by the rare reviews devoted to his production. This work turned out to be at the origin of a deep personal crisis for Rambert who discarded the classics altogether to focus on his own dramas for which he received the prestigious “Prix de l’Académie-Française” in 2016.

This paper will explore and discuss some of the aesthetical stands taken by Rambert in his approach of the play: the focus on the figure of Cleopatra as the leader in the relationship between the two lovers, and then the visual defeat of Antony at the battle of Actium with the actors having to play on a stage covered in water.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: Craig-stylization-Gielgud-set-wreckage

A Shipwreck with no ship and no sea: Craig's ideas on Tempest I,1

PATRICK LEBOEUF

Bibliothèque Nationale de France; [email protected]

The stage director, set designer and theatre theoretician Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) loathed Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, which he thought was the work of a younger playwright, reread and polished by the mature Bard. However, as much as he loathed it, he seems to have been equally fascinated by it, since throughout his life he jotted down stage directions about it, and drew sketches as though he had had a plan to produce it.

This paper will focus on the ideas he developed over time for the opening scene, the tempest properly said. That scene seems to have represented a particular challenge for Craig, who considered a variety of treatments for a passage that, in the tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, had always been regarded as a pretext for some lavish and spectacular pageant. Craig rejected that notion, and strove on the contrary towards a maximal stylization of this scene. Eventually, in 1956, as his cousin John Gielgud (1904-2000) was to act as Prospero at Stratford the following year, he wrote a letter intended for him (although it is uncertain whether he sent it or not), in which he synthetized his ideas for a purely abstract conception of the scene. In this conception, as he is obviously very satisfied to announce, 'The dam silly imitation of a wreck on the board is swept away'…

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Metathearical storms in Georges Lavaudant’s Une Tempête (MC 93 Bobigny, 2010) and Oskaras Korsunovas’s Miranda (OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, 2011)

DANA MONAH

University of Iasi, Roumania; [email protected]

The world is a bare stage in French director Georges Lavaudant’s production of The Tempest (2010) and a clumsy flat of the Communist Gulag in Lithuanian Oskaras Koršunovas’ Miranda (2011). In spite of their highly different aesthetics, both directors construct the initial storm as a metatheatrical, artificial, extremely fragile device, built with the simplest, most trivial theatrical means (an undulating piece of blue canvas with Lavaudant, a fan moving the pages of Shakespeare’s book and the daughter gently moving her dress back and forth with Korsunovas) which enables the on-stage and off-stage spectators to escape into embedded fictional time and space realms. I will investigate the ways in which theses “voyages”, under the control of an authoritarian figure, construct an intellectual, sometimes political play with the meanings and forms of Shakespeare’s play that the off-stage spectator will be asked to enjoy and decode.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: poetical imagination-Gaston Bachelard- Northrop Frye-Roland Barthes-space and mythology

Passion and imagination. Aquatic space in The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Mateusz Kucab

Jagiellonian University in Cracow; [email protected]

Poetical imagination is a key to understand the construction of the world of the novel and play as well as different works of art. Thanks to the analysis of language and images we are able to define the most relevant features of the landscape of the mind of the author. The paper is devoted to the problem of aquatic space and the problem of imagination in The Tempest . Based on works by Gaston Bachelard, Northrop Frye and Roland Barthes we would like to discuss the problem of poetical imagination and passion in William Shakespeare’s play. We would like to research the poetical space (language, metaphors and constructions) of water on many levels (storm, rain, tears) and its implications towards the characters and plot (the storm as passion and ardour) or even – the philosophical rules governing the imaginary world. We will discuss different examples from selected plays by Shakespeare in which the water element is a profound one (island, water battles, oceans, rain, storm and madness). In The Tempest the space of the island along with dream, music and the atmosphere of the storm create a very special type of actions and decisions done by characters, establishing the order of the world which has been finally restored at the end of the play. Not only verse and action, but also the construction (repeated motifs along with themes) will be analyzed. The paper is devoted into three parts: at the beginning, the methodological introduction; secondly, the analysis of The Tempest; finally, contexts and conclusion of the paper. Our methods are based on works by Gaston Bachelard, Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, Jan Kott, Jerzy Limon etc. To justify our thesis we would like to use novels and poems from different times and periods.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Shakespeare’s Imperfect “Art of Navigation”

Fiammetta Dionisio

Roma University Tre, Italy; [email protected]

The paper will focus on The Tempest, which I would like to interpret in light of John Dee’s 1577 treatise General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. My intention is to concentrate first on the dramatist’s shaping of Prospero on the silhouette of Dee by focusing on the latter’s role as an early imperialist – a side of his persona that is clearly testified in the treatise. A commitment to the idea of a rising British Empire is what we may consequently expect the dramatist has transmitted in the very play where a character similar to Dee is depicted. However, what I would like to bring to the fore is the way how Shakespeare appears to react against the imperial myth promoted by Dee. Indeed, if considered under another perspective, the “art of navigation” that Shakespeare seems to portray in The Tempest is far from a “perfect” one. The play opens with a storm that shatters an entire crew among the waves, soon after it recalls another shipwreck that involved the main character and his only daughter, just to end with Prospero’s departure for a journey whose destination is announced but not reached. Finally, these tempests are nothing compared to another, last tempest: the one occurring at the end of the drama, which epitomizes a perturbation that Prospero is completely unable to control. Shaking nothing but the depths of the hero’s mind, the main tempest in The Tempest appears to have been aroused by a problematic encounter with the other.

The aim of this paper is therefore to detect the impact of Dee’s treatise on navigation on Shakespeare’s last play and to focus on how the dramatist shaped, but also reacted against the firm beliefs on sea control and the imperialist myth that dominated the philosopher’s mind. My analysis will be finally accompanied by references to Motus’ Nella Tempesta [Into the tempest], a recent Italian production that premiered in 2013 at Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique. In my analysis of the performance, I will focus on the techniques employed by the company in order to reshape an encounter with the other that is not (only) marked by anxiety, but also by the desire to make of this meeting a precious opportunity to recognize the other as part of the self.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Storm in a tea cup?! Cries and whispers in a 2018 puppet performance of The Tempest

Gabriella REUSS

Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary; [email protected]

The most recent Shakespearean première in Budapest, this September, was held at the Puppet Theatre. Directed by Rémusz Szikszai, The Tempest is not the first ever Shakespeare to be staged in a Hungarian puppet theatre, yet, I argue that the production is one that demands thorough attention from the Shakespeare researcher from at least three aspects.

Firstly, the performance is advertised as 16+, and it marks the gradual consolidation of the puppet medium by adult audiences. It features a wide variety of characters on the stage, all perfectly visible, including live/flesh actors, bunraku (child-size) puppets, bunraku heads made after actors’ heads, and attachable body puppets (which puppeteers can wear); therefore the subtle and complex play with the relations between the bodies of the actors and the bodies of the puppets ought to be noted.

Secondly, the performing space is worth being mentioned: an enormous wreck of a barge in a spacious room which squeezes performers and spectators together. The lack of physical distance between viewer and player simultaneously provokes the spectator’s powerful emotional involvement and at once reminds them of the metatheatre present in both the play and the production. The set for the 2016 Tempest of the RSC looks surprisingly similar; however, the impact of this wreck, thanks to the particularly small performing space is completely different and allows the performance to magically oscillate between the theatrical and the metatheatrical, the physical and the poetic spheres.

The positioning of Caliban is an aspect that plays a key role in any production of The Tempest and Szikszai’s production occupies a firm standpoint by making Prospero symbolically castrate the island’s native. Just as Prospero, Caliban did not have a puppet double in the performance but his final punishment – a painful response to recent global news and events – forces him to hold and play with a puppet, too: his own phallos, boxed.

In Prague, the home of Central-European puppeteering from where centuries-long puppetry traditions stem unbroken, where marionettes are sold in the streets and footbridges, and in a country where scholarly journals like Teatralia regularly deal with puppeteering in detail, adult puppet productions, even if they produce Shakespeare, would not be a rarity. However, Hungarian expressionist pre-World War puppet traditions – scarce and weak - were nearly completely washed away by the slapstick-for-three-year-olds kind of glove puppet productions of post-War Socialism (fights of the Hungarian Punch, Vitéz László).

My paper does not aim to summarize the state of Hungarian post-war and post-1990 puppeteering, nor does it mean to deal with the Hungarian stage history of The Tempest. My argument will be informed about and rely on these two fields in order to point out the place of Szikszai’s mixed, puppet and live actor, production on the map of twenty-first century Hungarian Shakespeares.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Tempest, death, bereaved, elements

Stormy Waters of Death in Twelfth Night and The Tempest

DANIEL KACZYNSKI

University of Warsaw, Poland; [email protected]

The paper examines the devastating impact of storms on Shakespeare’s characters in Twelfth Night and The Tempest, with the emphasis on the ensuing thoughts of death. It is concerned not only with envisaging one’s own death or thinking about the loss of loved ones, but also with pursuing one’s own or others’ destruction or mutilation (involving even the loss of identity and/or gender). By referring to mythology, the mediaeval danse macabre and Early Modern views on time and matter, the author argues that the inner turmoil of Shakespeare’s characters, the bereaved in particular, often surfaces in the form of re-enactments of the experienced tempestuous clash of the elements. Thus the playwright creates a temporal-spatial geography of death, presenting his theatrical figures as suffering the presumed death of their relatives or as expecting their own last hour. The author considers The Tempest’s tempest as a unique example of a sea- storm in Shakespeare. As he asserts, it visualizes the psychological dilemmas of the old Prospero who, despite claiming control over time and death, fails to stop the destructive power of Father Time, and consequently dies at the exact end of the play. Offering a new reading of this play, the paper suggests that The Tempest might have been conceived as a theatrical representation of the Bard’s own inner storm as he struggled with the imminence of death.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

The Travails of The Comedy of Errors in Athens

EFTERPI MITSI

University of Athens, Greece; [email protected]

The Comedy of Errors begins with the description of a shipwreck, presenting the significance of the sea and sea travel as forces both separating and reuniting characters and families. By situating his play in the port city of Ephesus, Shakespeare not only changes the setting of his main source (Plautus’s Menaechmi) from the Adriatic to the Aegean, but also opens up a magical “fairyland”; a Hellenistic cosmopolitan city, at the borders between East and West, representing the religious syncretism and the fusion of cultures, worships and rituals of late antiquity. The divided family of Egeon, whose name invokes the sea itself, is reflected on the diverse and fractured Greek world and the political chaos of the Hellenistic era. Egeon’s fate, on the other hand, reminds that xenophobia still exists in a divided world and in a sea of continuing shipwrecks.

The setting of the play and its palimpsestic nature, evoking perhaps a lost Greek play underlying the Menaechmi, are pertinent in a current Athenian production (2018-19), directed by Katerina Evangelatos and featuring a new verse translation by poet Dionysios Kapsalis. This is a “syncretic” performance that unites diverse theatrical traditions, ranging from the magical world of the circus to Kyogen, and from slapstick comedy — replete with allusions to Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure and The Circus – to Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The two concentric swing doors of the set, the larger of which is a dazzling mirror, emphasize the doubling of the idols and the transformation of characters and situations. Focusing on the visual and sound devices of the performance, I will discuss to what extent its frenetic rhythm and excessive mixture of comic genres shaped new horizons for the Greek audience, repossessing the composite material and lineage of the text.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: gender studies-Pericles-tempest-sex-violence

Toward a Blue Gender Studies: The Sea, Diana, and Feminine Virtue in Pericles

ALEXANDER LOWE MCADAMS

Rice University, Houston, USA; [email protected]

If nothing else, the polysemic sea in Shakespeare’s Pericles functions as the major narrative thrust of the play. Tides push and pull both object and man across the ancient Mediterranean, from the discoveries of Pericles’ “rusty armour” (2.1.115), to Thaisa’s “fresh” corpse “shrouded in cloth of state” (3.2.78 and 63). Oceanic tempests signal the disjointed collapse of early modern polis and family, while simultaneously testing the limits of “earthly man” who must “yield,” willingly or not, to its violent whims (2.1.2-3). The sea, frequently personified in the period as the Greco-Roman Neptune, is also rapturous. He captures, carries away, and plunders. He promises sexual violence, with a tendency to “swallow” young maidens (4.4.39) and “ravish[]” them (4.1.98). It is curious, then, that Thaisa and Marina, the wife and daughter to Pericles, live in far safer conditions in their sea-induced exile than the titular character. Despite its threats, the sea in Pericles, it would seem, favors females. This paper argues that an underexplored element of the play—the tripartite Diana of Ephesus’ personification as the moon—mitigates the masculine sea’s threats of capture and rape. By refocusing our attention to Diana and her ability to control the sea’s fickle vicissitudes, this paper argues that Shakespeare attempts to reconfigure the violence of the masculine sea as an entity that must ultimately cede power and control to Diana’s vestal femininity. Moreover, her lunar powers to control the tides serve to highlight the preeminence of female agency. Lastly, this essay shifts our attention from the “blue cultural studies”—a realm of study that investigates the sea as a site of maritime imagination and scientific advancement, as has been argued—to a “blue gendered studies,” a conceptual framework that emphasizes the gendered seafaring journeys crisscrossing Shakespeare’s corpus.

Seminar - Of Seas and Oceans, of Storms and Wreckage, of Water Battles and Love in Shakespeare’s Plays

Keywords: gender studies-Pericles-tempest-sex-violence

Shakespeare The Ecopsychologist: King Lear And Macbeth

Sibel İzmir

Department of English Language and Literature, Atılım University, Ankara/TURKEY; [email protected]

Shakespeare as a playwright was a conscientious observer not only of human nature but also the physical one. He was very well aware of the fact that weather conditions were affecting people and their mood. Yet, Shakespeare was more interested in revising the picture than showing a one-to-one representation. In a considerable number of plays (such as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Macbeth, etc.), he draws us a picture in which the way human beings and/or non-human beings behave to one another affects the weather and vice versa. Shakespeare thus presents us an equivocal world where stormy weather and natural events add to the ambivalence and create a liminal atmosphere. The aim of this presentation is an attempt to show how Shakespeare achieves to construct a perfect dramaturgy in King Lear and Macbeth by reading the plays in the light of one of the most recent movements called “ecopsychology”.

Seminar

Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Kirilka Stavreva1, Francesca Rayner2

1Cornell College, United States of America; 2Universidade do Minho, Portugal; [email protected]

The creative range in performances of gender in Shakespeare’s plays has its roots in the lived experience of early modern actors. Their performances of gender took place “elsewhere,” arguably stimulating the many challenges that Shakespeare’s characters, from Ariel to Viola, present to gender normativity. Thus actors in the early modern theatre companies formed alternative households apart from their domestic ones and located in the “liberties”–sites outside of city jurisdiction and social control; traveling troupes from the continent staged spectacular Italian femininity–a gender construct previously unseen on the English public stage.

For this seminar, we invite papers that explore contemporary performances of gender in Shakespeare’s plays and poems outside of culturally normative sites and institutions. The organizers are interested in a broad representation of national and transnational experiences and traditions. We look for analyses of the effects that contemporary theatre performances have on both the category of gender and on the sites/communities, in which the performances take place. Possibilities include, but are not limited to investigations of:

• performing the gender of Shakespeare’s characters in alternative spaces, such as migrant camps, youth programs, prison programs, civic spaces;

• Shakespeare and gender in de-centralized social power structures, such as community programs, digital collaborations, etc.;

• re-gendering and transgendering Shakespeare’s characters as part of artistic and civic or political agendas;

• the role of women in directing and designing performances of Shakespeare;

• performing the gender of Shakespeare’s Fools;

• cartographies of gender and race in Shakespeare performances;

• cartographies of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare performances;

• performing gender and sexual violence in Shakespeare.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Bronfman Collovati, Paulina University of York, UK 91

Georgopoulou, Xenia National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece "Howe, Adrian (1); 2: Liceo “G.Mazzini, ” Genoa, Italy" Laskowska-Hinz, Sabina University of Warsaw, Poland Lindsay Hall, Isla University of Kent, Canterbury, UK "March, Florence (1); 2: IRCL, CNRS: French National Centre for Scientific Research, France" Montorfano, Beatrice University of Siena, Italy Özmen, Özlem Muğla University, Turkey Sakowska, Alexandra Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK Schandl, Veronica Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary "Stavreva, Kirilka (1); 2: University of Notre Dame, London Global Gateway, UK" Walkling, Saffron St John University/University of York, UK Wynne-Davies, Marion University of Surrey, UK

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

"Frailty, thy name is woman": Gender Norms in the Post-1989 Political Hamlets of Lin Zhaohua and Jan Klata

Saffron Walkling

St John University/University of York, UK; [email protected]

Both of the appropriations of Hamlet that I look at in this paper took place in symbolic locations – Lin Zhaohua’s late-communist play was put on by his own private theatre company (the first of its kind in communist China) in an empty film studio far from the state theatre. Jan Klata’s production famously took place in promenade in the Gdansk Shipyard itself.

“Let the women wear pretty dresses if they want to,” Lin Zhaohua said emphatically when I interviewed him about Gertrude and Ophelia in his 1990 production of Hamulaite (Hamlet). However, in a Chinese context, these words are not as dismissive of the fashion choices of the women in his cast as they initially appear. Hamulaite was Lin’s first foray into directing classical theatre, a choice he made after his last play with Nobel Prize winning playwright Gao Xingjian had been closed down by the state censors. Put on only 15 years after the Cultural Revolution, at a time when the country’s Open Door Policy was in its infancy, and when women choosing to dress as they pleased was a symbol of individuality and resistance, Lin’s choice of a classic European play about a society on the cusp of change was no accident. Furthermore, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Fifth Generation film directors and avant-garde theatre practitioners such as Lin rejected the state-generated narratives of the strong socialist-realist woman warrior, typified in the operas and ballets of Jiang Qiang (known in the West as “Madame Mao”), presenting instead the marginalised woman as a metaphor for communist oppression.

Alternatively, after the end of the communist era, Jan Klata, in his Hamlet appropriation H., used the marginalisation of women in the play to critique the rapid commercialisation of society in Poland post-1989 and the emergence of socially conservative factions led by the former heroes of Solidarity. I explore this through a close-reading of his Gertrude and Ophelia, in the context of the erasure of women from the Solidarity narrative. Furthermore, when Ophelia’s body is retrieved from a ship-less basin in the near derelict Gdansk shipyard, she can be seen to represent the death of the Solidarity dream.

In this paper, I look at how these male directors engage with representations, staging and symbolism of the female body as part of politicized narratives about late-communist and post-communist societies through the figures of Gertrude and Ophelia and ask, to what extent, with their strong identification with the Hamlet figures, and their construction of the court women as victims, are they perhaps also perpetuating the very stereotypes that they intend to challenge.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Destabilising the Centre: Regendering and Engendering Shakespeare's Plays at the Donmar Warehouse under the Artistic Direction of Josie Rourke

Alexandra Sakowska

Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK; [email protected]

London theatres, especially those located in the West End, have rarely put as much focus on female empowerment through the arts as has the Donmar Warehouse under the artistic direction of Josie Rourke. The sustained engagement of this studio not-for-profit theatre with regendering Shakespeare is particularly interesting. Phyllida Lloyd's trilogy, consisting of Julius Caesar, The Tempest and Henry IV, reimagined Shakespeare's stories through female prisoners' eyes, while the most recent production of Measure for Measure directed by Rourke focused on the politically charged gender issues brought forth by the #MeToo movement and the interplay of sex and power in modern society. To be able to make theatre productions of this kind at the centre, at the heart of London's musical extravaganza, is to bring so-to-speak the 'elsewhere' to the mainstream by female directors. In this essay I will focus on the impact and reception of the aforementioned productions at one of the most important 'off-West End' theatres located in the West End. Despite their critical success, they never managed a transfer to West End venues and failed to bring in full auditoria. And Rourke is leaving the Donmar next year criticised for not being able to monetise on the great success of her two predecessors, Sam Mendes and Michael Grandage.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Exploring Gender and Shakespeare in Italian Prison Theatre

Beatrice Montorfano

University of Siena, Italy; [email protected]

In my paper, I would like to consider gender through the approach of Shakespearean performances held in Italian prisons. My aim would be to explore the difference between all-male and all-female jails when their inmates are forced to face the absence of the other sex.

In Italian all-male prisons, casting men to play women is not so common as in many prison productions in the USA. In Cesare deve morire, the multi-awarded movie based on Julius Caesar and directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani in the prison of Rebibbia (Rome), Portia and Calpurnia have been easily edited out, reinforcing Shaul Bassi's claim that the movie «remains emphatically a virile (...) undertaking, impervious to any gender disturbance». In other instances, female professional actors have played Miranda or Ophelia, and this choice has various explanations. For example, Teatro Metropopolare productions, directed by a woman, have focused specifically on how the presence of women could affect (and perhaps change) the all- male and misogynist society of the jail.

On the other hand, a women performance such as Amleta, by Donne del Muro Alto (always in Rebibbia), explores the themes conveyed by Hamlet from a totally feminine perspective: on the stage, there are Ophelia, Gertrude and “Amleta” (the Italian female name for Hamlet). In this final case, it is worth noticing the need for a radical transformation of the basically male power structure of Shakespeare's plays in order to explore femininity. The prison, and prison theatre specifically, are signified as safe spaces wherein men are not permitted. This can produce a sort of relief, especially felt by those women who belong to strongly patriarchal criminal milieus.

Men, in contrast, have to deal with the absence of the only otherness able to justify their masculinity, which feels under serious threat inside the sexually homogeneous environment of the prison.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Lear’s Daughters—Presence in Absence: Gender Dynamics in Recent Hungarian Alternative Rewritings of Shakespeare’s King Lear

Veronica Schandl

Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary; [email protected]

The paper wishes to look at two recent Hungarian appropriations of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with a focus on how these productions modified the gender relations of the Shakespearean tragedy.

What connects the shows is that they both use the character of King Lear as a symbol to discuss aging in a contemporary setting. The first, an interactive theatre project by the Káva Kulturális Műhely (Káva Cultural Workshop) in 2016, entitled Lady Lear, rewrote the Shakespearean plot as a parable on a typical Hungarian family where the aging mother’s illness challenges the independence of her three sons. Using Lear as a cultural symbol of parents/authority figures who, despite their physical weakness wish to control the lives of their children/subordinates, the play challenges audiences in dialogues initiated by the actors to discuss how they would react in a similar situation. While the plot itself is a rather loose re-rendering of Shakespeare’s, my interest in discussing the production centres on what ways the “Learness” of play is manifested in the production, besides the title, while investigating what consequences the reversal of the Shakespearean gender roles has on the play.

The second production the paper intends to introduce is a two-person play entitled Lear’s Death, a show that premiered in the studio space of the Miskolc National Theatre in 2018. While Lady Lear repositioned the Shakespearean plot into a wider contemporary social setting, this production dug into the personal psyche of an aging Lear. Accompanied by his Fool the play follows “Uncle Lear” through several stages of self- investigation ending in his death. Performed by two actors the play does introduce the Shakespearean female characters as well. The paper will delineate how the male vocalisation of Lear’s daughters affects the dynamics of the production.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Ophelia and the Bucket: Gender, Water and Madness

Marion Wynne-Davies

University of Surrey, UK; [email protected]

This paper explores the ways in which we gender madness and danger through the performance of Gertrude’s speech in Act IV scene vii of Hamlet in which she describes Ophelia’s death. Here, one actor will read the description, while Ophelia and Gertrude’s ladies will mime the drowning (hence commenting upon the use of mimed plays in the text). This will be set against a performance of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlett in the Avon river in 1579, in particular referring to the inquest held by the Corporation of Stratford Upon Avon 1580 in which 13 of Katherine’s neighbours described how they had seen her heading for the river with a bucket. In this instance, one actor will perform the role of coroner and 13 neighbours will explain what they saw, while one actor will take the part of Katherine. The distinction between play and inquest being that, if you go to a river carrying a bucket you are there to get water and therefore sane, whereas, if you walk near the floods without an apparent purpose, you might well be mad. The performances will take place at the London Museum of Water and Steam. The Museum will host the event for young people 14-16, who will enact both fictional and historical drownings with two objectives: to teach them about gender identity in Hamlet and to highlight the dangers of water. Through the performances and subsequent discussions with the actors, I will explore the ways in which they interpreted their roles in terms of gender as well as how the use of an unconventional site (the water museum) allowed them to think about the play in different ways, in particular how they engage with the dangers of drowning and madness.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Performing Gender in a Shakespeare School Festival: A Case Study from France

Florence March1

1IRCL, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France; [email protected]

Three years ago, the Institute for research on the Renaissance, the Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), together with the Printemps des comédiens, the second biggest theatre festival in France in terms of attendance and international visibility, launched an innovative and experimental educational project on "Shakespeare and citizenship", involving five secondary schools with different social profiles in Montpellier. All along the year, five classes of students aged 14-15 work on a Shakespeare play with their English, French, Moral and Civic Education teachers, researchers from the IRCL, actors and the staff of the festival, to put on their own school festival: the Printemps des collégiens, whose name echoes the Printemps des comédiens within which it is embedded. Such reconfiguration of culturally and educationally normative sites and institutions calls for alternative spaces of performance in which initiation to acting and spectating practices allows the various partners to address the main values attached to the notion of citizenship – namely, civility, civic rights and duties, and solidarity. Shakespeare's popular theatre proves particularly appropriate to encourage the students not only to acknowledge and accept the other, but to experience otherness, and congregate around a common project with a view to generating debate.

In this context, gender issues are regularly broached, for instance when students with a traditional Muslim or Rom family background rehearse the love-at-first-sight scene in Romeo and Juliet, when a chorus of schoolgirls from a priority education network collectively deliver an epilogue to Measure for Measure that they have written themselves in the context of #metoo, when they experience cross-dressing in Twelfth Night or, alternately, when students are spectators of an all-male performance of The Woman in the Moon by the Edward's Boys Company. As the project shapes the contours of socio-geographical alternative spaces of performance, the detour through the theatrical experience of an early modern corpus leads teenage students to reconsider gender issues in a different light, as we will attempt to show in a few case studies.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Performing Power in Julius Caesar: How Casting and Performance Choices Impact Our Implicit Bias Regarding Leadership

Isla Lindsay Hall

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK; [email protected]

In 2012 the UK theatre industry’s gender balance was 2:1 in favour of men; Shakespeare was identified as the culprit and gender-blind casting as the first step toward a solution. This paper will consider how two forms of gender-blind casting (cross-dressed or gender-swapped) influence our unconscious bias regarding leadership. 2017 showed the first decline in progress toward gender parity globally since records began. Psychologists have shown the power of culture to influence our unconscious bias. Lack of representation has been shown to create stereotype threat, which impacts gender parity, especially in leadership positions. As a play that links power with masculinity, Julius Caesar provides an ideal case study to deconstruct this association and determine to what extent it can be challenged through gender-blind casting practice. I will ask whether cross-dressed performance (where the actor plays the gender of the character) or gender- swapped (where the character’s gender is ‘swapped’ to match the actor’s) is more likely to influence our implicit bias regarding leadership. To investigate this, research workshops will be conducted with professional actors, including LGBTQIA+ actors alongside cisgender, heterosexual actors, next week. These will be followed by audience focus groups, where qualitative data will be collected. Workshops and focus groups will explore the relationship between gender and leadership in nonverbal performance choices, asking how we experience gender and leadership when performed by us and to us. Additionally we will ask, to what extent is gender indivisible from character? I will support this by including performance analysis of three recent productions of Julius Caesar in London. This research will allow the industry to make choices which promote gender parity not simply through diversifying Shakespeare casting, but by grappling with the ways in which performance choices influence audience views, and can therefore impact society’s implicit bias regarding gender and leadership.

Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Politics of Appropriation in the Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy

Özlem Özmen

Muğla University, Turkey; [email protected]

Considering the relationship between the text and the context in practices of adaptation, the setting used in an appropriation, be it spatial or historical, plays an important role in defining certain political motivations behind a production. Similarly, transformations of gender representation determine the gender and/or sexual politics of a reproduction. The function of alternative uses of setting and gender in terms of the political associations of stage adaptations can be observed in the Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy, an all- female production of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, and The Tempest, set in a prison. This production is based on an actual project that has used Shakespeare’s works for rehabilitation of female prisoners in Britain. This practice itself is already a political one that questions the power relations in the prison context by removing woman prisoners from their object positions. When considered in relation to this context, the settings of the selected source plays make it possible to discuss politics of space. Particularly Julius Caesar and The Tempest are considered resonant for the woman prisoners as Caesar’s Rome is seen as a metaphoric prison, and the island in The Tempest seems familiar to the actor-prisoners as a confined setting. In terms of their subject matter – dominantly war and politics – these plays also make it possible to discuss gender politics in reproductions of Shakespeare’s plays as woman actors re-gender even Shakespeare’s most masculine characters in these examples. The fact that issues like war and politics are chosen for woman performers in this reproduction poses a challenge to traditional representation of gender in Shakespeare production. In light of these ideas, this paper aims to discuss politics of adaptation with examples from this particular appropriation with an emphasis on the various ways and spaces in which Shakespeare is used as a political tool in the contemporary period.

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Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Re-Gendering Shakespeare’s Characters on the Athenian Stage

Xenia Georgopoulou

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece; [email protected]

In 2008 the group “Delos G8”, consisting of that year’s graduates of “Delos” drama school, presented Queen Lear, a version of King Lear with inverted sexes, directed by their teacher Kostis Kapelonis. With the exception of the Fool, who remained male, the rest of the male characters were presented as female, and the female characters as male. This inversion was partly due to the fact that there were only three male graduates that year. However, it said much more about the production, whose main idea was that power is sexless, and could equally be female. The English background of the play seemed to underline this idea, since England was often ruled by queens or powerful female politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher. The production was also inspired by the contemporary political situation in Europe, with Angela Merkel (elected as Chancellor of Germany in November 2005) being a prominent figure in the European Union.

In 2011 the young director Alexandros Cohen staged Much Ado about Nothing, substituting Leonato with a female character, the “Governess”; in this way, he wanted to stress the dramatic turn of the plot concerning Hero, considering that Leonato’s cruel words towards his daughter would be even crueler coming from a mother. This was not the only case where Cohen turned a male part into a female one; in fact, he did so in all of his Shakespearean productions. In his 2014 Timon of Athens Flavius became Flavia, still a loving servant, but also a mother figure, considering the age difference between the actors playing Timon and Flavia. Similarly, in his 2016 Cymbeline Pisanio gave his place to a female character named Cornelia; thus, Posthumus’s servant became Imogen’s confidante (a coupling of same-sex characters we often see in Shakespeare’s plays), which makes sense, since Pisanio is mostly seen with his master’s wife.

Although in Queen Lear the Fool kept his male identity, in Raia Mouzenidou’s Twelfth Night in 2016 the director kept for herself the role of Feste, which she turned into a female character named Zourlou (alluding to zourlos, one of the Greek words for “mad”). Zourlou was somehow the spirit of the night, but also a mother figure to Olivia. Mouzenidou, known in the theatre business for decades, was the only mature actress among a group of young performers, which seemed to underline the Fool’s differentiation from the rest of the characters, as well as Zourlou’s motherly character.

This paper, mainly based on the productions mentioned above, will explore how the re-gendering of Shakespeare’s characters (which may also solve a casting problem), occasionally combined with the actors’ age difference, reflects the director’s view through a re-positioning of the relations between the characters, and occasionally alludes to the historical moment of the production.

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Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Romeo y Julian: A Queer, Pop Embodiment of Chilean Diversity

Paulina Bronfman Collovati

University of York, UK; [email protected]

This paper explores the links between the concepts of embodiment and diversity through the analysis of the Chilean play Romeo y Julian under the gaze of queer theory. The piece of contemporary Chilean theatre, written and directed by Carlo Urra, examines the concept of diversity beyond the meaning of sexuality using the language of pop culture in a contemporary Latin American context. This work investigates the creative process of appropriating the Shakespeare play, including the script development, staging process and his confrontation with the youth audience in Santiago, Chile in 2017.

Through distinctive representations of gender roles, the adaptation of Carlo Urra Romeo and Julian interrogates the notion that masculinity and femininity are binary oppositions. To challenge these stereotypical constructions of gender, Romeo and Julian represents masculine and feminine qualities as accessible by both genders, challenging conventional patriarchal beliefs. The characterization of Romeo as the submissive and sometimes effeminate gender role rejects the patriarchal expectation of male strength.

The aim of this paper is to show how modern adaptation of early modern plays can call attention to issues of gender and sexuality in the present, while at the same time expanding the traditional parameters of gender and equality.

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Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

The Othello Anti-Femicide Project—Performing Gendered and Raced Identities in Alternative Contemporary Sites

Adrian Howe1

1Law School, Birbeck University, UK; [email protected]

This paper reports on the Othello Theatre in Education project developed by Australian criminologist Adrian Howe and her plans to develop the project with Luciana Guido, an English teacher whose students from an upper secondary school in Genoa performed her theatre piece, ‘A Proposito di Desdemona’ in local venues in Genoa, Italy in November 2018.

Othello on Trial (or the Tragedy of Desdemona, the wife), the first play in the Othello Project’s planned trilogy, has been performed in Melbourne, Australia and London by professional actors, university and school students in a range of alternative spaces – a community theatre, universities, schools and civic spaces. Targeting the cultural scripts – ‘she asked for it’/’If I can’t have you…’ – that underlie intimate partner femicide, the play weaves scenes from Shakespeare’s Othello with excerpts from historic and contemporary wife-killer trials. To showcase provocation by infidelity as a deeply ingrained cultural excuse sanctioned by law for all wife-killers, it substitutes a white for a black Othello and puts him on trial for murder. Should extreme emotions ─ ‘being wrought/Perplexed in the extreme’ as Othello puts it ─ mitigate murder today? The audience delivers the verdict – on Othello and on a play highlighting the complex gendered and racialised dimensions of Desdemona’s killing that are overlooked in standard accounts of Othello.

Lucian Guido’s play, written as a contribution to the fight against femicide to be produced in schools, theatres and public venues, analyses step by step the crescendo of psychological violence in the exchanges between Othello and Desdemona that eventually lead to her murder. The project has been supported by a local council and a feminist anti-violence group.

We plan to co-write a second play, provisionally titled, Othello, the Verdict – Shakespeare’s Women Speak Out, in which several of his women characters, notably, Emilia and Desdemona, Kate from Taming of the Shrew, the Merry Wives and Lavinia (from Titus Andronicus) respond (in Italian and English) to Othello’s trial and the problem of speaking out against high levels of violence against women today.

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Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Tragic Refractions: Estranging Gender, Erasing Race in Two Bulgarian Adaptations of Othello in the 21st Century

Kirilka Stavreva1

1Cornell College, United States of America; [email protected]

Tragedy, Raymond Williams suggests, is “not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions” (Modern Tragedy, pp. 45-46). This paper explores two Bulgarian adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello from the beginning of the twenty-first century that erase the racial dimension of the play while foregrounding the performance of gender, gender ideals and estrangement, gender ambiguity and violence, redeeming female passion and the ritualistic annihilation of women. Both Liliya Abadjieva’s post-dramatic theatre experiment (2005) and Ivan Mladenov’s socially engaged documentary cinematic treatment (2008) heighten the affective factor by locating the tragedy in the context of physical and social incarceration; the former sets it in an anonymous black space framed by metal scaffolding and shared by the audience, the latter—behind the bars of the Varna prison, with characters matched to the actor-inmates according to crime and life story. Both mix high and low stylistic registers: in Abadjieva’s production tragic pathos is intertwined with pop music hits and farce, while Mladenov juxtaposes key points of Shakespeare’s dramatic action to the life-stories of the inmates-performers. Both use all-male casts: Abadjieva—as part of the development of a distinctive performative style, Mladenov – as dictated by sex segregation in the prison system. Inhabiting a world to which they are strangers and dreaming of a world to which they can belong, the “unhoused” characters of these truncated, refracted versions of Shakespeare’s play acknowledge the brokenness of the time and their own part in creating both horror and tenderness. Within the claustrophobic worlds of the play and the film, the female characters are further estranged from the male bodies performing them. The women’s stories, in turn – stories of passion, redeeming love, of kindness and courage – get warped into the language of farce or else, are ultimately erased from the texture of the tragedy. In this they follow the erasure of race, sustained in all productions of Othello by Bulgarian directors since World War II. Thus while neither Abadjieva’s play nor Mladenov’s film are preoccupied by feminist politics, they both shed light on the cultural ambivalence about freedom and the part of the Other during the Bulgarian post-communist transition. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the ramifications of such ambivalence in the context of the current migration crisis and its politicised appropriation by right-wing organisations to attack gender legislation in the country.

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Seminar - Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions

Women’s Gender Transformation: Iconographic Comments on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Sabina Laskowska-Hinz

University of Warsaw, Poland; [email protected]

It seems that in the patriarchal reality of Shakespearean Venice, women are allowed to display their true natures only when disguised in male clothes, or for ironic effect. In other cases, they remain the subjects of male domination.

Krakow’s poster for Tomáš Svoboda’s 2008 production of “The Merchant of Venice” pretends to enhance this view at least at first - it shows the female characters’ submission to overwhelming domination by their masters. However, if we have a closer look, the image indicates something else entirely. The Merchant’s women are proved to be intelligent, independent, and even dangerous. They possess the power to make decisions about their positions in society.

In his book, Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic 1720-1820, Stuart Sillars treats paintings, graphics and other artworks as analytical expressions of Shakespeare’s texts. We can extrapolate similar qualities from theatre posters (along with their advertising function). This particular example of the Krakow “The Merchant of Venice” poster constitutes an intertextual phenomenon, becoming an almost bottomless source of external references. Studied in the context of West European art traditions, the image constitutes a critical comment, highlighting the ideas of female power, courage (the colour of warriors) and sanctity (bare breasts); male fears (vagina dentata, Hellmouth) and weaknesses; and, finally, the status of feminised male characters.

Comparing the dramatic text and the iconography of the poster allows for alternative interpretations of Shakespeare’s women in “The Merchant of Venice” that underline their strong features – independence and ironic freedom when they chose to be subordinated to their husbands.

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Seminar

Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Michael Saenger, Sergio Costola

Southwestern University, United States of America; [email protected]

A paired Workshop and Seminar for the 2019 ESRA Conference in Rome.

The first element, a Workshop on translation in relation to Shakespeare, extends from Dr. Saenger’s workshop at the 2017 ESRA conference in Gdansk, where Dr. Saenger recruited translators and Shakespeare scholars from various countries. Before the conference, all participants had the opportunity to refer to some key points in the theory of translation. In Gdansk, the participants all translated the same small scene into five different languages (in separate groups) and discussed the results and their theoretical implications, as one large group.

We propose to build on this successful innovation by expanding the activity to include an affiliated Seminar that is organized according to normal Seminar practice—core readings, papers circulated, etc.

The effect of the paired Workshop (scheduled to occur first) and Seminar (second) would be to be meaningfully inclusive of translators, theater scholars, practitioners and researchers in similar fields. The Workshop will remain focused on language, and for the Seminar, we take the idea of “translation” to encompass a variety of boundary-crossing issues, including Shakespeare’s adaptation of his sources, his depiction of exile and linguistic exchange, the present practice of adapting Elizabethan theatre to a postmodern stage, the movement of Shakespeare across European boundaries, and the use of multi-ethnic casting that reflects and invokes the changing populations of the cities that surround European theatres, as well as the translation of Shakespeare per se. Papers will likely be grouped according to these sub-topics and then interconnections will emerge as topics for discussion in Rome.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Acciarito, Chiara Roma Tre University DiRoberto, Kyle University of Arizona, Sierra Vista Ji, Rangping Northeast Normal University Márkus, Zoltán Vassar College Montezanti, Miguel Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina Saenger, Michael Southwestern University, United States of America Smith, Shawn Longwood University, United States of America Zaharia, Oana-Alis University of Bucharest Zhang, Zhiyan East China University of Science and Technology

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Partial Paternity in Terence and Jonson

Michael Saenger

Southwestern University, United States of America; [email protected]

In this paper I compare the concept of paternity in Terence's *The Self-Tormentor* and Jonson's *Volpone*, not because these plays have any direct source relationship, but rather because they both self-consciously revisit and adapt the themes of generational strife inherent to New Comedy from a culture that is previous and foreign to their more current vernacular art. I discuss how various kinds of parentage are positioned by Terence and Jonson in their framing texts, as well as how paternity is imagined to sway the fortunes of the young within those two plays, and I argue that the confluence of natural and textual paternity operates as a productive site for moral reflection on the idea of classicism and its role in two very different vernacular cultures, that of Rome and that of London.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Translatio Pietatis in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Shawn Smith

Longwood University, United States of America; [email protected]

In his preface to the third Arden edition of Titus Andronicus, Jonathan Bate writes that in the play “Shakespeare is interrogating Rome, asking what kind of an example it provides for Elizabethan England.” This paper argues that an important part of this interrogation involves the Roman concept of pietas, and its associations with a strand of philosophical and theological debate about the relationship of pietas to the ethics of clementia (as a legal and philosophical concept) and misericordia (as an emotional and spiritual commitment). In English, the words “pity” and “piety” both emerge from the ambiguity of pietas in late Roman and medieval Latin, and that ambiguity persists in both words in early modern English. Titus Andronicus explores the ethics of pity and compassion as essential civilizing principles in both ancient Rome and Elizabethan England, but it also dramatizes the ways in which pity facilitates darker motives of deception and vengeance. Shakespeare’s audience was not Roman and pagan, but English and Christian, and necessarily idealized mercy as a way of smoothing out the discontinuities between ancient Roman and Elizabethan ethics in order to understand its own mythical origins in the Troy legend. Shakespeare’s dramatization of the ambivalence of pity brings these discontinuities to the foreground and finds its energy in the rhetorical and visual dimensions of that ambivalence as shaping motives in the tensions between England’s social and legal commitments to mercy and compassion.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Two Versions of Chinese Romeo and Juliet

Zhiyan Zhang

East China University of Science and Technology; [email protected]

In 2016, Two Kunqu versions of Romeo and Juliet were created coincidentally in China and attracted a lot of international audience. The one called Kunqu Romeo and Juliet was adapted by Chao Chen and invited to perform at Edinburgh festival, while the other was named Datura stramonium Linn, which was well received in China. I was among the translators of Kunqu Romeo and Juliet, and I found that although the former one seemed to be closer to Romeo and Juliet, actually it put more emphasis on Kunqu, as the name Romeo and Juliet was the appearance and Kunqu was the core. On the contrary, Datura stramonium Linn was closely attached to Shakespeare’s original play, including main plots and important props such as the poison.

While being faithful to the original play in different ways, both plays paid special attention to Kunqu’s unique form and style. On some occasions when Kunqu was incompatible with the original play, both playwright put priority to the original gravy and flavor of Kunqu, which showed Chinese playwrights’ confidence in Chinese culture due to President Xi’s appeal to cultural confidence as well as international audience’s growing interest in new and exotic elements in Shakespeare’s plays.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

A Riverplate Poetic Translation of the Sonnets

Miguel Montezanti

Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina; [email protected]

In the Prologue to Shakespeare Global (2009) Manfred Pfister gives a report of an extended reception of the Sonnets, which have a very old tradition in several cultures and languages. He considers parodies and other types of reception. Since I collaborated in the project guided by him and by Jürgen Gutsch I felt stimulated to start an experiment: to translate the Sonnets into a variant which may be called “River Plate”. The outstanding features of this variant is the use of the second singular person pronoun “vos”, instead of “tú”, bringing about a displacement of the verbal accent. Since the “expected” translation of a classical author is the literary Spanish, it is clear that the dialectal variety deviates from the norm. Since “vos”, as opposed to “tú,” implies familiarity or slang, this translation makes the Sonnets “sound” differently. It may be called a parodist translation, not because it is intended to provoke humor, but because it takes “parody” in the sense of rewriting, as Linda Hutcheon uses the term. However, since it becomes “marked” as a translation, the comic result cannot be left aside. My purpose is to analyze several choices I made as regards phonic, syntactic, lexical and stylistic aspects. It is to be observed that some reviewers agreed to the fact that these sonnets rewritten in the “Argentine” idiom resemble tango lyrics.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Celebrating Life: Translation as an Act of Survival

Zoltán Márkus

Vassar College; [email protected]

In the early 1980s, Paul de Man, following Walter Benjamin, contended, “The process of translation, if we can call it process, is one of change and of motion that has the appearance of life, but of life as an afterlife, because translation also reveals the death of the original.” Paul de Man claims that a series of linguistic disjunctions alienate the work from its translations and bring about “the death of the original”; for de Man, the process of translation is relegated to the realm of an “afterlife” of the original. My proposed paper questions the possibility of an “original” authentic Shakespeare and suggests that any translation of a Shakespearean play is, in fact, an act of not death but survival. With the aid of Gil Harris’s thoughtful borrowing of Michel Serres’s concepts of multitemporality and polychronicity, furthermore, the paper claims that the best organizing principle to account for the multiple temporalities of translation as an act of survival might not be the ‘palimpsest,’ as Gil Harris claims, but the ‘hybrid.’

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Entwining Shakespeare As You Like It: Teaching Digital Game Adaptation and the Code Modification of Community

Kyle DiRoberto

University of Arizona, Sierra Vista; [email protected]

This paper details the teaching of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, and Othello through online open-access game design, literature, and global popular culture with a particular focus on South Korea and the Middle East. In addition, it examines the dialectics of identity and community in digital modalities and Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring the way the digital is translating and transforming cultures, students find in Shakespeare a model for social critique and transformation. Just as through the techne of the early modern stage, Shakespeare took the xenophobic, misogynistic, and often heteronormative bias that informed his world and translated liminality into empowerment, they attempt to create adaptations of the plays that are meaningful for their cultural moment while further facilitating diversity. Allowing students to see the role of the literary arts in forging new communities across genres, nations, mediums, and authors affirms their potential to create new social worlds. In this way, the plays, once only on the early modern stage, model the realization of marginalized figures in collaborative networks that continues to haunt realizations of the self and the social across space and time. Moreover, if as social theorists argue, the future of the internet may be like that of an empire dominated by corporate interests, effective collaborative communication will remain important for both participation and resistance. Digital literacy is increasingly recognized as a means for civic empowerment, and teaching Shakespeare, global literature, and Twine 2.0 allows for active learning and collaborative strategies that embody these forms of effective world formation by introducing students to past and current modes of critical discourse and by providing them with direct experience in collaborative engagement online, allowing them to reproduce Shakespeare as they like it.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Othello as a Graded Reader

Chiara Acciarito

Roma Tre University; [email protected]

Graded Readers are amongst the most widely used tools in teaching English as a foreign language and are often produced by adapting an original English literary work into a linguistically simplified version of it. The aim of this latter kind of Graded Readers is to provide an enjoyable reading experience to learners who have not yet reached the required skills to tackle more complex texts.

This paper addresses the issue of intralinguistic and intercultural translation by comparing and analysing the Othello and its abridgement by the same title, created as a Graded Reader for the Pearson English Readers series . I have taken into consideration three themes of the tragedy, the eros, the monstrous and the feminine, and I have compared the way they are dealt with in the original work and in its abridgement, from a linguistic, thematic and cultural point of view.

In my proposed presentation, I will show that the process of simplification that the Othello underwent when transformed into a Graded Reader, altered significantly its literary identity in many respects: the structure of the plot, the connotation of the characters and consequently their relationships, the general distribution of information, various authorial cues and several of the pre-existent intertextual references to the culture and society of the early modern English period.

This study will therefore conclude that the text resulting from such an adaptation process is a substantially altered one, in both linguistic and cultural terms.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

Rewriting Romeo and Juliet in the 19th Century Romanian Principalities

Oana-Alis Zaharia

University of Bucharest; [email protected]

In the Romanian Principalities, as in most of Europe, the 19th century marks a time of transition and unprecedented transformation that pervaded all significant areas of life: cultural, linguistic, social, political, economic, institutional etc. The passage from a feudal society, modeled on predominantly Orient-inspired and Slavic influences, to a more modern, increasingly Westernized (particularly French and German) one, gave rise to a wide range of co-existing, contrasting images, hybrid forms, and opposing attitudes. These major shifts reverberated in the area of literature as well, the first Romanian translations of Shakespeare’s plays (1840s) being a relevant example of hybridity on a linguistic and cultural level; written in a “transition alphabet” that mixed letters from the previously dominant Cyrillic alphabet with Latin letters, these early rewritings relied on French or German intermediaries of Shakespeare’s plays. The result of this process of rewriting was a hybrid, palimpsest-like text that borrowed, blended and transformed the diverse influences of the context in which it was produced. In the light of this perspective, the paper will consider the translation contexts and practices that informed the first Romanian translation of Romeo and Juliet (Bucharest, 1848), a rewriting based on Pierre Letourneur’s French prose version of the play. Thus, the paper will explore the multiple cultural and linguistic threads interwoven in the fabric of this secondary translation – threads that will take us back to at least three different cultures and periods, each with their own particularities: 16th century England, 18th century France and the 19th century Romanian Principalities.

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Seminar - Polychronic Translation of Shakespeare

The Image Construction of Shakespeare in China in Late Qing Dynasty

Rangping Ji

Northeast Normal University; [email protected]

As an important pioneering translator in late Qing Dynasty, Lin Shu is one of the earliest Chinese who introduced Shakespeare and his works to China. His Yin Bian Yan Yu (“An English Poet Reciting from Afar”, 1904), an interpretative translation of Tales from Shakespeare (Charles and Mary Lamb, 1807) in classical Chinese, was warmly welcomed upon its publication, and exerted great influence upon common readers, writers and scholars then. Despite the fact that the book was once negatively appraised and even severely criticized by scholars and critics such as Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Dongrun and Ba Desen primarily for its being unfaithful to the source text and the adherence to Chinese traditional ethics, the popularity and significance of the book was undoubtedly noteworthy, and the contribution Lin made to Chinese literature and culture was also undeniable. This paper above all gives a concise account of the cultural and social background against which Lin is motivated to undertake his cooperative translation with Wei Yi. Then with close reading and case study of the tales, it explores the strategies and guiding principles Lin adopts in the translating process. Finally, based on the above analyses, the paper examines and evaluates his endeavor of introducing Shakespeare, and tries to decode the image construction of Shakespeare that is conducted by such an outstanding Chinese translator and scholar in the very early 20th century.

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Seminar

Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

Carla Della Gatta1, David J. Amelang2

1University of Southern California; 2Freie Universität Berlin, Germany; [email protected]

Taking Shakespeare and his theatrical world as a temporal and locative point of departure, this seminar brings together papers engaging with depictions of gender in different nations of people and across political borders from the 16th century to the present. With numerous studies over the last four decades that address gender in Shakespeare’s works and on stage, we aim to explore how gender is theorised, staged, and depicted across national and cultural boundaries.

We welcome papers establishing a dialogue between the dramatic works and theatrical practices of early modern England and/or with those of other European countries that seek to further our understanding of how characters from this period were (and still are) constructed, perceived and performed. Papers may approach the concept of gender from theoretical, historical, literary, performative or other perspectives: by keeping the range of possibilities purposefully broad, we seek to foment an eclectic and wide-ranging discussion as a way of helping us better to understand the full complexity of the gender relations and dynamics that have been unfolding on the stages of Europe from Shakespeare’s time up until today. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Comparison between the gender dynamics displayed in early modern English and European plays, authors’ corpora, national theatrical cultures, etc.

- Analysis of the reception of a particular role or gender dynamic from an early modern English play in a European country, by a European reader or critic, etc.

- Analysis of a European adaptation or interpretation of an early modern English character, play, etc. and how its dealing of gender relates to the original counterpart

- Application of contemporary gender theory that addresses non-binary, trans, and genderqueer identities to Shakespearean texts and performance

- The role of gender theories in shaping Shakespearean scholarship and performance, including masculinity theory, postcolonial feminisms, etc.

- Analysis of ways in which gender categories map onto sexual categories and ethnoracial categories in Shakespeare’s works, adaptations, and performance

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

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Cerdá, Juan F. Universidad de Murcia Guenther, Shawna Dalhouisie University Kazanina, Viola Yuryevna Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts Lupić, Ivan Stanford University Shupe, Deirdra Florida State University

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Seminar - Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

"Un[Gender] Me Here": Gender, Sex, and Rewriting the Masculine in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Deirdra Shupe

Florida State University; [email protected]

The difference between gender and biological sex is a distinction that is now considered commonplace in contemporary gender theory. Although the terminology emerged out of the feminist movement in the 1960s from theorists such as Judith Butler, there is evidence that the divide between the two characteristics was felt long before the terminology existed to describe it. For example, Sixteenth century French physician Ambroise Paré cites Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus’ documentation and his own research in the work On Monster and Marvels. Even in the early modern period, when an individual’s perceived biological sex did not adhere to notions of perceived societal gender norms such as clothing, they were immediately corrected by those closest to them.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth can be viewed as a tragedy of the perceived binary between sex and gender. In the “unsex me here” speech, one of the play’s most critically acclaimed and studied passages, Lady Macbeth expresses her desire to become remorseless and cruel, characteristics that she associates with the male gender. Although specifically mentions her “woman’s breasts” and invites the spirits to whom appeals to, “take my milk for gall”, she never, in the course of the speech, expresses a desire to acquire male genitals. This divide between her female sex and the desire to perform male gender roles articulated in the speech is a key tension in Shakespeare’s play. A closer review of Macbeth and the single sex model of biological sex coupled with the evolution of feminist theory shows not a strict distinction between the modern and the early modern constructs of gender and sex, but evidence of ongoing discourse surrounding a complex theoretical issue.

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Seminar - Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

Influence of Belarusian sovereignty on international cultural exchange in Shakespeare’s heritage

Viola Yuryevna Kazanina

Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts; [email protected]

Since the XIX century, the formation of the theatre in Belarus was connected with the Shakespeare's heritage. Built in 1890 under the patronage of Count Jan Karol Chapski (1860–1904), the Minsk City Theatre was given to the entrepreneur Alexei Kartavov (1841–1894), and for the first two years, Hamlet and King Lear were among its first performances. After declaring the Belarusian People's Republic (BNR) in 1918, as well as the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Soviet Union in 1920, the theatre became known as the Belarusian State Theatre-1 from 1926, and from the middle of the XX century – the Yanka Kupala National Academic Theatre. Then the Vitebsk Theatre named after Yakub Kolas (Belarusian State Theatre-2), originated in the studio at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921, put on the second performance – “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. The actors were trained by experts from the Moscow Art Theatre, who collaborated with Anton Chekhov. Biomechanics was taught by Irina Meyerhold, the daughter director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940).

Until the end of the XX century, the Belarusian theatres staged plays by Shakespeare and toured with them outside Belarus, but that was not often and within the USSR. The situation changed after 1991, when the Republic of Belarus gained sovereignty, and the state monopoly on art disappeared. The theatrical troupes were created on the basis of the principles of non-repertory theatre, with the most famous troupe being the Free Theatre of Yuri Khalezin and Natalia Kolyada, which began to periodically participate in international forums. In 2012, when the actors of the Janka Kupala National Theatre and the Free Theatre were invited from Minsk to the World Shakespeare Festival in London, this event became a subject of discussions in the press, although the representatives of the groups were consistent and spoke in an interview about art, not about competition in the Shakespearean heritage. Acculturation and cultural exchange in this field simply cannot happen today, because independent theatres in Belarus are supported by the world-famous playwrights Vaclav Havel and Tom Stoppard, and their performances are preceded by such celebrities, as Ian McKellen, a recognized master of Shakespeare's repertoire, who also played in a number of British and Hollywood blockbusters.

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Seminar - Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

Sex and Gender Spectra in Shakespeare’s Plays: The Rejection of the One- and Two-Body Theories of Sex and Gender

Shawna Guenther

Dalhouisie University; [email protected]

In the early modern period, a watershed moment in medical theory enables the remarkable shift from Galenic humoral medicine, which necessitates a one-body theory of human with the inferior male body constituting “female,” to the beginning of the modern scientific method, which develops the two-body theory of male and female bodies as distinct from each other. We know that Shakespeare read extensively (and that his son-in-law was a doctor), so it is quite possible he may have read at least one of the widely available and highly popular medical texts published for laypeople (further, we see multiple references to medicine and medical jargon in his plays). In the twenty-first century, medically and culturally, we are moving beyond the two-body model into spectrum, a leading term for a non-binary, non-stable sexual preference/ gender identity that allows people to escape the confines of our notion of the two-body male/female constructions of humans. Recently, I have presented conference papers that have considered a two of Shakespeare’s plays (namely, As You Like It and Macbeth) in terms of sex and gender spectra, illustrating the potential for characters to be understood in terms of sex and gender spectra. In this paper, I will solidify my position of the presence of sex and gender spectra in the Shakespearean canon. Further, I will express the necessity of addressing spectra in the twenty-first century classroom in which students are, ahead of their elders, engaging with new and diverse forms of sexual expression and personal identity.

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Seminar - Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

Shakespeare’s Illyrian Viola

Ivan Lupić

Stanford University; [email protected]

Recent Anglophone scholarship on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has increasingly recognized the interest of Illyria as a concrete historical space that would have been familiar to early modern publics across Europe. Instead of being interpreted as an almost mythical place, filled with alluring sounds and rich in erotic fantasy, Illyria has come to be perceived as a specific site whose complex cultural identity, forged along the borders of the Ottoman Empire, may help us see Shakespeare’s familiar dramatic masterpiece in a new light. Extending somewhat this recent scholarly trend, I shift the focus from Illyria as a space that is observed by those who travel through it or are shipwrecked on its coast and look instead at Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from the Illyrian perspective. I do so by discussing the life of an Illyrian woman from the early seventeenth- century whose movement across borders of different early modern polities was enabled by repeated instances of cross-dressing. For this Illyrian Viola, just as for Shakespeare’s Viola, performing a different gender identity was a means of surviving in a hostile world.

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Seminar - Remapping Gender in Shakespeare’s Europe

‘The Rape of Lucrece’ in the Era of #MeToo

Juan F. Cerdá

Universidad de Murcia; [email protected]

Just as Barack Obama’s administration was taken by conservatives as prove of the end of racial discrimination, the possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming the next president of the world’s first economy demonstrated, within this rationale, the futility of the feminist struggle. This late cop-out of the demands of equalitarianism can be seen as the natural continuation of the conservative backlash of the 1980s, both embraced and expanded by the present commander in chief. However, Donald Trump’s sexist rhetoric and demeanour, together with recent cases of sexual harassment in the media have attracted a renewed interest in feminism which had lately been lurking mostly in activist and intellectual circles. The US mass media craze for feminism could be just a passing fad but, even when the dust settles, these debates will still be a part of a much larger context of local and global feminisms that have taken on the struggle of the first two waves spurred at the turn of the twentieth century and in the 1960 and 70s. Specifically, for the third wave of feminism of the twenty-first century gender violence has (re)emerged as a central concern, so it is in this light that certain early works by Shakespeare have assumed a special relevance. This paper takes contemporary debates on feminism as the starting point for the discussion of “The Rape of Lucrece” and its current significations.

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Seminar

Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

Nancy Isenberg1, Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau2, Alina Bottez3

1Università Roma Tre; 2Université Blaise-Pascal, F- Clermont-Ferrand, France; 3Universityh of Bucharest, Rumania; [email protected] Across time and the geopolitical global map, the opera and ballet stages have shared a long-standing tradition of looking to Shakespeare for inspiration, narratives, and characters. Such migrations number in the hundreds for both genres where many of them occupy central positions in their genre’s repertory. With the rise of musical theatre and modern and contemporary dance, these genres too have produced their share of Shakespearean remediations, with a similar effect.

Our seminar will advance our understanding of this strong and influential presence of opera-musical and ballet-dance on the global map of Shakespeare’s cultural travels and of Shakespeare’s influence within the world of opera-musical and ballet-dance

It proposes to look at how, as Shakespeare’s texts cross the borders of nations and media on the opera- musical and ballet-dance stages, each specific genre, through its own narrative devices, draws heightened attention to identity related issues (gender, sexuality race, ethnicity) in individual and societal relations, and sharpen the edges of the tensions around them.

We are interested in exploring:

(1) the way these genres use their own tools to ‘translate’ Shakespeare into new ‘scripts’ (music scores, libretti, story boards and books, choreographies), involving their specific musical and corporeal vocabularies, registers, discourse styles and dramatic conventions.

(2) how these genres use the geography (center-peripheral positioning; circulation on stage) and demographics (from solos to ensembles) of their stages.

(3) how Shakespeare adaptations in the worlds of these genres reflect or question their socio-political ‘here and now’, creating new mental landscapes especially at relational intersections.

We invite contributions on specific works and performances on these stages; comparative studies within one of the genres; cross-disciplinary studies involving combinations of opera-musical and ballet-dance. We also invite data-oriented studies that will make more visible the width and breadth of Shakespeare operas- musicals and ballets-dances in the Shakespearean world.

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List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Beaman, Patricia Wesleyan University Bottez, Alina University of Bucharest Guneratne, Anthony Florida Atlantic University Kellermann, Jonas University of Konstanz Levine, Laura Tisch School of the Arts, NYU Lo Iacono, Concetta University of Roma Tre Mantellato, Mattia University of Udine McCulloch, Lynsey Coventry University Monahin, Nona Mount Holyoke College Radu, Roxana University of Bucharest Škrobánková, Klára Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague and the Department of Theatre Studies, Masaryk University Brno Takahashi, Yuriko Tsuda University, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Ueno Gakuen University in Tokyo, Japan

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“A Self by Any Other Name: Five Pas De Deux in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet”

Laura Levine

Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; [email protected]

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio tells Romeo in effect that Rosaline’s value is only knowable in comparison to that of others: “Compare her face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow” he says (i.ii.85-6). In contrast, in the balcony scene, Juliet posits the existence of an essential self as an entity which exists apart from language: “Thou art thyself, though not a Montague” (II.ii.39-40), she says .As with so many plays by Shakespeare, one of the questions running through the play is whether things and people have essential natures or exist only in comparison to each other.

How might a ballet address such a seemingly abstract and philosophical issue? How might it “translate” a problem which seems so utterly rooted in language into the “here and now” of physical movement? “A Self by Any Other Name: Five Pas De Deux in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet” offers an extended meditation on this question. Early in the ballet, Paris and Juliet establish a lexicon of gestures—lifts, dips, and steps between—which form their opening pas de deux. Romeo and Juliet’s balcony-scene pas de deux, which draws on the same lexical items, couldn’t be more different. This becomes particularly visible if one compares one of these items, the lift in which Paris holds Juliet vertically straight over his head like a board, to the balcony scene’s variations on it, the various “opposites” that Romeo and Juliet perform. My paper traces the use and re-use of these lexical items, their constant remapping of the geography of the stage, in order to see whether Romeo’s inversions of them establish an “essentially” different identity from Paris, or one different only in context. In so doing it suggests the way that MacMillan’s choreography fashions a new script out of Shakespeare.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“But where’s the lark? Some problems of translating Romeo and Juliet into dance.”

Nona Monahin

Mount Holyoke College; [email protected]

Many studies have addressed the question of how well (or not) literature lends itself to being re-interpreted as dance, and many of those have focused on ballets based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in conjunction with Sergei Prokofiev’s famous musical score.

There is a consensus that choreographers rely, at least partially, on the popularity of the plot. Audiences familiar with the Romeo and Juliet story are able, or expected, to “fill in,” as it were, those parts of Shakespeare that the choreographer found difficult, if not impossible, to render into dance.

But precisely within that familiarity lies the rub: the better one knows the Shakespearean text, the more “cheated” one might feel when certain iconic moments find no equivalent in a balletic version. Of course, a choreographer is not obliged to attempt a faithful danced rendition of Shakespeare’s text, even if such a feat were possible, and many choreographers have created outstanding ballets offering their own, often abstract, “take” on a given work of literature.

I argue that some choreographers of the “traditional” narrative versions could have benefited from a closer reading of Shakespeare’s text and Prokofiev’s musical setting, with an exploration of a possible subtext, before considering the possibility, or even desirability, of attempting to bring out such subtleties in the dance. Focusing on two iconic scenes involving Romeo and Juliet: the famous “nightingale/lark” dialog (III, 5) and the “sonnet” exchange at the Capulet ball (I, 5), I show, for instance, how Prokofiev’s score actually offers structural equivalents to the rich subtext of Shakespeare’s dialogs that can help the choreographer in finding ways to convey character psychology and the situational substance of Shakespeare’s text through the dancers’ corporeal movement.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“Coriolanus Meets Polonius: The Political in Shakespearean Operas in Communist Czechoslovakia”

Klára Škrobánková

Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague and the Department of Theatre Studies, Masaryk University Brno; [email protected]

This paper focuses on the political elements in two Czechoslovakian operas with librettos based on plays by William Shakespeare and their subsequent stagings. Poison from Elsinore by Karel Horký and Coriolanus by Ján Cikker were both written and staged in the 1960s and early 70s, reacting to the political situation in communist Czechoslovakia and its turbulent history culminating with the Soviet occupation of the country in August 1968. Poison from Elsinore presents a prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and confronts the character of Polonius (as well as the audience) with the question of one’s own conscience face to face with “the greater good”. In Cikker’s Coriolanus, the original Shakespearean topic of the fickle political power and opportunities of an individual are greatly emphasized, inconspicuously painting a picture of Czechoslovak most recent history. The paper looks at the staging history of both pieces with an emphasis on the possible political references, their reception by the media and the government, and, most importantly, on the way the classical text of William Shakespeare once again becomes actual in the hands of 20th-century librettists. To argue the unique position of these two operatic works, a comparative analysis of opera repertoire will be offered, as well as the examination of Shakespeare scholarship and popularity in the 40 years of communism in Czechoslovakia.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“Dancing Shakespeare in Japanese Noh and Kabuki”

Patricia Beaman

Wesleyan University; [email protected]

There is an emerging academic discourse among dance scholars studying Shakespeare on the presence and purpose of dance—not as decorative divertissement, but as an integral, dramatic force propelling the plot. While versions of Shakespeare’s plays by Western choreographers abound, these works also lend themselves well to adaptations into the theatrical dance forms of Japanese noh and kabuki, and deserve more study. Shared similarities between Shakespeare, noh, and kabuki include cross-dressing by male actors playing females, mixing of high and low cultures, characters facing moral dilemmas or torments of the heart, and the prominent presence of dance. Regarding the experimental use of noh and kabuki, renowned director Peter Brook observes, “In the Japanese tradition one sees…a true renewal and a vision that comes out of the present day, yet doesn’t deny their heritage.” Japanese avant-garde directors interpolating traditional aesthetics and dance into Shakespeare’s plays such as Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and Macbeth include noh iterations by Yoshihiro Kurita, Satoshi Miyagi, and Izumi Noriko, while those presenting kabuki-style Shakespeare are Ninagawa Yukio and Takahiro Fujita. By synthesizing centuries-old traditions from two contemporaneous yet culturally disparate theatrical forms, these works transcend time, and are catapulted squarely into the 21st century.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“Pas de deux, pas d’amour: Duological Love in Balletic Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet”

Jonas Kellermann

University of Konstanz; [email protected]

Romeo and Juliet is arguably one of the most widely adapted and re-imagined plays in the Shakespearean canon, re-imaginings that have contributed to the play’s almost mythical standing as the quintessential dramatization of romantic love in Western culture. One art form in which the tragedy has proven and continues to prove particularly popular is dance. Whether it is Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet score (1938), Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s overture-fantasy (1886), or Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony (1839) – the tragic love story, more so than any other Shakespeare play, has become an indispensable pillar in the repertoires of dance companies all across the globe.

This paper will argue that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is the emergence of the ‘pas de deux’ in romantic ballet. As a formally structured duet between two dance partners, it is exceptionally suited to translate the highly poeticized discourse of the duological love scenes in Shakespeare’s play – the pilgrim sonnet in act 1, the balcony scene in act 2, and the aubade in act 3 – from a verbal into a non-verbal art form. For this purpose, this paper will offer a close analysis of the ‘scène d’amour’ in Sasha Waltz’s ballet Roméo et Juliette, which interprets the sweeping instrumental love scene in Berlioz’s dramatic symphony as a tender and poignant ‘pas de deux’ between the star-crossed lovers. The analysis will focus on how the scene develops the classical formula of the ‘pas de deux’ further by infusing it with elements from postmodern dance, especially ‘contact dance’, a style of dancing marked by the reciprocal distribution of body weight between two dancers who support one another in continual movement.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“‘She speaks yet she says nothing’. Star-cross’d lovers dancing on the Russian stage”

Concetta Lo Iacono

University of Roma Tre; [email protected]

Combining historical analysis and iconographical research, my presentation guides us through the origins of the Lavrovsky version (in Leningrad, 1940) - with the majestic interpretation by the ballet actress Galina Ulanova - and the precepts of ‘drambalet’ or ‘dramatized ballet’. Romeo and Juliet marked a turning point in the Stalinist Era, when it was established as an exemplar of choreographies based on literary masterpieces. Because Shakespeare’s sentences needed to be summarized and conveyed to the audience with particular clarity, Russian theatre director Sergei Radlov was involved as important co-author of the libretto, which also remained, with its incarnated metaphors (see the eloquent dialog with the nurse and the ardour of the love scenes) a model for future adaptations.

After World War II, Lavrovsky’s new Bolshoi version made its historic debut in New York in 1959: “It was a stupefying production (also seen on film with Ulanova) that initially left critics and audiences stunned, sometimes baffled. Above all, it was an exercise in Stanislavsky-type realism”(NYT). The filmmaker Eisenstein also analyzed and reassembled the gestural score of Ulanova and her partner. He wrote about her refined classical aplomb: “Ulanova shines at the Kirov Theater for its mysterious uniqueness, […] for the magical unification of two dimensions: the original element of the movement of sound in the melody and the original element of the movement of the body in the dance”. When first performed in 1935, the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet score received critiques calling the music too complex and unsuitable for dancing; nonetheless, from the Psota (in Brno, 1938) to the Grigorovich versions (in Moscow, 1979), and thanks to legendary dancers such as Ulanova, it became one of the most performed Shakespearean ballets in the world.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“The Ballets Russes Origins of George Balanchine’s Film Version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Anthony Guneratne

Florida Atlantic University; [email protected]

In 1967 George Balanchine initiated a collaboration with Dan Eriksen to create a feature-length film version of his successful NYCB setting of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To the surprise of even some of the dancers who were its creators – as revealed in interviews with the present author – this film still exists, underservedly never achieving the celebrity of other full-length ballet performances that have specifically been re-staged for the camera. Although close study of the shooting script reveals that Balanchine preferred his own conception to some of the technical innovations suggested by Eriksen, the film moves briskly and makes deft use of cinematic techniques, very much like those pioneered in the 1955 Bolshoi film version of Romeo and Juliet. The present seminar paper argues that besides this somewhat competitive emulation, Balanchine’s connections to Shakespeare’s drama go much deeper to his days with the Ballets Russes and such choreographers as Bronislava Ninjinska, who had herself worked on a Hollywood film production of the film. Teasing out intricate but detailed connections between the leading figures of 20th century dance, and featuring interviews with such leading dancers as Edward Villella and the late Arthur Mitchell, this paper attempts to resituate a “lost” masterpiece of American dance film making.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“The Three Harlots in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet”

Lynsey McCulloch

Coventry University; [email protected]

In 1965, the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s full-length dance adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Performed by the Royal Ballet and starring its celebrated principals—Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev—the production was met with 43 curtain calls and hailed by critics as a milestone for MacMillan as a choreographer. It remains a mainstay of the Royal Ballet’s repertoire in addition to being performed by major dance companies around the world. It is, one might argue, the archetypal Shakespearean ballet. Based on this iconicity, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet would seem to be the ideal model for examining a successful synthesis of Shakespeare and dance. However, a straightforward mapping of the text onto the dance work, in which we look for evidence of the play’s influence, cannot do this translation process justice. In using Shakespeare’s drama as the template—identifying what MacMillan retains from the source-text and what he discards—we inevitably make the assumption that the play is more important to the discussion than the ballet. More useful in this context is a closer look at MacMillan’s additions to the world of the play, additions with no apparent basis or equivalence in the text. An approach that neglects the Shakespearean source material may feel counterintuitive, particularly to the literary critic, but it may be the only method capable of challenging the centrality of the text within scholarship and producing an honest appraisal of adaptive work. This paper will use the figures of the three harlots in MacMillan’s ballet—characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s play—to explore the real, practical and pragmatic business of adaptation.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

“Unmoored Jealousy: A Historical, Psychological, and Philosophical Examination of Jealousy in Verdi's Otello”

Roxana Radu

University of Bucharest; [email protected]

Lost intimacy, lost love, lost honour, lost pride—these are the spectres which haunt the jealous lover even to insanity. Othello is haunted, but it is for the eyes—or ears—of the audience that the green-eyed monster is first conjured up in Brabantio's ominous line: "She has deceived her father, and may thee". While Iago works upon Othello, the play also works to cast the shadow of doubt upon Desdemona, until she emerges as both tinted and tainted. This is not the path Otello treads. Boito's libretto does away with textual ambivalence, detaching jealousy from its comfortable, outward pointing posts. This paper takes a comparative approach to highlight the changes effected by a remediation of jealousy. Having to work around medium-specific requirements, the movement the opera suggests is inward, toward what Rorty calls "the significant cause". This movement coincides with an adaptation of character dynamics which pushes Otello centre stage, inviting attention. To trace the rhythms of jealousy is to map Otello’s affective journey. To do so, the paper enacts a second unmooring—from its literary context to jealousy's historical, psychological and philosophical spheres. Drawing thus on emotion studies, jealousy will ultimately be tied back to Otello’s impaired intersubjectivity.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

Remappings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the Lyric Stage

Alina Bottez

University of Bucharest; [email protected]

This paper looks at Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a fruitful source for what Bolter and Grusin have called remediation: new media achieve their cultural significance by paying homage to, and refashioning, earlier media. The Bard’s play is compared with several musical works it has inspired, signed by Henry Purcell, Thomas Adès, and Jeremy Sams. It shows how the rigours of the operatic tradition imposed various transformations from spoken to sung language, entailing a dramatic metamorphosis which results in the alteration or downright rewriting of the plot, and the reduction of the number of acts and characters. Genre is a major factor in the process of adaptation. Thus, Purcell’s The Tempest (1667) is a semi-opera, Adès’ The Tempest (2004) a full-fledged opera, and Sams’ The Enchanted Island (2011) – a pastiche, and the distinctions between these species, as well as the temporal travels of the original play, engender three radically different works.

Thematically, magic, love, betrayal, and the supernatural are discussed according to their remediation across the centuries, with reference to critics such as Hattaway, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Roux, Hibbard or Schmidgall.

Music can increase dramatic tension and character outline through tonal structure, rhythm, timbre or vocal virtuosity. Thus, this paper analyses the entwinement between dramatic warp and musical invention that generates the new remapped works.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

Reworking Shakespeare with dance: Youri Vámos’ Romeo and Juliet

Mattia Mantellato

University of Udine; [email protected]

In the world of ballet and contemporary or modern dance, Shakespeare and his plays have been inspirational for an impressive number of different and original choreographical adaptations. The English playwright’s works are filled with visual semantics and their contents are marked by a remarkable performative charge. It comes as no surprise that many choreographers around the world have turned to Shakespearian plays in order to give voice to his unforgettable characters and timeless plots through gestures and movements. Amongst them, Youri Vámos, a visionary Hungarian choreographer, stands out for his extensive work on the Shakespearian fictional world. Vámos has staged many of his productions for the ballet company of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, in Germany, but his peculiar and original choreographical texture has brought him such prominent success that many theatres in Europe have called him in to re-stage many of his works. His signature style is distinguishable not only through his use of corporeal vocabulary, which brilliantly fuses classical poses with modern and contemporary tones and stresses, but also through his attentive dramaturgical characterisation of the protagonists. This study focuses in particular on Vámos’ 1997 interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, the drama portraying the most famous tragic pair of lovers in the history of theatre. The choreographer’s adaptation is set at the beginning of the 20th century, around the same time as the composer Prokofiev orchestrated and arranged his renowned musical interpretation. The lovers are interpreted by the youngest and most inexperienced performers in the ballet ensemble, while the dramatization of the plot shifts between irony and tragedy, following a succession of accurate intersemiotic translations of the text and deliberate stylistic reworkings.

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Seminar - Remappings and New Centerings of Shakespeare on the Opera-Musical and Ballet-Dance Stages

The semi-opera Miranda: the adaptation of the “negatives” of The Tempest

Yuriko Takahashi

Tsuda University, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Ueno Gakuen University in Tokyo, Japan; [email protected]

I would like to attempt an analysis of the inspiring production of the semi-opera, Miranda, directed by Katie Mitchell (the production at the Opera Comique, Paris in 2017). It is a striking example of the adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This production is based on a newly written libretto by Cordelia Lynn and it comes to the light the potential problems that The Tempest could have produced, and it shows how we could imagine the afterlife of Shakespeare’s characters in the contemporary theatrical performances.

Musically, Miranda is a pasticcio composed of Henry Purcell’s music and this style of adaptation was very popular in the late 17th and the18th century. However, unlike the Enchanted Island at the Metropolitan opera (2011), which is the gorgeous restoration of “authentic” semi-opera in the 18th century, Miranda is a radical adaptation, full of reflections of the contemporary topical issues, such as domestic violence, gender inequality, rape, child abuse, and terrorism.

In the paper, I would especially focus on analyzing these three points: 1) The framework Miranda provides in the prologue. 2) The scene of Miranda’s flashback. 3) The characteristic of semi-opera and how they are utilized as a gimmick in this production. Through these analyses, I would like to show that this is not at all moldy ancient musical production, rather it could be the showcase of the theatrical experiment of the cutting- edge adaptations.

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Seminar

Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Michelle Assay1,4, David Fanning2, Aleksei Semenenko3

1Université Paris Sorbonne; 2University of Manchester; 3University of Stockholm; 4University of Huddersfield; [email protected]

Following successful seminars on Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe in Paris450 and WSC2016, this seminar will study Shakespeare’s appropriation in Eastern and Central Europe, including those countries comprising the former USSR. On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach embracing historical and literary criticism, translation studies, performance analysis and cultural politics, the seminar will address such questions as: what were/are the mechanisms of appropriation of Shakespeare within different cultural contexts in this region; how has the process of appropriation contributed to definitions of national identity; is there such a thing as a specifically Central/Eastern European ‘Shakespearology’? The seminar welcomes all disciplinary approaches to the question of appropriation, as well as discussion regarding the fate of Shakespeare’s texts and performances against relevant political and cultural backdrops.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

• Censorship

• The Cold War

• Political/cultural context up to the present day

• Translation

• Stage, TV, film and radio production

• Music

• Scholarly discourse

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Almási, Zsolt Péter Pázmány Catholic University Artemjeva, Lyudmila University of Nizhny Novgorod Gaydin, Boris Moscow University for the Humanities Jaworska, Anna univeristy of Warsaw Khomenko, Natalia York Uni, Toronto Kujawinska Courtney, Krystyna University of Lodz, Poland

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Makarov, Vladimir St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow Misterova, Ivona University of West Bohemia Nicolaescu, Madalina University of Bucharest Prozorova, Nadezhda Kaluga State University Savchenko, Mikhaïl Independent Scholar Zakharov, Nikolai Moscow University of Humanities

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

“Whose grave’s this, sirrah?”: Socialist Realism and Shakespeare’s Alter Egos

Natalia Khomenko

York Uni, Toronto; [email protected]

The first half of the 1930s saw a rapid re-organization of approaches to Shakespeare in Soviet Russia. Throughout the 1920s, discussions of building a socialist culture tended to refer to Shakespearean drama somewhat dismissively. The well-known theatre critic Aleksei Gvozdev noted regretfully in 1927 that Shakespeare’s writing had been affected by “the deeply individualistic spirit” of the era when “the bourgeoisie was establishing its ideology in art,” and therefore, despite theatres’ best efforts, his tragedies in particular would never speak directly to Soviet audiences. In the early 1930, however, this earlier disavowal came into conflict with Shakespeare’s new position as an approved model for Soviet dramatists and, by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, as the figurehead of socialist realism. It was up to directors and critics to negotiate ideological fluctuations and reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable views of the playwright’s cultural significance.

This paper examines one of the interpretative strategies adopted, during the early stages of the Shakespeare cult in Soviet Russia, in an attempt to bridge the gap between ideologies. In this approach, the more ideologically jarring aspects of Shakespearean drama were explained away by positing that the playwright should be viewed as a free-thinking artist forever struggling against his own darker alter egos shaped and trapped by the early modern class system. Any discrepancies in analysis could thus be attributed to Shakespeare’s less palatable identities, variously defined as an “intricate formalist” and “opportunist” [prisposoblenets], or a “sycophant” [lizobliud] and money-man. I look at how this briefly lived interpretative strategy was used in aligning Shakespeare’s plays with the socialist realist ideologies, paying particular attention to Aleksei Popov’s publications in preparation for his 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet. Ultimately, I suggest that the emergence of this approach indicates a continuing unease with the complexities of Shakespeare’s biography and writing, and a lingering suspicion of the playwright, even as socialist realism insistently lauded him as a singer of the revolution.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

A Scout, a Punk Rocker, or an Emo? Hamlet in Modern Czech Culture

Ivona Misterova

University of West Bohemia; [email protected]

The aim of this paper is to examine the contemporary Czech production of Hamleteen staged at the International Theatre Festival in the Czech Republic in terms of Hamlet’s search for identity and his journey to adulthood. Working with various interpretive lenses, it may help to understand Hamlet’s desire to revolt against the narrow-minded smallness of the surrounding world and make his way from adolescence to adulthood. The production grew out of the traditional Shakespearean framework, which was, however, transferred to the modern era and inhabited by entirely modern characters. The course of events was tinged by music, which represented one of the cornerstones of the production. Taken together, the authors and director created a non-traditional, dynamic space of intergenerational and interpersonal relations dominated by the death of Hamlet’s father, problems of adolescence, family conflicts, and young love. The directorial intention and the modern setting may thus be read symbolically as a call for intergenerational and interpersonal understanding. It can be viewed, moreover, as a search for constant values in an uncertain world. The playful tone, together with a touch of tragedy and the absurd, inserted in a new cultural platform, has transposed Hamlet to a new dimension without losing its strength.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

A speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in’t”: Insertions in Playtexts as a Mode of Appropriating Shakespeare in Hungary

Zsolt Almási

Péter Pázmány Catholic University; [email protected]

Deletions, modifications and insertions are common practice in the Hungarian theatrical appropriation of Shakespeare nowadays. These may be seen as violations of the sacred Shakespearean texts for the sake of updating his works for the present audience, or as genuine acts of bringing Shakespeare home, of making him speak to the present. In this paper, I shall argue that as of today in some of the productions insertions may reorient the political claims of the performances by reflecting on current political tendencies in Hungary. To prove my point, and to narrow down the analysis to a manageable size, I shall focus on only two of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, i.e. Hamlet and Macbeth, to two productions designed for larger, public funded theatres (Comedy Theatre, Budapest; Jászai Mari Theatre, Tatabánya) premiered in 2016 and 2018. Within these two productions, I shall analyse two insertions, a Hungarian poem, entitled “Air!” by Attila József in Hamlet (directed by Enikő Eszenyi) replacing the Hecuba speech, and a speech delivered by Duncan in Macbeth (directed by Rémusz Szikszai) clarifying the method of succession in Scotland. The analyses of these insertions may well exemplify the methods of politicising Shakespeare in public funded theatres to bring him home in the present Hungarian context.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Complete works of Shakespeare in Soviet Russia: editorial landmarks

Mikhaïl Savchenko

Independent Scholar; [email protected]

While the first Complete Works of Shakespeare in Russian translation appeared in the 1860s, it was not until the Soviet times that a truly well-commented and well-translated set of his works was published, contributing to the establishment of the current Russian tradition of poetic translation.

The relevance of the presumably off-the-table “bourgeois” writer in the young Soviet state had been much discussed, and only by the late 1920s were a couple of unconvincing Collected Works projects attempted, one of which aborted after issuing one volume.

In the 1930s, an ambitious project of new Complete Works was launched, aiming at replacing imperfect pre- Soviet translations with new, more accurate renditions by the best Russian poets. While the design of the large-format set was somewhat decadent, lush and reminiscent of pre-Revolution book publishing tradition, it made no reference to the recently tabooed Shakespeare authorship question, unlike the previous Complete Works from 1902-1904. All of the eight planned volumes were successfully issued, although in the meantime WWII broke out, the original publishing house ceased to exist, and two of the original editorial board members perished in Stalin’s purges, as did the designer and numerous translators (some of the translations had to be printed unsigned).

At the same time, a complete 4-volume set in English was published by Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, whose other books were Lenin’s works in English and literature on the Soviet Union and labour movement.

New, stage-oriented in its approach to translation and more austere in design, Complete Works were published in 1957-1960. This project introduced a new Russian Shakespeare canon, totally replacing old, pre-Revolution translations (already almost extinct in the previous one) and the work of some poets whose translation principles were judged inadequate (most notably Mikhail Kuzmin). This collection has remained unequalled until now, although rumours about a new project have been circulating for a few years.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Gustav Shpet and ‘Soviet Shakespeare’

Nadezhda Prozorova

Kaluga State University; [email protected]

Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) was a scholar of tragic destiny whose activities were marked with wonderful diversity and universality. Being a philosopher, psychologist, theorist of art, translator of philosophical works and fiction, he was erased by force from our historical and cultural memory. And if we can witness now the return of Shpet the philosopher whose philosophical works have been intensively edited since the 1990s, his work as a translator of fiction and commentator of European classical literature up to now remains essentially unknown not only to the ordinary reader but even to the professionals. In 2013 this situation changed with the publication of a volume of Shpet’s letters, documents and translations connected with Shakespeare’s heritage. The unique material of this volume (based on the archival data, collected and edited by T. Shchedrina) gives us an opportunity to realize the ways of the development of the historical image of ‘Soviet Shakespeare’ and the nature of the ideological discussions concerning Shakespeare’s works more distinctly.

The publication of letters by Alexander A. Smirnov and G. Shpet, the two co-editors of the first Soviet complete edition of Shakespeare’s works who began working on it in 1933, is of special importance. These letters are extremely interesting not only because of their editorial principles, but also since they so well capture the time Shakespeare’s editors and translators lived in. It is worth mentioning that when the first volume of the edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works was published in 1936, Shpet (who was arrested in 1935) was not mentioned in it as its editor and translator.

Not of lesser importance is the edition plan drafted by G. Shpet together with A. Smirnov, and the general principles of literary translation that remain topical for contemporary discussions of the issue. The publication of Shet’s translation of Macbeth demonstrates the way his theoretical principles of translation found its way into his practice. For this edition, Shpet also used a special (hermeneutical) type of commentaries, which he considered necessary for a number of works of world literature.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Othello on Socialist Radio - the Romanian case.

Madalina Nicolaescu

University of Bucharest; [email protected]

Radio performances of Shakespeare plays were among the first "cultural products" of Soviet Shakespeare to be introduced to Romania. This highly under-researched type of Shakespeare adaptation was associated with the new technology that the Soviet and later on the Romanian socialist government heavily relied on in order to reach large masses of spectators. Radio adaptations of Shakespeare were expected to function as a powerful educational and ideological tool. More than stage performances whose visual component could always be suspected of smuggling in transgressive meanings, radio versions could focus exclusively on the text and thus offer more appropriate, i.e. ideologically correct readings of the plays that closely followed the guidelines imposed by the new doctrine of socialist realism. The paper will focus on two radio adaptations of Othello (1955 and 1981) and will highlight changes in the use of both the medium (radio) and in the ideological content that the play was expected to convey.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Polish Shakespeare Studies and the Double Totalitarian Crisis: The Case of Władysław Hubert Tarnawski (1885-1951)

Anna Jaworska

univeristy of Warsaw; [email protected]

The paper presents the figure of Władysław Hubert Tarnawski (1885-1951), an archetypal example of a Shakespearean scholar, faced with the tragic sequence of totalitarian crises perpetuated by the rise of the Nazi and then Communist ideology. Drawn to the Bard in his early childhood, Tarnawski became a key figure in the establishment of the Polish Shakespeare Studies and Professor of English Studies at Lvov University. Unable to conduct regular classes, Tarnawski translated most of Shakespeare’s plays in the turmoil of World War II. In December 1946, Tarnawski was arrested for his involvement in the activities of the Committee of Eastern Lands that had been banned by the regime. Imprisoned and suffering from a fatal disease, Tarnawski continued with his academic work. It was in the infamous prison in Warsaw on Rakowiecka Street where Tarnawski translated the Bard’s sonnets, published posthumously in 1995. Although he is one of the three translators of all Shakespeare’s plays into Polish, his heroic commitment proved in many ways vain. The political context of his death, ruled out publication, and the passage of time rendered his rewritings but a relic of past literary and linguistic convention. The aim of the paper is to reflect on the intellectual and psychological context of Tarnawski’s scholarly enterprise, with an intention of drawing conclusions about the complexity of academic commitments in the Central European historical context.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Russian Shakespeare's after the Jubilee

Alexei Bartoshevich

GITIS, Moscow; [email protected]

The report will focus on two Shakespearean productions that appeared on the Russian stage in the last two years. There were two Shakespeare anniversary – 450 years since the birth of the 400 – anniversary of the death. Usually after a natural (or artificial) explosion of interest in the playwright-hero of the day comes some fatigue and theaters come into a period of rest. On the one hand, the hero of the day, even when he is great, bored, and on the other – there is a feeling of some exhaustion of different types of modern interpretations. The rest from Shakespeare unexpectedly turned out to be short-term. Our author has regained his rights in Russian and not only Russian theatres. Again, different interpretations of Hamlet give different answers to hamletian questions about the fate of Russian society.

In the remarkable, if not to say, great and terrible production of Lev Dodin, the question of whether it is possible to get out of the global impasse is not too comforting an answer. The world is in play - graveyard, the world is a prison, in the crevices where you bury the dead or people just throw themselves head first into the slit-die. Hamlet is part of this world. Hamlet is a murderer, a power lover. Any hope that there is something that can withstand the horror and darkness of the Universe is lost here. Is that what about hopelessness says art, one way or another harmonizing chaos, which it screams, and, therefore, the world is not hopeless in some last sense of the word.

On the very threshold of departure from the Lensovet Theatre Yury Butusov put there, as always deeply personal, version of "Hamlet." It can be understood only in connection with all other Russian Hamlets, but most of all - with the current state of our society. In deliberately eclectic Butusov's performance of carnival of monsters, lying, selftheatralising postmodern world confronts Hamlet played by a wonderful actress Laura Pitskhelauri.

This Hamlet is a special creature, androgynous. It stands on the other side of gender differences. It is the embodiment of spiritual vulnerability, defenselessness, the embodiment of suffering, child pain, young despair. But first of all – of infant intransigence. Before the end of Hamlet drags for a enormous sword, which occupies slightly whether not half the scene. To raise it, he (she) can't, but from the hands of not issuing. Everyone, and the Prince of Denmark himself, knows how the fight will end. But the cries Horatio: "You're not going to fight!"Hamlet, time after time, stubbornly repeats:" I Will!". This is the final point of the play.

In this " I will!" the meaning of the play is its hope. The last, timid hope for the small and the weak, as the older and the strong rule, kill and play their deceitful games. Is it an exit from the deadlock?

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Shakespeare in Russian Political Discourse

Nikolai Zakharov

Moscow University of Humanities; [email protected]

Shakespeare remains topical in politics under various regimes, both authoritative and democratic. A few recent events have reminded us of this unique phenomenon. In 2012, Gregory Doran staged his Julius Caesar against an ‘African’ setting and brought the play to a festival in Moscow. The performance contained a warning against a popular leader’s abuse of authority, and in view of Russian politics sounded as a hint at Vladimir Putin’s running for a third presidential term.

We do not mean to say that Russia leads in Shakespeare-related excesses, but there is a special coloring to it. For instance, a 10-year-old boy reciting Hamlet’s monologue To be or not to be was detained by the police in the center of Moscow, allegedly for begging; and then there were accusations of theater director Kirill Serebrennikov (staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Gogol-Center in Moscow), and theater manager Aleksei Malobrodsky was charged with embezzlement, following which public protests were organized in their defense.

All these incidents bring to mind Tsar Alexander II’s disapproval of Shakespeare’s 300th anniversary and the plans of its celebration in the Russian Empire. In this paper, I try to trace the history of ‘involving’ the playwright in current politics, and the myths emerging along the way.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Shakespeare in Yuri Dombrovsky’s Works

Boris Gaydin

Moscow University for the Humanities; [email protected]

The paper examines the personal creative model of Yuri O. Dombrovsky and the influence of W. Shakespeare and his heritage on the Russian writer. I will analyze the cycle entitled Three Novellas about Shakespeare (The Dark Lady, The Second Best Bed, and A Royal Rescript), other fiction works and essays, as well as the biography of the Soviet man of letters.

It is known that Yu. O. Dombrovsky had been studying Shakespeare’s life and works as well as the Shakespeare authorship question for many years. He even gave lectures on the English playwright when he lived in exile in Alma-Ata. In Dombrovsky’s novellas, we meet Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre, in the streets of London, in Crown Tavern in Oxford and, finally, on his death-bed in his house in Stratford. Dombrovsky — a man of thorny destiny — internalized the playwright’s life and legacy mulling over the issue of the tragic nature of genuine artist’s existence in the society. Dombrovsky’s Shakespeare cycle is a vivid part of the Russian Shakespearean sphere.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

Teaching Shakespeare in Soviet Russia: A.A. Smirnov and the St. Petersburg academic culture

Vladimir Makarov

St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow; [email protected]

The decline of academic life in post-Revolution St. Petersburg has been a subject of a number of studies. This paper takes a look at the practices of teaching Shakespeare at higher schools of St. Petersburg – Petrograd – Leningrad of the 1910s to 1940s, using the test case of the famous Russian Shakespeare scholar Aleksandr A. Smirnov (1883-1962). Except for the years of absence from the city during the Civil War, Smirnov taught foreign literature at St. Petersburg university from 1916 to late 1950s, and many of his syllabi and preparation materials survive in his archives at the Pushkin House.

A study of these archives will address several important issues. To begin with, the 1920s are typically seen as the period when theatre flourished and the media was relatively free to discuss Shakespeare-related concepts, including that of authorship – while academic scholarship was mostly inconspicuous. On the contrary, the 1930s saw a resurgence of Shakespeare editions (including the Complete Works project overseen by Smirnov). How does this “revenge of the classics” translate into teaching, given the tightening ideological climate in the country?

Secondly, I am interested in the issue of language – how does Smirnov’s pre-revolution language, a curious mix of the Veselovsky school and of the Formalists, come to accommodate the unavoidable wave of Friche’s ‘vulgar sociology’ and other fads of the 1920s and 1930s? Is there any terminological continuity in his teaching Shakespeare over decades?

Lastly, there is the issue of how Smirnov borrowed and appropriated the ideas and approaches of his Western colleagues, especially John Dover Wilson, whose Cambridge Shakespeare series served as a model for both the 1936 and 1956 versions of the Complete Works Smirnov (co-)edited. Which concepts made their way into Smirnov’s lecture materials and how were they presented to Soviet students?

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Central/Eastern Europe: Then and Now

The Shakespeare authorship question in modern Russian detective novels

Lyudmila Artemjeva

University of Nizhny Novgorod; [email protected]

This paper investigates the Shakespeare authorship question in modern Russian detective novels using the example of Poslednyaya drama Shekspira (The Last Shakespeare’s Play) by Nataliya Aleksandrova, Sharada Shekspira (Shakespeare’s Charade) by Nataliya Solntseva, and Shekspir dolzhen umeret (Shakespeare has to die) by Valeriya Leman.

While reference to Shakespeare’s plays in fiction, especially in detective novels, in order to emphasise the entanglement of the plot seems rather common place, reference to the Shakespeare authorship question is yet to be investigated.

Such reference usually implies a conceptual projection of a Shakespeare authorship theory onto the detective story. The nature of such projection is possible to account for by using the method of analysis proposed by cognitivists Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier. They suggest that a conceptual projection of one story onto another is constructed in “middle spaces” such as generic and blended ones instead of being direct from the source to the target. They argue that the blended space makes inferences, emotions, and novel patterns available, thus leading to reconceptualization and category extension.

Although a detective story by default implies the presence of secrets and hidden truths and is structured as an investigation, even a mere mentioning of the Shakespeare authorship question appears to affect the novel’s structure by introducing the inevitable element of conspiracy into the plot. This leads to the doubling of plotlines, the Shakespearean one becoming the key to an ongoing investigation. This “clue”, however, might be evident only to the reader.

The analysis based on Turner and Fauconnier’s theory of the novels listed above provides a glimpse into the mind-set reflected in modern Russian detective novels and the Shakespeare authorship question place in it.

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Seminar

Shakespeare and Music

Michelle Assay1,2, David Fanning3

1Université Paris Sorbonne; 2University of Huddersfield; 3University of Manchester; [email protected]

‘If music be the food of love, play on’ (Twelfth Night, I/1/1)

Despite the fact that at least some Shakespeare-inspired music constitutes an important part of the concert repertoire, scholarship specifically dealing with Shakespeare and music is surprisingly under-developed. Studies in this area are far less numbered than, for example, those dealing with Shakespeare and film.

This seminar aims to approach the subject matter of Shakespeare and Music, from both aspects of music in Shakespeare’s time or on various aspects of music in Shakespeare’s works (including his musical imaging and imagination), and music inspired by Shakespeare’s works or composed either to Shakespearean themes or directly for Shakespeare plays: in short – Music in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Music.

As John Stevens observed Shakespeare ‘inherited and enhanced a tradition of theatre music used not only for embellishment but in the delineation of character and with accepted symbolic associations.’ On the other hand, Shakespeare’s musical afterlives –works that found their inspiration in Shakespeare – not only contribute to a richer understanding and appreciation of the Bard’s works, but are often they works that can stand alone and act as gateways to the musical traditions and aesthetics of their time.

Possible threads for papers or lecture/recitals include but are not limited to:

•Music imagery and imagination of Shakespeare •Original melodies for Shakespeare songs and their afterlives •Shakespeare and opera •Incidental music for Shakespeare productions: past and present •Analysis and contextualising of individual Shakespeare-inspired works •Setting Shakespeare’s words to music •Shakespeare in instrumental music •Shakespeare and film music •Role of Shakespeare in musical imagination and creative output of composers •Shakespeare and music nationalism •Shakespeare in non-classical music (jazz, musicals, pop) •Performing Shakespeare’s music •Afterlife of Shakespeare-inspired music

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List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Assay, Michelle Université Paris Sorbonne and University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom Bellinson, Nicholas University of Chicago Dailey, Jeff S. American Musicological Society/Greater New York Chapter Eubanks Winkler, Amanda Syracuse University Francis, Ben Goldsmiths College, London, UK Graham, Michael Independent scholar Hampton-Reeves, Stuart University of Central Lancashire Havlíčková Kysová, Šárka Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Kopecký, Jiri Université Paris Sorbonne and University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom Schütz, chantal Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France Shabalina, Natasha Vaganova Ballet Academy, St Petersburg Škrobánková, Klára Institute for Theatre Research Brno Trippett, David University of Cambridge Wilson, Jeffrey R. Harvard University Wong, Katrine University of Macau

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

'If It's Good Enough For Shakespeare, It's Good Enough For Us': Highbrows, Lowbrows and the Broadway Musical.

Ben Francis

Goldsmiths College, London, UK; [email protected]

The presentation will take three of the best-known musicals based on Shakespeare plays: The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart, 1938), Kiss Me, Kate (Cole Porter, 1948) and West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, 1957), and will use them to illuminate the complex dialectic between twentieth century popular theatre and Shakespeare. In the early part of the twentieth century Shakespeare had gone from being regarded as popular entertainment to being culturally respectable. The Broadway musical to some extent reversed this process: The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart, 1938) doesn't use its source play, The Comedy of Errors, in order to proclaim its cultural respectability but rather as a license to be vulgar and bawdy.

Shakespeare is an excuse for vulgarity precisely because he is respectable: all three shows under discussion adhere to a culturally conservative idea of Shakespeare as a divinely-inspired healer, and his absence in West Side Story - the only show of the three where he is not mentioned by name - is a part of the deprivation that the characters suffer in the slums of New York. Shakespeare was often, in a process begun in the nineteenth century, revered as an other-worldly figure of transcendent genius. This is a process that the shows at once endorse and also make fun of. The song from Kiss Me, Kate, 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare', both ridicules social and cultural pretensions, ('With the wife of the British Embessida/Try a crack out of Troilus and Cressida') and also recommends Shakespeare as a cultural Mr Big who still has power ('Brush up your Shakespeare/And they'll all kowtow'). The shows regard Shakespeare as 'high art' while also wanting to stress that he can provide popular entertainment as well, and so they gently mock some of his work and also mock themselves for having the temerity to take it on. In doing so the shows both endorse and make fun of the image of transcendent Shakespeare, and imply that Shakespeare belongs to the whole audience, highbrows and lowbrows alike. In doing so they brush away some of the stilted respectability that had settled over his work and make him pleasurable to watch once more.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

‘Let’s Have a Dance’: Musical Shakespeare in Restoration London

Amanda Eubanks Winkler

Syracuse University; [email protected]

When we think of Shakespeare’s great tragedy Macbeth, we might recall the famous soliloquy upon a dagger or Lady Macbeth’s compulsive hand washing. We do not think of showstopping musical numbers. And yet, for audiences in Restoration London, the musical witches were the big draw. As Pepys observed, ‘[it is] one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw’ (19 April 1667). This paper will consider the aesthetic strategies adapters used when making space for music, through an analysis of Davenant’s Macbeth (1663/4); Dryden/Davenant’s The Tempest (1667; rev. Shadwell, 1674); The Fairy-Queen (1692); and Gildon’s Measure for Measure (1700).

I will also consider Restoration Shakespeare as palimpsest. Just as traces of Shakespeare’s plays co-exist alongside newly composed lines of text, older songs were retained or their memory lingered. For instance, the anonymous adapter of The Fairy-Queen (probably Thomas Betterton) retained the text of Bottom’s song ‘The Woosel Cock’ in the word book, although no setting of this piece survives by Henry Purcell, possibly because the pre-Restoration version of the song was retained. The music for other Restoration Shakespeare adaptations were set repeatedly: three settings of Macbeth survive (a partial one by Matthew Locke, and two full ones by John Eccles and Richard Leveridge), while Locke, Banister, Pelham Humfrey, Pietro Reggio, G.B. Draghi, Purcell, and John Weldon all contributed to revivals of The Tempest. Just as Shakespeare lurks behind Davenant, so might the memory of Humfrey resonate behind Weldon’s new settings of the same texts.

158

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

God and Friendship in Stephen Oliver’s Timon of Athens

Michael Graham

Independent scholar; [email protected]

Timon of Athens – a relatively obscure, curiously structured, and arguably unfinished play about a beneficent nobleman turned vituperative hermit – might not appear the most obvious Shakespearian candidate for operatic adaptation. The British composer Stephen Oliver, however, was drawn to this work precisely because of its supposed imperfections, which he believed provided him with an opportunity to ‘add to the story’. Oliver’s Timon of Athens (1991) aligns with several modern interpretations which underline the story’s pertinence to a contemporary world of financial misdealing and political hegemony. Moreover, it pre- empts recent literary analyses which draw attention to the play’s theological content and its title character’s spiritual journey.

Oliver’s epigraph for his Timon, ‘I come like a thief in the night’ (1 Thessalonians 5:2), might suggest an explicitly Christian agenda. While the opera contains Christian elements, however, its composer was an avowed atheist, and his understandings of ‘religion’ and ‘God’ were idiosyncratic. This paper will explore how Oliver musically emulates Shakespeare by pushing ‘down through Christianity to the religious passion underlying Christianity’ and ‘prob[ing] deeply into the possibility of the impossible’ (Ken Jackson). With reference to Derrida’s discussions of ‘the gift’, it will interrogate the motivations behind Timon’s outlandish generosity in the first half of the story, before focusing on two remarkable scenes of friendship in the opera’s second act that rewrite the source play. The paper will conclude by considering the potential autobiographical resonances of Oliver’s opera, which was his final work prior to his death from AIDS in 1992.

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Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Keywords: Hamlet, Opera, Georgia, Russia, Soviet Union, Politics

Hamlet’s Operatic Afterlife: Between Individuality and Political Allegory

Michelle Assay

Université Paris Sorbonne and University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom; [email protected]

From their first engagement in the mid-18th century, to Declan Donnellon and Radu Poklitaru’s Hamlet ballet, currently on stage at Moscow’s Bolshoy Theatre, Russians have constantly re-invented the play according to contemporary contexts. As with so many of their artistic endeavours, their Hamlet has always been ‘more than Hamlet’, and several of their most iconic productions have been enhanced by musical scores from the most prominent composers of the time (Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev et al.), providing an additional layer of semantic commentary to that guided (or negotiated) by the producer/director.

Particularly interesting examples of musical meta-text are to be found in the field of opera, where the composer has the role of initiator and, in effect, producer. The three Hamlet operas composed in the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia – by the Georgian Alexi Machavariani (1965-68), the Leningrad/Petersburg- based Sergey Slonimsky (1991), and Yekaterinburgian Vladimir Kobekin (2001, subtitled ‘a Russian comedy’) – each have a distinct socio-political angle and meta-musical commentary, embodied both in their libretti and in their musical scores, and featuring respectively a nationalist sub-text, an allegory of a society in decline, and an absurdist reconceptualization of individuality.

These elements will be set forth in this paper, drawing on the respective composers’ own commentaries, and placing them in the generic context of the (rather few) Western attempts at operatic settings.

160

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Music n Victorian Shakespeare Productions and Arthur Sullivan

Jeff S. Dailey

American Musicological Society/Greater New York Chapter; [email protected]

Shakespeare made Arthur Sullivan a success. Although his name is now permanently welded to Gilbert’s, long before he first composed any comic operas, Sullivan wrote music inspired by the Bard of Avon, and very successfully at that. In 1861, Sullivan composed his music for The Tempest, which brought him instant attention in both England and Germany. Originally created as concert music, it was subsequently used for a staged production of the play, in an adaptation by Charles Alexander Calvert. Sullivan’s Tempest music is an interesting mixture of Renaissance and Romantic sensibilities—clearly influenced by Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also more attuned to English text setting (at which Sullivan was a master) and containing more solo vocal music than this German counterpart’s score.

The Victorians shaped Shakespeare into their own vision. Although Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage, his 19th century interpreters added their own pomp and splendor to their productions. They added hundreds of supernumeraries, spectacular scenery, and music. Charles Alexander Calvert was a major mid-Victorian producer of Shakespeare, whose productions at the Prince Theatre in Manchester featured such attention to detail that he imported a real gondola from Venice for The Merchant of Venice in 1871. This production also featured music by Arthur Sullivan. Calvert also commissioned Sullivan to write music for his production of Henry VIII in 1877, after which Sullivan focused on his collaboration with Gilbert and worked with him exclusively for more than a decade before writing music for the theatre with anyone else.

Sullivan also wrote music for two London productions of plays by Shakespeare—The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1874, produced by John Hollingshead, and Macbeth in 1888, produced by Henry Irving.

My presentation will begin with an overview of Shakespeare production in Victorian times and a brief introduction to the music of Arthur Sullivan and how he was able to parody a number of musical styles. I will then examine each of his Shakespearean works, examining if his music evokes the Renaissance, the play’s settings, and how it supports the text.

161

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Keywords: Hamlet, Ophelia, Music, Song, Instrument, Agency, Manipulation

Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Harvard University; [email protected]

This essay reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet: Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

162

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Polonius’ Quest for Truth – Karel Horký’s Poison from Elsinore

Klára Škrobánková

Institute for Theatre Research Brno; [email protected]

The story of Poison from Elsinore is a complicated one – originally written as a radio play, it was adapted for theatre in 1967 and only in 1969 Czech musician Karel Horký composed music for the opera. The story of Václav Renč’s libretto is meant to be a prequel to Hamlet, working mostly with old Hamlet’s tale of his murder that is re-enacted on stage. The main protagonist here is Polonius, desperately balancing between the greater good and the dangerous truth. In its time, the opera faced many challenges – from the almost exclusively male cast to political consequences of staging this work in the communist Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, this adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play had the ability to appeal to a broader audience – with Horký’s music, closely resembling oratorios, emphasising the struggle of Polonius. This paper will not only try to describe the changes the librettist had to do in order to adapt Hamlet for opera, but it will also look at the only production of Poison from Elsinore from 1969.

163

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Reflections on Hamlet in the Russian ballet art

Natasha Shabalina

Vaganova Ballet Academy, St Petersburg; [email protected]

In the history of world culture the tragedy “Hamlet” externalized itself in different kinds of art and outgrew the frames of its original genre. Ballet appears to be one of the theatre forms in which “Hamlet” evocation seems to be the most challenging and complex one. Having philosophic monologues expressed in poetic language by Shakespeare translated into ballet language is far from being a simple task.

The paper focuses on the most significant Russian ballets and ballet-films, produced after “Hamlet”. These are “The Reflections” by N. Dolgushin (1969, Leningrad State Academic Maly Opera Theatre), “Hamlet” by K. Sergeyev (1970, Leningrad Kirov theatre), the ballet-film “The Reflection on the Topic. Hamlet” by S. Voskresenskaya (1991) and “Hamlet” by R. Poklitaru and D. Donnellan (2015, Bolshoi theatre, Moscow). The performances are analyzed and connected with cultural, social, political and art process in the country. The way from the first performances in the classical style of dance in the genre of the tragedy to the modern conceptions in the genre of tragifarce is revealed. It is important to find tendencies due to which ballets “Hamlet” of the Soviet period differ from the modern ones. Many Soviet productions became a reflection of the epoch of ballet drama and socialistic realism. In the 1990s due to the dismantlement of political and cultural situation in the country, brand new creative opportunities and ideology freedom, modern versions of the play started to emerge. The choreographic dramaturgy, dancing style, musical score and scenery of the performances are analyzed. The theme of “Hamlet” in the Russian ballet is a perspective, though complicated way of searching, thinking and finding new means of expression of Shakespeare’s play in nonverbal kinds of art.

164

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

RSC Twelfth Night in Chinese: A Case Study of Musical Response to Shakespeare in Contemporary China

Katrine Wong

University of Macau; [email protected]

Shakespeare and his works began making their way to Asia through diplomatic and missionary channels some two centuries after the Bard’s death. Through translations and adaptations, Asian countries began to learn about his works and what they represent (culture, life-style, ideology), and such activities soon began to meet and dance with local cultures and practices of musical performances: Chinese operatic Shakespeare, Japanese Noh Shakespeare, Korean shamanistic Shakespeare, to name but a few. This paper focuses on one recent production of Twelfth Night in RSC's Shakespeare Folio Translation Project, in collaboration with Guangzhou Dramatic Arts Centre. Led by a Feste, who lugs a cassette player wherever he goes and whose unkempt look is reminiscent of a Bob Dylanesque Autolycus, this heavily musical comedy presents tunes from Chinese folk and pop repertoires. Feste and his song-buddies, as well as the resident male ensemble at Duke Orsino's, give this production a new soundscape that situates neo-liberal consumerism against a canonical classic and its corresponding cultural ideology.

165

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Space for Performing Dynamics of Power: Scenography for Verdi’s Macbeth in the Czech Republic after 2000

Šárka Havlíčková Kysová

Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; [email protected]

After the Velvet Revolution, Giuseppe Verdi’s Shakespearean opera Macbeth has been staged in the Czech Republic several times. In my paper I analyse the 21-century productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s Shakespearean opera Macbeth in the most prominent Czech theatres. Special attention is paid to scenography of the productions through the lens of audio-visual metaphors incorporated in the directors’ conceptions. I focus on particular metaphors rooted in Shakespeare’s play that enter the stage via Verdi’s opera and stage direction. As visual and audial means of expression, scenography has a potential to express key concepts of Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s work, such as emphasizing – via stage/audio-visual metaphors – dynamics of power, evil, forces of nature and some other.

166

Seminar - Shakespeare and Music

Such Sweet Thunder: Shakespeare’s Afterlives in Jazz

Stuart Hampton-Reeves

University of Central Lancashire; [email protected]

One of the more unexpected Shakespearean afterlives has been the complex interconnections between his work and Jazz. Shakespeare’s modern performance history developed in parallel to the emergence of Jazz. Both performance cultures drew on similar cultural energies, subjecting classical forms to the more freewheeling, improvisational immediacy of modernity. At the same time, both emerge from very different cultural milieus, with Shakespeare representing cultural orthodoxy and Jazz emerging from a culture of racial segregation. Shakespeare performance has often appropriated jazz, using it within performance to texture productions and using its concepts to license a free approach to working with the text. Jazz, by contrast, has on occasion drawn on Shakespeare as one strategy to assert the form’s cultural value. How has Jazz appropriated Shakespeare and how is our contemporary understanding of Shakespeare shaped by the improvisatory nature of jazz? This study will focus on several key moments when the history Jazz intersected with Shakespeare including:Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired suite Such Sweet Thunder, the musical Swingin’ the Dream, with Louis Armstrong as Bottom; Miles Davis’ recording of Darn that Dream; Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s Shakespeare and All That Jazz; and modern experiments in Shakespeare and Jazz including the Shakespearean Jazz Show in Boston, Christiana Drapkin’s If Music Be the Food of Love: Shakespeare in Jazz,and the Shakespeare-inspired compositions of Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet.

167

Seminar

Shakespeare and religious dislocations: texts, iconography, performance

Maria Luisa De Rinaldis1, Paul J.C.M. Franssen2

1University of Salento, Italy; 2Utrecht University; [email protected]

This seminar addresses Shakespearean passages that are charged with theological meaning(s) to provide insight into his dramatic practice in a period of religious change and theological anxieties. In line with a renewed interest in the relationship between literature and religion, but beyond divisive readings of Shakespeare as secular or religious, Catholic or Anglican, this seminar explores his supposed ideological ‘evasiveness’ or “confessional invisibility” (Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, 2010; Sean Benson, Heterodox Shakespeare, 2017), by tracing layers of religious allusion in otherwise secular plots - as when the conspirators wash their hands in Caesar’s blood after the assassination, described by Brutus as a religious sacrifice. Focusing on religious dislocations, including the survival of Roman Catholic feeling underneath Protestant repression, enhances our understanding of Shakespeare’s intersystemic imaginative response to contemporary ideological and religious changes. If the recognition scene in Twelfth Night seems to dramatize the notion of ‘presence’, related to the controversial real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, “Mercy”, in Portia’s speech, calls up Protestant conceptions of Grace, while Portia herself appeals to nostalgia for Marian intercession (R. Espinosa, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England, 2016). Iconography, too, can help analysing how ‘miracles,’ such as Hermione’s return to life, tie in with ancient, even pre-Christian ideas of resurrection. Extending the subject into Performance Studies, the seminar invites research into religious layers discovered in - or added to - Shakespeare’s texts by (film) directors, such as Julie Taymore’s self-conscious use of Roman-Catholic imagery of the Virgin and Saints in her 1999 Titus. Regarded in the context of a post-Reformation world torn between old and new religious experiences, presumed centres and margins, Shakespeare’s religious dislocations between (and within) “pasts and presents” (H. Cooper, R. Morse, P. Holland, Medieval Shakespeare Pasts and Presents, 2013) may appear less evasive.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Litwin, Elżbieta University of Wrocław, Poland Molina Blanco, Clara University of Exeter

169

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

“Performing Shakespeare at the Vatican: 1964 and 2016”

Marta Cerezo

UNED, Spain; [email protected]

On 13 April 2016 Hamlet was performed at the Vatican as part of the Globe to Globe tour to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. At a press conference about the performance, Bishop Paul Tighe stated: “We are celebrating the Year of Mercy and trying to understand the importance of mercy not just for the life of the Church but for all people. And I think that play brings us in somewhere into a type of mercy that re-dimensions justice.” Shakespearean religious evasiveness allows Tighe to consider the performance relevant both to “the life of the Church” and “for all people” as the dividing line between religiosity and spirituality blurs in the text.

The bull of indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, proclaimed a year earlier on 11 April 2015, declared the relevance of intense prayer and the Church’s need to keep the ecumenical nature of the Second Vatican Council alive. Hamlet 3.3.27-217 had already been performed at the Vatican on 12 November 1964 during the third phase of the Second Vatican Council, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Prayer was seen this time as the “fundamental religious theme of the whole tragedy.” The event was recorded, and a programme was designed for the audience to follow the selection of Shakespearean texts performed both in English and Italian. The Christian notion of mercy was central in the programme description of the religious significance of some scenes from The Merchant of Venice or Measure for Measure.

In this presentation I will centre on how the 1964 and 2016 performances at the Vatican rescue and appropriate religious resonances evoked by these Shakespearean texts whose religious evasiveness contributes to strengthening the Catholic Church’s ecumenical mission at two key moments of its religious history during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

170

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

“Shakespeare and the Catholic reader: Expurgating Shakespeare's religious imagery”

Line Cottegnies

Sorbonne Université; [email protected]

Irrespective of Shakespeare's own, elusive, religious affiliation, this paper draws its argument from two under-studied documents, one associated with the English Jesuits of St Omers and the other with the English College in Douai, which offer a fascinating insight into what seventeenth-century Catholic readers might have found offensive and problematic in Shakespeare's texts. The documents are the Shakespeare Folio recently rediscovered in the municipal Library of Saint-Omer, which includes two plays that have been marked up, presumably to be used in a school context, and the Douai MS, compiled around 1695, which contains an edition of six plays by Shakespeare. As is now well-known, English colleges abroad had a rich theatrical culture, and recent evidence has emerged that shows that Shakespeare was read, and sometimes used for school exercises, in this environment. In the two instances used here as a basis for discussion, the text was cut, expurgated and revised in many instances with a Catholic reader in mind. It is not just oaths which are left out, but many references to religion are expurgated, or carefully revised, to put the text in line with doctrinal and moral requirements. This paper will use some of the most revealing corrections made to the text to reflect, in return, on Shakespeare's specific use of religious imaginary. This, I claim, qualifies as profane because it transcends ecclesial and theological debates, as Shakespeare's works can be seen to displace topical religious questions onto the poetic and literary.

171

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

Exploring theatricality and shamanism in Yohangza’s Hamlet.

Clara Molina Blanco

University of Exeter; [email protected]

After a world-acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his company Yohangza Theatre Company, director Yang Jung-Un unfolded, again, ancient traditions to realize modernity and globalization in his 2009 Hamlet production. Heir to a tendency of “koreanizing” the play by coupling it with musoksinang, or Korean shamanism, through a gut ritual, Yang takes it a step further by staging the play as a gut, rather than as a play with different incarnations of the rite. However, we should notice musoksinang serves the production as more than a religious tool to resolve a crisis. Yohangza makes use of its theatrical offerings, and by acknowledging the traditional perception of shamanist ritual as an element of genuine Korean identity, ties it to Korea’s larger intangible cultural heritage and history.

172

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

Shakespeare’s wavering geography: religious topographia in Cymbeline

Davide Del Bello

Università di Bergamo, Italy; [email protected]

As forms of vivid description, or enargia, the figures of topographia, topothesia and chorographia figure prominently in the rhetorical manuals Elizabethans inherited from the classical tradition (for instance in Peacham 1577 and Puttenham 1589). This paper considers Cymbeline’s wavering geography as a confluence of these three tropes of location and dislocation, a feature that is arguably tied to the late Shakespearean predilection for the genre of Romance. More specifically, I would try to read the multiple rhetorical constructs of Shakespearean topographia in Cymbeline as instances of rhetorical and dramatic dislocation: a dislocation between the strictures imposed by a national project of identity (the paradoxical self-fashioning of Tudor England as altogether “other” with regard to the Catholic continent and yet at the same time “always the same”) and the ever-present longing for a traditional (yet now denied) religious and cultural past, whose clandestine strategies of survival are signified surreptitiously in the literary poetics of romantic utopia. In this respect, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a play whose Christian intimations are still the subject of critical contention, may also be said to dramatize and interrogate the precarious settlements (cultural, religious, and geographical) brought about by the Henrician reformation and manifested in the evanescent practices of Catholic recusancy.

173

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

The fifth act of Hamlet and divine violence: “Let be”

Petra Bjelica

University of Verona, Italy; [email protected]

This paper will address the interpretation of Hamlet’s textually problematic, ambiguous and theologically layered line “Let be” in the fifth act of Shakespeare’s play (Hamlet, V, 2, 220). The main focus of the paper is whether let be can be understood as Hamlet’s final answer and how it can be read in terms of theology. Treating it as an example of Shakespeare’s dislocation of religious orthodoxy, the aim is to offer a new understanding of religion and spirituality in the heterodox universe of this play (Sean Benson, Heterodox Shakespeare, 2017).

Following a premise that meaning is a matter of discourse and that it relies on both pretext and context, an analysis of differences in the Folio and both Quartos will be offered. According to the rules of Elizabethean dramaturgy let be can be read as a simple interruption of the dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio (Harold Jenkins, 1982). Even if we follow Jenkins’s argument describing the primary intention of the text, and thus agree that language or dialogue is no more required as a means of resolving Hamlet’s dilemma, the play implies retreating into silence and coming to a decision after experiencing a sign of providence. This interpretation will further be linked with the contemporary ideological and (post)religious context of Shakespeare studies, which will provide an outline for reading let be in terms of newly understood Shakespearean spirituality (ed. Ewan Fernie, Spiritual Shakespeares, 2007).

In conclusion, this paper will propose a new reading of the end of Hamlet in comparison with Walter Benjamin’s view of divine violence (Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, 1921). This concept may reach beyond religious and secular problems by dealing with a notion of radical action in the name of justice.

174

Seminar - Shakespeare and Religious Dislocations: Texts, Iconography, Performance

The Sacred Space of Subtext: Baz Luhrmann’s Pursuits of the Truth in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Elżbieta Litwin

University of Wrocław, Poland; [email protected]

Can a popculture film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet present marriage as a holy sacrament? What is the religious value of “Til death do us part” in a popcultural text? A case study of the wedding scene in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann (1996), this paper is a hermeneutic exploration of the truth pursuits within the subtext from the empirical perspective of a practicing director and a semiotician, in accordance with the principles of the Method acting technique. The author proposes a new, space- negotiated definition of subtext as a separate cognitive unit, based on the multilayered interdependences within the directorial semiotic triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène. In a minute shot-by-shot analysis, the author examines the hermeneutic collocations in-between the elements of the triad, and reveals the abundance of religious layers of Luhrmann's adaptation. The cognitive spaces become subtextual statements of the sanctity of marriage within each shot in order to arrive at the megasubtext of the scene – and subsequently the total subtext of the entire story. Aspects of the evolution of the subtext representations are analyzed within the triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène, against the backdrop of the epistemological pursuits of the truth.

175

Seminar

Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Monica Alcantar1, Mika Eglinton2

1University of Bergam; 2Kobe City University of Foreign Studies; [email protected] Different tensions related to a highly contested ‘global’ view associated with economical and cultural hegemonies in the world markets (Bharucha 2000) have allowed the intercultural practice to develop several strategies. Adaptation, translation, acculturation and hybridity appear not only as the foundation layers for a plural approach on Shakespeare productions but also as an open interface to its cross-cultural narratives. This seminar attempts to acknowledge the heterogeneous territories of mixed-heritage Shakespeare performance that explore and negotiate constantly between text and its context, while interacting with multiple loci of interpretation, performance dynamics and audiences.

This seminar invites prospective contributors to consider the expansive possibilities of intercultural approach while tracing the conceptual framework underlying adaptation within its sphere of practice in contemporary performance engaging or/and exploring the interweaving of conceptual threads and its critical reception. Beyond an already exhausted opposition between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ the Shakespeare we confront today has grown beyond the confines of any single language and territory.

Recognizing that ‘every engagement with a Shakespearian text’ as Antony Tatlow (2001: 5) writes, ‘is necessarily intercultural. The past really is another culture, its remoteness disguised by language that can occasionally appear as familiar as we seem to ourselves, whom we understand so imperfectly’ different perspectives are set on motion such as geographical location, social environment and identity in response to the sheer diversity of approaches, characterized by intercultural performance. Invoking Mieke Bal’s notion of ‘travelling concepts’ (2009), Kamilla Elliott invites the scrutiny of ‘conceptual threads across disciplines’ (2013: 36) in practices of adaptation. This Seminar rather seeks to render specific cases of study and their respective trends of interpretation, as statements of creative renewal and rediscovery of Shakespearian text attempting to answer how intercultural readings and settings of Shakespeare which feature deal or negotiate cultural specific contexts, theatrical traditions, geographies and translations.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Brokaw, Katherine Steele University of California, Merced Calvi, Lisanna University of Verona Chiba, Jessica Royal Holloway, University of London Conejero-Magro, Luis Javier University of Extremadura Consiglio, Cristina University of Bari, Italy Doğan Adanur, Evrim Beykent University 177

Drábek, Pavel University of Hull, UK Guerrero, Isabel National University of Distance Education, Spain Krajník, Filip Masaryk University, Czech Republic Mikyšková, Anna Masaryk University, Check Republic Milică, Iulia Andreea University of Iași Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Romania Modenessi, Alfredo Michel National University of Mexico O’Brien, Shauna Trinity College Dublin Paoli, Sandra Liceo Canova, Treviso Pulice, Antonella University of Rome Tor Vergata Bai, Shenhao University College London, UK Miksza, Agnieszka University of Lodz

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Keywords: Macbeth, Richard III, House of Cards, adaptation, acculturation, transtextuality, popular culture.

´False face must hide what the false heart doth know’ (Macbeth, 1.7.95-6): House of Cards as a Remapping of Shakespeare’s Texts

Luis Javier Conejero-Magro

University of Extremadura; [email protected]

This paper presents a literary analysis of the TV series House of Cards(2013-2018), for which the hypotext is Shakespeare’s plays Macbethand Richard III. Taking a television-specific approach and incorporating contemporary cultural theory, this analysis highlights the importance of the rediscovery of Shakespearean texts and their migrationacross media. The paper first traces the literary sources used in the series, particularly stylistic parallelsand disruptiveevents in theplays in question, which informthe overall diagetic universe of the series as an architext. Secondly, it comments on the reflexive elements in theseries, through ‘conceptual threads of disciplines’ (Kamilla Elliot, 2013) such as adaptation and acculturation. In fact, House of Cardsappropriates a number of Shakespearean elements, from subtle suggestions to direct quotations from his plays. Thepreference for the tragedy of Macbeth, “one of the best examples of a play with topical references and political implications” (Ana Stegh Camati, 2008: 341), has thus made it a useful tool in illustrating how specific motifs and themes can be re-employed more thanfour hundred years later using a different media. The main contention put forward in this paper isthat the success of the serieslies in combining the Shakespearean dimension with the metafictional and cross-medial, since both help to highlight the importance of Shakespeare in adaptation, beyond a single ‘language’ or nation.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

“Better Than Shakespear?”: Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra for the Edwardian Stage

Shenhao Bai

University College London, UK; [email protected]

As one of Bernard Shaw’s earliest works in his playwriting career, Caesar and Cleopatra reflects the modern playwright’s enduring interest in his predecessor, William Shakespeare. The play could be read as Shaw’s expression of his own interpretations of the historical figures as he composed it in 1898 after his watching and reviewing two productions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Shaw published the play in 1901 as the second of his Three Plays for Puritans. In the wake of its publication, Shaw wrote a preface entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in which he criticized the Elizabethan-Jacobean playwright for subliming the romantic passion between the political rulers and for its deficiency of philosophical depth. Shaw’s critique could find its resonance in many Edwardian theatre practitioners’ devotion to improving the literary quality of the English modern theatre against the popularity of melodramatic productions. Under such a cultural-historical context, the paper aims to examine specifically how Shaw differs from Shakespeare in his distinctive characterization of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and the Roman rulers Caesar and Antony, and to analyze its significance in the shift of aesthetic taste on the theatre stage of the Edwardian era.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

“I was not born to fight”: A Shakespearean Reading of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola (1816-1820)

Lisanna Calvi

University of Verona; [email protected]

My paper aims at exploring the Italian early nineteenth-century cultural and political context as well as theatrical tradition in terms of Shakespearean ‘(re)discoveries’ by looking at Alessandro Manzoni’s tragedy Il conte di Carmagnola [The Count of Carmagnola]. In particular, the play’s 1816 draft appears to pivot on an hybrid strategy of appropriation of Shakespeare’s artistry in that it presents a problematic complexity, together with a dramatic density, and performative potential which follow along with Manzoni’s and his contemporaries’ appreciation of the Bard’s work. This leaning, however, was remarkably discolored in the play’s 1820 published version. In those same years, a dual stance of political and literary struggle for independence and renovation entered the critical and literary output of Alessandro Manzoni and his contemporaries and, interestingly enough, Shakespeare’s is the name that universally emerged in their writings. Manzoni, especially, did not simply suggest to imitate or copy the Bard but wished to look at the generic variety of his dramas, at their multifariousness, even at their ‘irregularities’ as models to be internalized in order to break away from the literary and political constraints of the past. Accordingly, Shakespeare’s works played a significant part in Manzoni’s theoretical writings on drama, but the poet also took them as a source of inspiration for his own playwriting with special regard to his The Count of Carmagnola. Yet, the Shakespearean muse was hushed in the drama’s final form, an event that raises a few interesting questions. In what terms can Manzoni’s creative attitude be considered a renewal of Shakespeare’s artistry and why were its echoes later silenced, but also how can its reception help discuss the cultural context in which the play was written, and how did it affect subsequent Italian theatrical approaches to and appropriations of Shakespeare?

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Keywords: Cleopatra, adaptation, translation, classicism, transnationality, foreign, early modern theatre, diva, gender, France, Spain, England, Shakespeare, Bensérade, Mairet, Dryden

“Preparez mes habits, mon sceptre, & ma couronne”: Cleopatra on the Early Modern Transnational Stage

Pavel Drábek

University of Hull, UK; [email protected]

Cleopatra was a notorious figure in early modern English drama – both on stage and in the closet – as Yasmin Arshad has recently explored in her PhD thesis (forthcoming as Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England in July 2019). There are also other cultural geographies that we can call upon to attempt a more rounded picture of the fame of Cleopatra on the early modern stage. John Dryden’s All for Love or, the World Well Lost (1677) has been discussed as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c1607) – in a loose grouping with his and Davenant’s The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667), and Dryden’s own version of Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late (1679). My paper proposes, alternatively, to extend the geographies of Cleopatra’s dramaturgical empire to a European level, considering the transnational context in which numerous stage versions appeared on the seventeenth-century stage: extending between Shakespeare and Dryden, my paper considers not only John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The False One (c1620), but also a Spanish version, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla’s Los áspides de Cleopatra (<1645), the prominent and little-studied French versions: Isaac de Benserade’s La Cléopatre (1636) and Jean Mairet’s Le Marc-Antoine ou La Cléopatre (1637), and their possible influence on Dryden. The relation of Dryden’s to Mairet’s play has been studied by Philip Tomlinson (1998) but not the other two plays. This paper is an attempt at opening the historiographical perspectives of Shakespearean drama and its English reception to the lively theatre cultures in other countries of early modern Europe.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

“So is it not with me as with that Muse...” Translating The Sonnets with a different Spanish accent

Alfredo Michel Modenessi

National University of Mexico; [email protected]

As I’ve often noted,1 translating Shakespeare in/to the common language of Spain and its former colonies has historically suffered from imbalance, as the general practice in Latin America has been to “render the voices in Shakespeare as if they came from the European shore of the Atlantic, upon ingrained preconceptions about the authority of Iberian norms, and mechanical concepts of what translating a ‘classic’ entails by way of diction”.2 To wit, suffice it to browse the variegated “Complete Works” issued in Argentina by Losada (2010).

But the overt and covert disparities between the praxis of Spanish in its native geography and in the “New World” betoken the creativity of 500 million users in manifold literary works: they should also be celebrated and employed to advantage in translation. The point isn’t to conflict with the users of the European variety but to rejoice in the diversity that keeps Spanish thriving. In fact, some translations of Shakespeare’s drama that diverge from the usual path are already acknowledged to have made a difference.3 Mexican audiences, for instance, now perceive how our own rhythms of speech and diction bring us much closer to the experiences afforded by Shakespeare’s plays than the old, worn-out ways.

But what happens when the texts are lyrical, not dramatic? Does my variety of Spanish impinge upon “engrafting” Shakespeare’s Sonnets “anew”, regarding both aesthetic and technical matters? What are the challenges of listening with ears capable of enjoying multiple acoustic options but committed to bringing a different Spanish accent to the page, and thence to dissimilar perceptions of similar lingusitic-poetic vehicles? My paper aims to explore and elaborate upon these issues, using examples from selected cases from diverse regions and eras.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

“Wandering Shakespeares”: The performance of Shakespeare’s plays among the Iranian diaspora

Shauna O’Brien

Trinity College Dublin; [email protected]

After the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, many writers and intellectuals fled the country and settled in Europe and the United States, a post- revolutionary diaspora that gave rise to a parallel Iranian literary and theatrical tradition. Shakespeare adaptations among this diaspora, such as Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi’s Farsi- language Othello in Wonderland (staged in Paris and London, 1985), Reza Abdoh’s King Lear (Los Angeles, 1985), Mahmood Karimi-Hakak’s HamletIRAN (New York, 2011), and Krzysztof Pastor’s ballet of The Tempest produced in collaboration with Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (Amsterdam, 2014 and Warsaw, 2016) testify to the importance of these diasporic Iranian Shakespeares as a subject of study in and of itself. As many of these works demonstrate, however, Shakespeare production among diasporas often occupy liminal positions, “distinctive from national, international, and touring Shakespeares” (Alexa Alice Joubin 2018).

In this paper I examine one of these diasporic productions, Waterwell’s 2017 production of Hamlet directed by Tom Ridgely and performed in Persian and English by Iranian, Iranian- American, and non-Iranian actors to audiences in New York. While the action of the play is re-located to early 20th century Iran, Ridgley’s adaptation works in dialogue not only with the social, cultural, and political issues of this Iranian context but also with those of the contemporary American context of its performance. Adapting Firuza Abdullaeva’s notion of “wandering stories” to examine this production, this paper explores the negotiation of the multiple loci of interpretation with which these diasporic Iranian Shakespeare productions interact.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

From National to Transnational Performance: Shakespeare in 20th-century European Festivals

Isabel Guerrero

National University of Distance Education, Spain; [email protected]

The 20th century has been key for the development and circulation of intercultural Shakespeare productions, and international theatre festivals such as the Edinburgh International Festival (Scotland), the Avignon Festival (France) and the Almagro Festival (Spain) have played an essential role in this development. At the Edinburgh International Festival, the Shakespearean productions in the first decades of the festival were staged by British companies, and it was not until the 1980s when the first intercultural productions were performed. At the Avignon Festival, the plays also remained in the hands of national French companies until the 1980s, when the festival organization started a conscious effort to turn the festival into a truly international event.

At the Almagro Festival, Shakespearean productions have been always a synonym with international theatre, as the festival is mainly concerned with Spanish Golden Age Theatre. Shakespearean productions in the 1980s and 1990s brought with them a mixture of both national and international companies working on Shakespeare’s plays. The intercultural productions in these festivals adopted a variety of strategies to adapt to the festival stage (from the use of surtitles to the emphasis on the visual dimension of the productions). This paper has a double aim. First, it will examine the evolution of Shakespearean productions at the Edinburgh, Avignon and Almagro Festivals in order to analyse the turn of these festivals from international meetings – in which artists represent their countries of origin – to transnational spaces, in which national differences are dissolved in favour of an interconnectedness of theatre cultures. Second, the paper also intends to focus on the influence of the festival context on the production and reception of intercultural Shakespeare, addressing specific strategies to adapt to the festival context.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Hamlet overseas. The acting technique of Edwin Booth.

Cristina Consiglio

University of Bari, Italy; [email protected]

Often regarded as the premiere American Shakespearean actor of the late 19th century, Edwin Booth (1833-1893) distinguished himself as an interpreter of Hamlet by his exceptional quality in transferring his experience from life to art. By reading the most relevant passages of his biography, it is apparent how he could transform every setback in a challenge and in an opportunity. Since the beginning of his career, in the 1850s, he brought Shakespeare to the American scene crossing the boundaries of the English tradition; he performed the character of the Prince of Denmark going ahead the acting style of his predecessors and the words of the critics (as when he toured Europe); he reappeared to the scene in the late 1860s – after the death of his wife in 1863, the assassination of President Lincoln by his brother in 1865 and after his theatrical property was destroyed by a fire in 1867 – to witness how he came through these ‘extreme situations’ with a deepened awareness, how he struggled to find his acting style and became a star, from the moment he first played Hamlet in New York in 1857 to his farewell performance at the Brooklyn Academy of music in 1891, going through his legendary ‘hundred nights Hamlet’ in 1864-1865.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Hamlet, Translation, and the Cultural Conditions of ‘Being’

Jessica Chiba

Royal Holloway, University of London; [email protected]

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the centre from the periphery by looking at early modern English from modern-day Japan, using translation as a means of thinking about the way that Shakespeare raises issues about human existence in Hamlet's soliloquy beginning 'to be or not to be'.

In Japanese Shakespeare translation and criticism, it is an acknowledged fact that 'to be or not to be' cannot be adequately translated into Japanese, because the language does not have the equivalent verb 'to be'. To date, there are over forty different ways the phrase has been rendered by Japanese translators of different generations, each emphasising a different aspect of the phrase: the multiplicity of meaning, poetic simplicity, philosophical cogitation, despondency and more. Critics of Japanese Shakespeare studies who deal with this subject take a largely pragmatic approach, comparing the benefits of each translation and suggesting alternatives for translation by pointing out yet more interpretations that a translator should consider.

In an English paper, it is not possible or desirable to go into the peculiar grammatical challenges that Japanese translators face, since the dilemma is as untranslatable as the phrase that causes it. However, the untranslatability of 'to be or not to be' provides a perfect starting point for a philosophical meditation on the cultural concepts required for the exploration of human existence. Thus, through a cross-cultural mediation, this paper will consider the conditions of possibility that allowed Shakespeare to write in such a way, focusing on the way that English structurally allows such formulations, Shakespeare's manipulations of English grammar, and the fact that his age allowed for such manipulations.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Keywords: Shakespeare, adaptation, reception, text, social media, book studies

OMG Shakespeare: From Print to Social Media

Iulia Andreea Milică

University of Iași Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Romania; [email protected]

One of the most recent adaptations of Shakespeare’s most famous plays has been published by Penguin, in a collection entitled OMG Shakespeare and including: A Midsummer Night # nofilter (2015) and YOLO Juliet (2016) by W. Shakespeare and Brett Wright, and Macbeth # killingit (2016) and srsly Hamlet (2015) by W. Shakespeare and Courtney Carbone. The plays are rewritten as text messages with the inherent abbreviations, emoticons, signs, etc. the plot is also changed to fit this contemporary medium of transmission. According to the description, the OMG Penguin series (OMG Shakespeare and OMG Classics), are to be found in “teen and young adult fiction” and indeed, though they appear readable to such audiences, these books are often rather difficult for more traditional readers, less knowledgeable in using the new technology.

In approaching these books, we intend to appeal to two theoretical aids: adaptation studies and books studies. By focusing mainly (but not exclusively) on L. Hutcheon’s definitions (A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006), we will try to see how Shakespeare’s plays were adapted by referring to various aspects: a comparative study of the two products, the type of text used by these new books, changes in plot and characters, reader reception, the dialogue it engenders with the original, etc.

Such adaptations may appear unsatisfactory for an avid reader of Shakespeare, but they tell a lot about the modern world and mostly about the tremendous shifts in reading, literature consumption, entertainment. Moreover, according to the research in book studies, the passage from the traditional print/ book to the computer or phone will eventually change our mind and the way we think. From this perspective, the OMG Shakespeare series becomes a hybrid product: a printed book using the format and the language of digital media, but without the interactive possibilities that the latter entails. It thus combines two media of transmission: the book (printed medium) and the digital, marking the passage towards a (brave?) new world. The final question is: how will this new world look like? Is there still a place for Shakespeare in the preferences of young audiences for whom speed, instant gratification and a digital world are most important?

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Overcoming Boundaries by Translating Mirth: Harlequin, Pickelhering, Hanswurst

Anna Mikyšková

Masaryk University, Check Republic; [email protected]

One of the typical features of European Renaissance theatre is the figure of the clown. Its prototype Harlequin (Arlecchino) from the Italian tradition of the commedia dell’arte spread to theatrical practices of several other countries with the help of travelling players (clown Jean Pottage in France; Jack Pudding in England; Shakespeare’s typology of clowns and fools also draws on this histrionic custom). The Italians were, however, not the only disseminators of this tradition. The character of Pickelhering, extremely popular on the 17th century German stages, was an import from England by English itinerant actors. Pickelhering was initially incorporated in Englishmen’s plays (the character appears in the dramatis personae of Romio und Julietta) and then emancipated in his own Pickelhering-sketches (the interlude Pickelhering in the Box/Pickelhering in der Kiste), printed in 1620, is a variant of the English jig Singing Simpkin. The character was later utilized by German dramatists (notably Andreas Gryphius, whose 1648? play Absurda Comica, an adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream, features Pickelhering as one of the mechanicals) and thus joined, and for a while replaced, his German cousin Hanswurst. Although the beginning of the 18th century brought severe critique against Pickelhering from German theoretician Johann Christoph Gottsched, who was assisted by the famous German female principal Neuberin, the spirit of this unruly figure survived on popular stages, and even Johann Wolfgang Goethe could not resist playing with the same social type in his unfinished drama Hanswurst’s Wedding or the Course of the World (Hanswursts Hochzeit oder die Lauf der Welt, 1775), where he explored the non-existent limitations of this prank character. This paper intends to focus on the transitory phase of this Anglo-German exchange and explore the English clown as a phenomenon crossing borders of both geographical and cultural domains.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Restoring Shakespeare, Adapting Tate, Killing Off Garrick: Staging King Lear on the Post- Restoration London Stages

Filip Krajník

Masaryk University, Czech Republic; [email protected]

Before William Macready’s 1838 production of King Lear at Covent Garden, the one usually credited for being the true revival of Shakespeare’s text after the more than 150-year hegemony of Nahum Tate’s Restoration version of the play, there had been at least three major attempts to restore Shakespeare’s original text for London audiences, namely David Garrick’s (1756), George Colman’s (1768), and John Philip Kemble’s (1792), none of which, however, survived its producer. In their adaptive efforts, these three great theatre practitioners of their time strove to find the right balance between Renaissance and Restoration aesthetics in order to bring the play into the post-Restoration epoch. Analysing these hybrid versions (that is, adaptations of adaptations) of Shakespeare’s play, it could be easily argued that, despite remaining within the same country and the same city, by the late 18th century, Shakespeare’s text had seen three distinct cultural epochs that influenced the play’s shape and reception. Another major factor, however, that played an important role in shaping King Lear for 18th-century audiences were the personal relationships, animosities and ambitions of the adapters. While the relationship between Colman and Garrick has been thoroughly described (see, for instance, Cunningham’s Shakespeare and Garrick), it has never been satisfactorily explained why Kemble decided to commit, in George C. D. Odell’s words, an “act of vandalism” and reject Garrick’s successful version, replacing it with his own, based largely on the (by then) old- fashioned Tate. The proposal of my paper is that young Kemble first needed to kill off the legacy of his more famous (and arguably more competent) predecessor in order to take over the position of the iconic Shakespearean actor of his generation. Besides the changing aesthetics of the London audiences and the rising cult of Shakespeare in the period, it was, thus, also the cult of actors and directors of the 18th century that, in at least equal measure, contributed to King Lear’s textual and staging traditions, some of whose elements survive even nowadays.

Seminar - Shakespeare on the Intercultural Edge: Adaptation, Translation, Acculturation and Hybrid Strategies

Shakespeare in Istanbul

Sandra Paoli

Liceo Canova, Treviso; [email protected]

Emine Sevgi Özdamar is amongst the most representative authors of contemporary German-language literature, a writer who defies the catalogues and categories in which an artist like her - who observes, interprets and represents our multifaceted and multicultural society - tends to be placed.

A number of her works, in which there are many autobiographical elements, feature Turkish actresses who spend part of their lives in their country of origin and part in Germany. They are driven to leave their homeland by their passion for theatre. Like the main characters of the novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn), or the play Perikızı, Ein Traumspiel (Perikızı, a dream play), they decide to drop out of education to move to Europe, and Germany in particular.

This work will focus on the numerous dialogues in the play in which the "fairy girl" (this is the meaning of the Turkish name Perikızı) embodies the words of Shakespearean characters such as Titania, Bottom, Helena and the Fool in King Lear.

The result is a fruitful interweaving of the story created by Özdamar herself, initially set in Turkey, and the elements taken from the work of the English poet. The aspiring actress takes on the role of the characters, playing them in front of her loved ones, who do not want to let her leave. She uses their statements to justify her ideas, to explain why she is making the right choice for her. The story is thus enriched by unexpected new perspectives.

Thanks to the author's creativity, Özdamar's writings and stories will reveal themselves as particularly original. The reworking of the quotations results in an intertextual irony that goes beyond that theorised by Umberto Eco - complex and at the same time unique.

Seminar

Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

Natalia Brzozowska1, Jacek Fabiszak2

1IRCL, University of Montpellier 3, France; 2Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland; [email protected]

The motivation behind this seminar is the exoticizing potential of Shakespeare’s romances, in which the settings are, from the point of view of the Early Modern English spectator, alien and mysterious. The seminar proposes that such an approach be embraced in the case of localities associated with not the cultural core of Western Europe, but Europe’s semi-peripheries in the sense these politicized geographies are understood today. Extending the sociological term, cultural peripheries could be found on the same continent, or even within the borders of the same country that housed the core culture - an example being Wales in Cymbeline. These frontiers constitute Shakespeare’s ‘elsewheres’, which, through generic and thematic negotiations, are made central to the action of the play. The process of romanticization they undergo consists in presenting the elsewheres as idyllic, strange and magical; at the same time, their quasi- idyllic character is challenged by the invasion of realism: the flawed, familiar and painfully mundane. The plays to be considered do not necessarily include romances, but for example, Measure for Measure (Vienna? or perhaps Verona?), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Athens), Twelfth Night (Illyria), The Winter’s Tale (Bohemia), Othello (Cyprus), Hamlet (echoes of Poland). The seminar invites considerations of why and how these contrasts are shown, as well as: - Romantic exoticizing of European semi-peripheries and peripheries in Shakespeare and his contemporaries - Images of non-core European cultures in Early Modern England - Concepts of the ‘European other’ in Early Modern England - Romanticizing non-dominant Europe in stage/film versions of Shakespeare’s plays - Ways of romanticizing ‘exotic’ localities in Shakespeare - Understanding of ‘exotic’ setting in Shakespeare’s plays - Eastern or Southern European and Western (English) cultural exchange - Non-mainstream scholarly perspectives towards the dichotomies mentioned - Literary explorations of exotic localities within a ‘core’ country

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Brzozowska, Natalia IRCL, University of Montpellier 3, France Burzyńska, Katarzyna Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Bzohova-Wild, Jana Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava, Slovakia Kizelbach, Urszula Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Kosim, Alicja University of Warsaw, Poland LaRubio, Mark Arizona State University, USA Pilla, Eleni Independent Researcher Wołosz-Sosnowska, Anna Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

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Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

‘When we consider/ th’ importancy of Cyprus!’: The Schematics of the Space of Cyprus in Othello

Eleni Pilla

Independent Researcher; [email protected]

Situated at the southernmost extremity of Europe, Cyprus lies at the heart of the crossroads of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The space of Cyprus is of extreme significance in Shakespeare’s early modern text of Othello since the four acts of the play and the tragedy unfolds in Cyprus. Cyprus constitutes not a mere backdrop for Shakespeare’s Othello, but reinforces the complex interaction of race, gender, jealousy and revenge, when far from the civilizing forces of Venice, the ‘honest’ Iago can overrule the noble Othello with the “green-eyed monster” (3.3.169) of jealousy. Othello strangles his innocent wife and commits suicide when Iago’s deception is exposed. This paper gives Cyprus the academic scrutiny it deserves by offering a reading of the space of Cyprus in Othello and beyond the text. The discussion begins with an exploration of the meaning and function of Cyprus in Shakespeare’s play. Having analyzed the complex relationship between Venice (centre) and Cyprus (periphery), and how the characters relate to the two contrasting spaces, the paper will proceed to an examination of how historical reality and fiction interweave in relation to Cyprus. The discussion engages with a wealth of documents in archives in Cyprus in order to establish a dialogue between Shakespeare’s early modern text and the socio-historical reality of Cyprus at the time of the Venetian occupation of the island. Throughout the analysis, references will be made to directorial approaches to Venice and Cyprus by Cypriot directors.

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Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

“No barricado for a belly”: the threat of the pregnant body in The Winter’s Tale (1.2.253).

Katarzyna Burzyńska

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland; [email protected]

The condition of pregnancy seems to invite reflection on peripheries and centralities. As Iris Marion Young writes: “The integrity of my body is undermined in pregnancy not only by this externality of the inside, but also by the fact that the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. In pregnancy I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins” (Young 1990: 150). Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale is one of few early modern plays that feature a pregnant woman. The play investigates pregnancy and its subversive potential within such a fluidity of boundaries as Young mentions. On the one hand, Hermione’s pregnancy constitutes a structural core of the romance. On the other, it perversely becomes a driving force of conflict and eventually drives Perdita, Hermione’s baby to the peripheries of the play’s world. Like so many other plays by Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale takes up the topic of destabilizing maternal forces; a theme explored in mature tragedies like Macbeth and King Lear. In the romance, Shakespeare offers his audience a supposedly happy ending, where “The Winter’s Tale ends with the return of a masculine authority grounded in a benignly generative maternal presence” as Adelman writes (1992: 194). However, the ending brings a shaky and uncomfortable resolution. What seems more poignant is that the play investigates the topic of female insatiability, capitalizing on Renaissance obsessive fear of female corporeality and male dependence on female generative powers for the continuance of the patriarchal order. Following in the footsteps of feminist researchers preoccupied with Shakespeare’s vision of maternity (Adelman, Callaghan) and utilising ideas proposed by philosophers of pregnancy (LaChance, Kristeva, Irigaray and Beauvoir), I wish to focus on Hermione and her exclusively female community in order to investigate early modern visions of pregnancy and male attempts at seizing and usurping female generative forces.

195

Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

African spaces and boundaries in Shakespeare’s Europe: The exotic and the (un)romantic.

Natalia Brzozowska

IRCL, University of Montpellier 3, France; [email protected]

The paper will show how the spaces occupied by sub-Saharan Africans in England were delineated and understood during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The ‘boundaries’ within which black-skinned Africans existed in the 16th/17th century - court performers, household servants, sex workers - were culturally linked to a variety of factors. As Peter Mark (1974) noted, a black servant or maid in the Renaissance could be chosen due to their 'exotic aesthetic', however, “one need not deny that the decorative element is present in order to insist that something more complicated is going on” (Erickson 1993: 503). I will analyze the difference between the modern and the sixteenth-century approach towards ‘race’ (as underlined by recent sociological works), as well as the complex notion of romantic exoticism and its relationship with status. Consideration will be paid to travel literature, source material and the Early Modern plays themselves, and how the various experiences translated to ideas regarding ‘blackness’ in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

196

Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

Exoticising (stylistic) strategies in Measure for Measure

Urszula Kizelbach

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland; [email protected]

Vienna as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire was not unknown to Shakespeare, but, surely, it was culturally and geographically distant from England. Vienna in the play is depicted as a place of moral corruption, licentiousness, and abuse of authority, which is manifested in the figure of the corrupt magistrate Angelo. Much as the play can be seen against the background of Shakespearean comedy, its inner tensions and discords between the characters are raised to extreme levels, auguring the dissolution of all human values, which makes us perceive the play and its characters in a more dramatic light. In my stylistic analysis I want to demonstrate how Shakespeare presents moral decay on the linguistic plane, which is for example visible in male-female communication, in Angelo’s “wooing” of Isabella. The pragma-stylistic strategies of the language of courtship in Measure for Measure are different from the romantic courting of Katherine of France by King Henry V in Shakespeare’s history play. It is interesting to compare the male-female communication on the level of authority and investigate how more powerful individuals exercise their power in dialogue, and which stylistic devices are used to take over the conversation.

197

Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

On a romantic island: Shakespeare & 1970s and after

Jana Bzohova-Wild

Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava, Slovakia; [email protected]

My paper will concern the blockbuster musical film Mamma mia, loosely using some of Shakespearean patterns, topoi and plots. Set on a small Greek island, idyllic and exotic, the film offers a contemporary romantic story with new/reversed roles in terms of gender, parenthood, sexuality, marriage and age, pointing to a different cultural paradigm. While the Shakespearean level is recast, remixed and probably less visible, the priority is given to the utopia of the 1970s and to the question of its outcome and transformation.

198

Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

Stars, crosses, and books. Migrations, translations, and circulations of the Jewish people in the Renaissance

Mark LaRubio

Arizona State University, USA; [email protected]

This paper will take an in-depth look at the contributions made by the Jewish people in

their migrations across European borders in the Renaissance. Doing so will demonstrate how there was a web of intellectual endeavors and conversation concerning forbidden knowledge which extended from the hills of Safed in the Holy Land to the banks of the Thames in England. This paper will look at the cultural and academic exchange occurring in the Florentine court of Count Urbino, the University of Louvain, and the University of Cambridge. In particular, it will look at the transmission of kabbalistic and theurgic texts which influenced Shakespeare’s TheTempest with a special attention paid to the magical aspects which arise on Caliban’s island. From this, I will assert that the placement of the dramatic action on a peripheral and exotic island holds great meaning considering Ariel, Caliban, and Sycorax represent the “other” and thus will focus on how they represent the very discourses emerging between the Islamic world and Christian Europe and with the Jewish communities that were scattered and were interacting between the two worlds. Thus, this paper will engage with the texts and contexts of how place and knowledge interact in exotic, liminal spaces and how the Jewish people in their migrations across borders and cultures. It will then show how through their writings the foundations of the encounter with this culture gave to the eventual rise of science by way of the magical nature of the text brought within the walls of the cities of Europe.

199

Seminar - Shakespeare’s Romantic European Outskirts

The issues of (non)space in Enki Bilal’s Julie and Roem

Anna Wołosz-Sosnowska

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland; [email protected]

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with its universal depiction of love, has a strong connection with location in which the plot takes place i.e. Italy and Verona. The dynamics of the play not only focuses on the romantic relationship between the young lovers but also on the conflict(s) with and within the social space of the city and its inhabitants, and indirectly with the city itself. As a result, adaptations of Romeo and Juliet rarely tamper with the space and location to emphasise the significance of the frictions within the community as an inalienable element of the play.

Enki Bilal’s comic book Julie and Roem proposes an interesting approach towards the treatment of both the plot and the location. The introduced alternations to the original plot spark discussion concerning the role of community in the play. The events take place in the not-too-distant future after a mysterious ecological disaster which changed the laws of nature governing the planet. Instead of life-bustling Verona, Bilal places his characters in the dessert which used to be the Baltic Sea, but even this piece of information is simply a speculation and leaves the reader with a certain degree of uncertainty about the location. The aim of the paper is to analyse the space, location and the social relationships and trace the manner these elements influence the understanding of the play created by Bilal in the comic book.

200

Seminars

Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Victoria Bladen1, Melissa Croteau2, Márta Minier3

1University of Queensland, Australia; 2California Baptist University; 3University of South Wales; [email protected]

Shakespearean audio-visual texts have proliferated across manifold media formats and are used in the service of myriad political, educational, and entertainment agendas. Simply put, Shakespeare migrates through multitudinous geographies, and remediated Shakespeare texts in audio-visual form are more profuse today than ever before, incessantly and rapidly traversing multifarious types of boundaries, from technological to philosophical to physical. This seminar explores ideological and terrestrial geographies of Shakespearean adaptations and intertexts on screen, defined broadly as audio-visual texts (e.g. film, television, YouTube and other social media, ‘live’ theatre broadcasts, etc.). We invite papers that explore the porous boundaries present in ideas of centralities and elsewheres and how these are negotiated in various screen interpretations either in European texts or those that position Europe in relation to spaces of otherness. Geographies and topographies are construed widely here in terms of physical, generic, affective, identificatory, textual, or linguistic transpositions and transformations. For instance, Shakespearean appropriations dealing with borders, liminalities/hybrid spaces, and national identities may be examined. Also welcome are interrogations of Shakespearean texts as they migrate from/through media platforms and as they are used to negotiate relationships of inclusion and exclusion in diverse contexts. Issues surrounding the concepts of the national and the global in Shakespeare audio-visual media are pertinent as well.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Bladen, Victoria University of Queensland, Australia Carson, Christie Royal Holloway University of London, UK Croteau, Melissa California Baptist University, USA Földváry, Kinga Institute of English and American Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary Galery, Maria-Clara Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil Lanier, Douglas M. University of New Hampshire, USA Minier, Márta University of South Wales, UK Moroney, Elizabeth Shakespeare Institute, UK Parisi, Serena University of Salerno, Italy Sánchez-García, Inmaculada N. Northumbria University, UK

202

Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight?”: The Crossing of Emotional and Generic Boundaries in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood Shakespeare Adaptations

Melissa Croteau

California Baptist University, USA; [email protected]

Both film studies and Shakespeare studies have embraced the concerted turn toward affect in the humanities and behavioral sciences in the past decade. In film studies, this move has often been asserted as a response to and turning away from semiotics and formalism; whereas in Shakespeare studies, the appeal to affect has inspired new foci for close readings, performance studies, and audience reception. This paper takes cues from the Shakespeare studies’ approach to affect and applies them to a historically- informed close reading of three Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare. All three films have the Bollywood masala mix of genres—melodrama, romance, comedy, tragedy—breaking down the boundaries of genre which were erected in Western narrative tradition by Aristotle and carried by writers and critics all the way into the twentieth century. These rules were not propounded by aesthetic theories of the East, particularly not in India, where ancient rasa theory has dominated aesthetic approaches to arts from theatre to poetry for some three thousand years. Emotions, or bhavas, are the most important element in India’s ancient rasa theory, which arose in response to ancient Sanskrit theatrical performance, an art that involved music and dance to convey narrative. In Sanskrit theatre, there were no prohibitions against genre mixing or stark transitions within a singular piece, and rasa theory states that the highest priority of all actors is to communicate one powerful emotion at every moment of a performance, such that the audience can share that emotion. Shakespeare’s injunction, through Hamlet, that actors should avoid bombastic performing is certainly not embraced by the rasa theory-influenced Bollywood. Indian filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj made three Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare tragedies between 2003 and 2014—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014), adaptations of Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet, respectively—and these films traverse quickly between genres and tones, in keeping with masala style, pulling the audience through intense emotional terrain constructed and evoked more by vivid audio-visual stimuli than language.

203

Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

“This is my road”: Appropriating and Displacing Boundaries in My Own Private Idaho

Serena Parisi

University of Salerno, Italy; [email protected]

The focus of my paper is Gus Van Sant’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s Henriad in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Drawing inspiration from Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), as well as from actual stories of street hustlers, the film partially relocates the Henry plays to the early-1990s American suburban scenarios. By displacing the Shakespearean source within contemporary “elsewheres” or “nowheres”, apparently opposed to the centrality of Early-Modern European landscapes, the film deals with issues of marginality and otherness. Falstaff’s “band of outsiders” is repositioned into a new, even more profoundly marginal environment: Prince Hal and Poins are reinvented as two gay hustlers, Scott and Mike, while Falstaff is turned into an old fat drug-addict named Bob Pigeon. Not only are Shakespeare’s texts both spatially and temporally decentred, but the physical and ideological boundaries of the plays undergo a radicalisation, underlining a more drastic division between what is socially acceptable and what stands irremediably outside the social order. My paper explores how the main oppositions of the Henriad – between court and tavern, authority and outlaws, social order and outsiders – are reworked in connection with geographic, economic, social and sexual marginalisation in the contemporary scenario. In doing this, I consider the hybrid structure of the film, which places the Shakespearean story within a net of visual and verbal intertexts, and shifts abruptly among different languages, cinematic techniques, genres and styles. The filmic form of Idaho continually crosses aesthetic categories, annulling and reshaping them. Besides confounding temporal and spatial dimensions, the film’s disorderly and metamorphic aesthetic exposes the arbitrariness of both terrestrial and ideological borders. Van Sant’s appropriation of the Henry plays, by positioning the source texts in relation to contemporary spaces of otherness, finally deconstructs the notions and norms that determine social conflicts and marginalisation.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Alterity and Heterotopia: The City in Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice

Maria-Clara Galery

Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil; [email protected]

I propose a discussion of the representation of Venice in Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (2004). Different scholars have noted how Shakespeare drew on the “myth of Venice” to create a symbolic space in the play, into which Renaissance anxieties about justice, gender, religion and finances were projected. English travel writing during the Renaissance contributed to the notion of the Italian city, noted for its splendor, affluence and diversity, as an ideal of freedom and stability. My paper will rely on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, developed in the French philosopher’s essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1984), to address how Venice offers a counter-site to Shakespeare’s England. Peter G. Platt, in Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (2009), considers the Foucauldian concept useful to understand the city as a site of cultural self-interrogation in Merchant. I intend to further explore Venice as a mirror of Elizabethan and Jacobean society by looking at its representation in Radford’s visual hypertext. The analysis of the different textures of the Italian city-state in the film will pay special attention to the screen images of prostitutes; it will also focus on the scene of Shylock’s trial, examining the courtroom as a heterotopic site, to address the ambivalence regarding the idea of justice in Shakespeare’s work.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Dissolving Boundaries in Indie Cinema: Versions of Henry IV

Kinga Földváry

Institute of English and American Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary; [email protected]

Within the dramatic oeuvre of Shakespeare, it is the genre of the history play where geography matters the most: countries and borders, distance and proximity, division and union all play their role, both in conflicts and their resolutions. History plays often show how identity is tied to location, as the Henry IV plays offer ample illustration. Here we can find Scottish and Welsh identities clashing with English ones, and we also witness how the Northern loyalties of the Percy family run deeper than the shifting political allegiances that secure the throne of Bolingbroke. The social and cultural division between the world of the court and the underworld of Eastcheap is equally vital, and however porous the boundaries between these worlds may appear, by the end of the second part, all borderlines seem once again reconfirmed, separating from each other the socially and politically incompatible elements.

Some contemporary film adaptations, however, choose to reinterpret the plays without any reference to landscape or geography. In some cases, specific locations do appear, but their role is predominantly symbolic, as in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). In my paper, I focus on another independent film, loosely based on the Henry IV plays: James Gray’s We Own the Night (2007), to see how national and family loyalties come into conflict in a place – the New York of the late 1980s – where power and control no longer seem to rely on geographical or national allegiances. In this strangely nostalgic thriller, names and identities are called into question, but at the end of the day, an internalised concept of the family and an inherited sense of duty emerge from the chaos and bloodshed, making the film a deeply moving rethinking of the Shakespearean dramas.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

In the Trenches of Love: Gendered Territories in Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García

Northumbria University, UK; [email protected]

With the award of the Jury Prize in Cannes, Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende, 1955) signalled Ingmar Bergman’s international breakthrough. The Swedish film is a comedy of manners that echoes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream well beyond the resonances of its own title. With a farcical tone, it focuses on four initially mismatched heterosexual couples that after a summer stay in the countryside swap their partners and end up happily ever after. Dream and chance feature prominently in both film and play. While Puck’s potion determines the outcome of the lovers in Shakespeare’s play, a “magical” wine triggers the re-arrangement of the filmic lovers during their nightly retreat from the urban space to the countryside. My paper reads Bergman’s film as a free adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that conveys gendered power dynamics spatially. The countryside is cinematically depicted as a space surrounded by nature and gendered as female, functioning as one of Northrop Frye’s green worlds. My paper examines how the liminal space of the woods is negotiated in relation to the centrality of the urban space and its ideological underpinnings. I argue that the green world is subversive only in appearance, functioning instead as a prolongation of the city since the woods mirror the urban space and the ideological constrictions of the patriarchal order.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Le marchand de Venise (1953): Shylock on Screen in Post-War Europe

Douglas M. Lanier

University of New Hampshire, USA; [email protected]

Pierre Billon's Le marchand de Venise (1953) is an important landmark in post-WWII European film adaptation of Shakespeare that has been almost entirely forgotten. A cross-national production between France and Italy, Le marchand de Venise sought to engage the painful legacy of European anti-Semitism and post-war guilt by reshaping Shakespeare's Merchant and in particular Shylock. With its opulent production values and location shooting, it makes a case for the glories of pre-war European high culture. At the same time, by casting Michel Simon in the starring role of Shylock, it seeks to generate sympathy for Jewish oppression, particularly when Shylock suffers humiliation at the hands of the upper-class lovers and a clearly biased court. The much-beloved Simon was firmly identified in French film with the working classes, and so the film uses his established persona to recast Shylock as the victim of class rather than religious prejudices. Le marchand de Venise thus makes Shylock an empathetic figure at the cost of a full reckoning with the anti-Semitism the film would seem to address.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Making War in Europe: Henry V and Richard III on screen

Christie Carson

Royal Holloway University of London, UK; [email protected]

The battles of Shakespeare’s Histories plays are laden with the mythology of nationalism and the rhetoric of heroism. The boundary between France and England, in particular, is key to the battles which conclude Henry V and Richard III. The contested leadership of the country is central to all eight of the plays that make up the two tetralogies of the History cycle. But it is the glorious and heroic victory at Agincourt and the ignominious and cowardly defeat at Bosworth Field that punctuate the moral lessons of these plays. The fact that military conquest is signalled as a defining element of British self-definition can be seen in the rhetoric of these two plays. However, the virtuous leader who comes to save Britain in Richard III arrives from France, much in the way that Cordelia and the army that come to save King Lear arrive at Dover. This contested entry point to Britain has never been more in the minds of the citizens of both countries, nor has Calais, as the point of departure from Europe, been more battered by its reputation as a launching pad for entry into England. In order to look at this contentious border crossing I will examine the geography, iconography and visual rhetoric of the screen battles which end these two plays in four films, Branagh’s Henry V (1980), Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) and the Hollow Crown adaptations Henry V (2012) directed by Thea Sharrock and Richard III (2016) directed by Dominic Cooke. Through an examination of the visual elements of these films I hope to articulate the current emotional understanding of the division which has arisen between England and the rest of Europe.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Maps and Monsters in Othello on screen

Victoria Bladen

University of Queensland, Australia; [email protected]

Shakespeare’s Othello (1602-3) explores the tragic power of storytelling. "Othello", as a soldier and traveller, wooed Desdemona with his tales of exotic journeys and encounters with the monstrous and the marvellous. Proud of his ability as a storyteller, he holds his audiences spellbound with his narrative power. Yet as a black “other”, Othello embodies the interrelated qualities of the monstrous and the marvellous, associated in the early modern mind with peripheral space on maps, and travellers’ tales. Thus, from the beginning, Othello is not a character in control of the tale. Constructions of the human in peripheral space were subject to discourses based on fear of difference, and impulses to dominate. Tragically Othello, the master storyteller, is entrapped by multiple layers of narrative, particularly the metanarratives of race and gender that create and define difference in the world he inhabits. This paper examines how screen adaptations have dealt aesthetically and ideologically with the intersections of monstrosity, race and gender, drawing examples from various screen adaptations, directed by: Orson Welles (1952), Sergei Yutkevich (1955), Jonathan Miller, for the BBC series (1981), Janet Suzman (1988), Oliver Parker (1995), Tim Blake Nelson, O (2001), Geoffrey Sax (2001) and Ivan Lipkies, "Huapango" (2004).

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

Relocating the Chronotope, Shifting the Genre: A Comedic Adaptation of Othello on the Hungarian Small Screen and Stages

Márta Minier

University of South Wales, UK; [email protected]

Othello Gyulaházán (Othello in Gyulaháza, 1966), directed by Éva Zsurzs (1925-1997), not only relocates Othello to the television screen, but also transposes its story to regional Hungary during the socialist era, altering the story’s chronotope and the play’s linguistic and historical coordinates. Beyond the cultural, geographical, historical and transmedial relocation process, the genre also shifts from tragedy to comedy, perhaps with a slight aura of melancholy to it. The television film comedy, a gem of early Hungarian television, is based on prose by vitriolic Hungarian satirist Béla Gádor (1906-1961). It tells the fictitious story of a young, ambitious and apparently Stanislavskian director from the capital who arrives in a provincial town and ventures to put on a Shakespeare play instead of the operettas that the locals - actors and audience alike - are used to. His idea has a mixed reception from the local ensemble, and when he casts a marginalised actress in the role of Desdemona as opposed to the usual 'Leading Lady', he unsettles the stable routine of the theatre, where any kind of innovation is unheard of. The Desdemona actress is also the wife of the actor portraying Othello and, as their personal drama transfers to the stage, audiences are pouring in. Yet, Gyulaháza, an encapsulation of regional backwater attitudes both artistically conservative and heroically unwilling to go along with (potentially) state-imposed modernization, is hardly a place where Othello can remain a tragedy. As the finale of the performance goes unexpectedly interactive, the fragile wife is 'saved' from the jealous husband, and the play turns into some sort of an operetta - exactly what the director wanted to avoid and what Gyulaháza likes to see. Zsurzs's tv production appropriates Othello to hold a satiric mirror to post-WW2 Hungarian provincial theatre. It mines the comic potential of the play and puts it to use in its subtle social criticism. While Zsurzs's production is a classic, the post-1989 period brought an intriguing change in the tv film’s reception history: the tv drama has been adapted for the screen and performed as a popular play in various theatres in Hungary as well as in Transylvania. Although some of its themes are undoubtedly 'timeless' and potentially 'global', Othello in Gyulaháza has been pressed into service as a nostalgic middlebrow piece to help local theatre-going communities address once again the changes of time, except this time around from socialist to post-socialist life within and outside the theatre.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Geographies on Screen

The Māori Merchant of Venice

Elizabeth Moroney

Shakespeare Institute, UK; [email protected]

Don Selwyn’s 2002 The Māori Merchant of Venice was a landmark achievement in New Zealand cinema. Not only was it the first Shakespearean cinematic production from the country, it was also the first full-length film to be produced in te reo Māori. Acting as a cross-cultural communicator, the film works to simultaneously de-centre Europe, both physically and ideologically, through the use of te reo Māori and a strong Māori aesthetic, yet also using powerful imagery to align the Māori experience with that of the Jewish during World War Two. The term ‘cross-cultural’ can be dissected in a variety of ways in relation to the film, and it is this examination that will form the central argument of my paper. On screen, settler Europe meets ancient Māori as the visual landscape of the film works to harmonise the two cultures, whilst also putting them at extreme odds with each other. This tension can be readily observed throughout New Zealand literature. Shakespeare, who journeyed to New Zealand with the early settlers as a ubiquitous herald of European culture, plays a central role in the struggle to reconcile two distinct historical cultural identities in one nation. This paper shall discuss the portrayal of European culture throughout Selwyn’s Māori Merchant, which treats New Zealand as a liminal and marginal space. Furthermore, it shall address the notion of global versus local and the ways in which Selwyn deals with the need to appeal to both. Both Europe and New Zealand are presented as Other: which reveals itself as more dominant or can an equilibrium be achieved?

212

Seminar

Shakespearean migrations

Graham Keith Gregor1, Jasmine Seymour2

1University of Murcia, Spain; 2Queen Mary University, UK; [email protected]

The recent refusal by the Italian government to allow a boat full of African refugees to dock there is but the latest instance of the vast migration problem facing contemporary Europe and the authorities’ inability and/or reluctance to deal satisfactorily with it. But the issues raised by migration to Europe from a range of different locations go back several centuries and, as the work of Shakespeare reveals, were of sufficient concern to have found a place in the literature of the early modern period. The panel welcomes contributions on Shakespeare’s treatment of migration, whatever its motivation (war and physical abuse, political expediency or simple ‘wanderlust’) and source or destination of the migrant. Contributors might explore either the conditions (social, political, economic, etc.) to which the texts were a response, the treatment of migration in the texts themselves, the response of critics or the subsequent adaptation/appropriation of the texts to address the circumstances of the various regions or nations of Europe at specific historical junctures.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Achilleos, Stella University of Cyprus Goodspeed, Sally Jane Australian National University (alumni), Australia Keinänen, Nely University of Helsinki, Finland LaRubio, Mark Arizona State University, US Mercier, Stephanie University of Helsinki, Finland Sivefors, Per Linnaeus University, Sweden

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Seminar - Shakespearean Migrations

Class, Commerce and the Bard: The Migration of Shakespeare into Sweden, 1770 – 1820

Per Sivefors

Linnaeus University, Sweden; [email protected]

If anything, the migration of Shakespeare into Sweden was complex and fraught with uncertainties. The scant existing documentation of performances in the 18th century indicates that the introduction of Shakespeare often took the route via French or German translations, although in some cases there are clear indications that English was the source language. Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden, had lively contacts with Great Britain and it was also here that for example Hamlet was staged the first time. Notably, Shakespeare was not performed in the capital of Stockholm until the 1810s: it was theatres in provincial towns like Gothenburg and Norrköping that introduced Shakespeare, in various versions, to the Swedish stage. In the light of this historical development, the present paper argues that the migration of Shakespeare into the country was strongly linked to the rise of a wealthy provincial bourgeoisie, often with economic connections in England and Scotland. Once Shakespeare begun to be staged in the capital, it was for different reasons, involving the rise of literary Romanticism, and from the horizon of a Europe that had been affected by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, the paper concludes, the early history of Shakespeare in Sweden was not so much the result of national projects or specific agendas as the consequence of an emerging class restructuring and economic interests.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Migrations

Migrants, Refugees and the Maritime in Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles: Then and Now

Stella Achilleos

University of Cyprus; [email protected]

Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles is a play that appears to have gained in popularity in the last couple of decades, especially as modern audiences have been prompted to explore how the question of migration in the play resonates with such important modern-day concerns as forced displacement (concerns that have become especially urgent with the Syrian refugee crisis in recent years). Various productions of Pericles in the last couple of decades reflect this engagement with the play. Examples may be found in the production by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Cardboard Citizens in 2003 that interweaved the original text with refugee statements, but also, a lot more recently (November-December 2018), a production by The Welders called “In this Hope: A Pericles Project” in which actors (including Syrian actress asylum seeker Raghad Makhlouf) shared stories of their own with the audience. These attempts appear to have found a mixed response: while some lauded the ways in which the reinvention of the original draws attention to pressing contemporary concerns, others found the suggested parallels between the Shakespearean text and the predicament of contemporary refugees problematic, especially given the fact that Pericles in the original is in fact a privileged individual who is only temporarily exiled. This criticism no doubt raises questions about the ethics of representation that I would like to interrogate in my paper. In doing so, I would like to examine the element of defamiliarization as it is introduced in such contemporary reinventions of the play, suggesting how the disquieting combination may be precisely what enables one to appreciate rather than overlook historical specificity, and to productively reflect on the different kinds of transitions involved in maritime travel (in the play, in Shakespeare’s world and in the present).

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Seminar - Shakespearean Migrations

Migrations, Toleration, and Legality in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Mark LaRubio

Arizona State University, US; [email protected]

This paper will look question the way in which the Venetians create a false narrative of toleration and how the characters of Shylock, Jessica, and the Prince of Morocco form particular representations of how migrants negotiate being vulnerable to the Venetians and their usage of the law and legality to undermine their motivations to be in Venice. This will look then at how the supposed state of legality of citizenship and belonging is used against communities who are disparate in being at the mercy of the Venetians all the while being held under suspicion and held at a distance due to their status of migrants. In this way, this paper will question the established paradigm of legal migration and how Venetian society uses it to gaslight the migrants who are aware of the suffering under the auspices of calls for assimilation and the narratives of toleration being proposed by the Doge and the eponymous merchant. Doing so will look at the Prince of Morocco’s own realization of his position among the other princes due to his place of birth and race and at the construction of Shylock as unfit to be a citizen of Venice due to his Jewishness and seek to establish how the concept of legality forms a particular vehicle of oppression.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Migrations

Romeo and Juliet Migrates to Finland, 1881

Nely Keinänen

University of Helsinki, Finland; [email protected]

This paper is the second in a series of essays exploring the significance of Shakespeare in the development of the Finnish Theater (later the Finnish National Theater) in the late nineteenth century, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy in imperial Russia, longing for independence. In the first paper I analyze the translation of Hamlet in 1879, the first play in the first complete works translation project undertaken in Finland. As the fledgling theater lacked actors to play the leading role (there was a dearth of actors capable of acting in Finnish), Hamlet was not performed until 1884. The first Shakespeare play presented in its entirety at the FT was Romeo and Juliet, in 1881, a production revolving around Finland’s first great Finnish-speaking actress, Ida Aalberg (1858-1915). This paper will trace the stormy history of rehearsals and early performances (the opening night had to be re-scheduled due to the murder of Alexander II in St. Petersburg on March 13, 1881). Of particular interest is the laudatory reception of Aalberg’s performance, emphasizing both her personal star-power as well as the significance of this landmark in Finland’s efforts to build a national theater, which was itself seen as an important part of nation-building movements. Even thirty-five years later, the Finnish author Juhani Aho (1861-1921) wrote vividly about the significance of Aalberg’s Juliet in an essay for the 1916 Book of Homage to Shakespeare, edited by Israel Gollancz (Oxford University Press). After the first Romeo and Juliet, there was a new Shakespeare or a revival performed nearly every year at the FT, demonstrating the cultural significance of Shakespearean migration to Finland in the late nineteenth century.

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Seminar- Shakespearean Migrations

Keywords: Sir Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook, As You Like It, Colonisation of Australia

Sir Joseph Banks: Merely a player on the London and Pacific stages

Sally Jane Goodspeed

Australian National University (alumni), Australia; [email protected]

This unpublished research considers migration from several different perspectives - examining the influence of Shakespeare's As You Like it almost two centuries after it was first produced, how London society used it to observe and comment on the new scientific positioning of Joseph Banks after he returned from the Endeavour voyage to the Pacific, and how these ideas preceded Britain's colonial migration to Australia. It draws on a range of social commentary, published in the late eighteenth century in the form of caricatures, poetry and theatrical scripts. It's central theme is framed within the tension between the cult of personality that formed around Enlightenment heros like Banks, and Shakespeare's oft-quoted lines that 'All the world's a stage and all the men and women, merely players'.

Young, wealthy and privileged, the gentleman Joseph Banks embarked on the HMS Endeavour in August 1768 ripe for scientific discovery and adventure. When he disembarked on English soil three years later, only three of the team of naturalists, artists and servants from the journey stood alongside him - fellow naturalist and friend, Daniel Solander, and two servants. Only 10 years after that both Cook and Solander were also dead. In London, Banks was to become quite a character, and the subject of satire, observed by social commentators almost as keenly as he had observed the Pacific people and its landscapes. Over time he settled into married life and aristocratic society, directing his passions to his role as the President of the Royal Society. Bank’s life and achievements have been celebrated in many ways, but I argue, like John O’Keeffe, an Irish dramatist working in London in the late 18th century, he was ‘merely a player’, alongside many others on the Enlightenment stage. Observing Banks (and others, including Cook) from this perspective, we can enjoy the theatre that was created, but recognise also, that the stories that were captured were just that, stories, told to shape the uneasy cultural intersections that were recorded on the Endeavour voyage, and that continued after the first fleet settled on Australian lands, with great disregard for the nation's first peoples who had lived there for thousands of years before.

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Seminar - Shakespearean Migrations

Soldier Migration and Social Mobility in Shakespeare

Stephanie Mercier

University of Helsinki, Finland; [email protected]

Migration in the post Armada period was a geographical and a social issue for the rank and file English military man. Early modern soldiers were generally thought of as mere commodities, officially conflated with common criminals, singled out by royal proclamation, press ganged into military service; or, if they were lucky enough to have enough money, they could be compelled by unscrupulous officers to bribe their way out of conscription. In Shakespeare, soldiers are thus seen to be beleaguered, exploited, executed as an example to others and sacrificed to the supposedly greater good: the “commodity”, or profit, to be had from conquering foreign lands and their colonisation. The question seems particularly relevant in Shakespeare’s plays where soldiers and the term “commodities” (2 Henry VI) or “commodity”, (1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV), specifically appears and, more generally, in the first tetralogy, especially 1 Henry VI. Moreover, all are plays in which the migration towards a commodification of male soldiers, whether seen as amoral or absurd, criticised and ironised upon, can nonetheless be perceived all the way up the social scale. In this paper, I thus examine how medieval ideas of mutual confidence and seigneurial ties were gradually being replaced by the piecemeal monetary representation of England’s armed forces. As soldiers were selling their time in exchange for wages, their lives, and themselves, also became indistinguishable from the money they were being paid to earn a living. Discussing the plays in the historical order Shakespeare wrote them allows me to make a tentative claim to a historical progress in the playwright’s thinking about soldiers and ex-soldiers as commodities. As such, the figure of the lower ranking former soldier Jack Cade exposes the idea to criticism and resists it; the socially mobile aristocrat Talbot is made subservient, although he satirises the process; and, the corrupt middle-ranking dissembler Falstaff distorts military objectification to his own advantage, at least as long as he is able to. Besides, the broad/satiric comic portrayal of Cade and tragic character of Talbot combined may be a possible prototype for the tragi-comic figure of Falstaff; after all, all three exemplify how soldiers could, at least for a while, resist the inexorable movement towards their social migration towards the status of the commodity.

220

Seminar

“Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik1, Delilah Bermudez Brataas2

1Tischner European University, Poland; 2Norwegian University of Science and Technology; [email protected]

In its various forms, utopia and monstrosity are situated against or beyond the given order, be it political, aesthetic or epistemological in nature. Utopia interrogates the ideal topos, or space and place in relation to the hic et nunc, or the here and now; the monstrous interrogates the ideal/idealized self in relation to the other. For the early modern, the monstrous still aroused a sense of wonder, while allowing for a transgression and transformation that was essential to the construction of the world and the self. From its earliest classical models, visions of the ideal society required constructs of a humanity that was conceived of as perfect in its divine rationality; yet, its essence was drawn from differentiation from the other. Since the early modern period both the monstrous and the utopian have undergone major conceptual shifts, possibly affecting the understanding of the Shakespearean playtext and leading to encounters with Shakespeare’s drama as “something rich and strange”. This seminar seeks to explore the intersections between monstrosity and utopia in Shakespeare’s works and their rewritings that mobilize the polysemous meanings of both utopia and monstrosity, and share in their richness and strangeness. We seek papers that consider diverse ways, in which the monstrous and the utopian are mapped and remapped in Shakespeare’s texts and their adaptations, appropriations, translations, and interpretations in any format and language, in text and in performance, across media and cultures. The possible areas of interrogation may include Shakespeare, utopia and: monstrous geographies; animality and materiality; the monstrous feminine/masculine; hybridity and the post-human; mythology, transformation and metamorphosis; performing monstrosity; queer/trans bodies as idealized/monstrosized; monstrous body in politics and conflicts; monstrous authority and ideal knowledge; digital re-visioning through video games, social media, fan fiction and online forums.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Bermudez Brataas, Delilah Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Kowalcze-Pawlik, Anna Tischner European University, Poland Nakamura, Yuki Kanto Gakuin University, Japan Bui, Hanh Brandeis University, USA Pożar, Przemysław Warsaw University, Poland Volceanov, George Spiru Haret University, Romania

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Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia Keywords: Shakespeare, Utopia, Monstrosity

All the Infections that the Sun Sucks Up”: Caliban’s Sickened Afterlives

Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

Tischner European University, Poland; [email protected]

This paper aims to discuss the significance of illness in the presentation of Caliban in the texts that enter into in a more or less obvious intertextual relationship with The Tempest. The Polish translations of the play and its tradaptations in the form of graphic novels and films (Marvel universum) are scrutinized for the use of diseased imagery in the construction of Caliban, while medical and psychological writings are screened for the occurrences of accidental, optional and obligatory intertextuality which links disease with the figure of the “abhorred slave”. The paper will address the possible reasons for and the consequences of such a recontextualization that pushes Caliban into the realm of the pathological. It posits that such a shift is tied to a twofold paradigmatic change which has occurred firstly, in the modern understanding of the nature of disease, as discussed by Canguilhem in his The Normal and the Pathological, and secondly, in a changing response to The Tempest as a play, whose utopian hope is dimmed by the modern preoccupation with (post)humanity, and the problematic definitions of life and health, disease and death.

Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Keywords: Shakespeare, Graphic Novels, Utopia, Monstrosity

Gods and Monsters: The Shifting Presence of Shakespeare and his World in Graphic Novels

Delilah Bermudez Brataas

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway; [email protected]

In this article, I explore the presence of Shakespeare and his characters in two graphic novel series: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989-1996) and Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare (2010- 2014). Gaiman’s much-lauded series follows Morpheus, the god-like personification of dreams who empowers Shakespeare with his creative force, and then facilitates a disruption between the real and the ideal that allows Shakespeare and his characters to coexist. Their coexistence then complicates our collective idealization of Shakespeare’s characters and plays by imagining an alternate reasoning for Shakespeare’s creative impetus, and thereby establishing a sharp contrast between an unknown playwright eager for the god-like powers Morpheus offers and his monstrous “creations.” Alternatively, McCreery and Del Col’s series imagines a world where Shakespeare is a god, but one who regrets his creative powers and shuns his creations. Worshipped and relentlessly sought, this Shakespeare remains the mythic engine of a series that follows characters from across his plays who speak in a pastiche of fragmented Shakespearean lines, and who we must follow through alternate story lines that problematize our relationship with Shakespeare’s plays. Though Shakespeare himself struggles with his ambiguous divinity in both series, his characters statically linger as monstrous shadows of their original forms. Illustrating the limitations and possibilities of divinity and monstrosity thus allows Shakespeare and his characters to shift from idealism to realism in both series through the multimodality of graphic novels, combined with the pitting of gods against monsters common to fantasy and science fiction. Both series thereby critically interrogate the shifting power and frailty, and ultimately, the consequences, of our historical Bardolatry.

Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Relocating Prospero's Island in the 21st century: On Two Romanian Productions of The Tempest

George Volceanov

Spiru Haret University, Romania; [email protected]

Two 21st century Romanian productions of The Tempest relocate the plot of Shakespeare's romance to unexpected territories. Silviu Purcarete (The National Theatre of Craiova, 2012) turns the play into an 'illusion comique', i. e. the dreams, or, rather, nightmares, of a solitary old man living in a dilapidated apartment populated (haunted?) by characters that are children of his own fancy; Szabo K. Istvan (Tony Bulandra Theatre, Targoviste, 2017) places 'Prospero' in a mental institution: there is, indeed, a usurping brother, but all the other dramatis personae are the medical staff and the patients sharing the same space. My paper explores the way in which, quite curiously, both productions present narratives that depart from Shakespeare's story without altering the original text.

Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Keywords: Shakespeare, Utopia, Monstrosity, Maternity

The Monstrosity of Aged Maternity in Shakespeare’s Utopias

Hanh Bui

Brandeis University, USA; [email protected]

In this paper I explore how aged mothers are associated with witchcraft, magic, and animality in two of Shakespeare’s plays with utopian elements, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In The Tempest Prospero refers to Caliban’s mother as the “damned witch Sycorax,” and says that Caliban was “hag-born,” which suggests not only Sycorax’s malignity but also her age. In The Winter’s Tale Paulina is also figured as an old witch, and the “statue” of Hermione she brings to life is noteworthy for the wrinkles on its face. My analysis addresses the following issues: how the aged maternal body poses a problem in utopian visions, where physical health and moral purity are ideals, set against the backdrop of a fertile Nature that has the capacity to constantly renew itself; how the post-menopausal body is understood as being naturally corrupted; how older women produce monstrous children, or care for other monstrous women; and finally, the question of whether the a-temporality of utopias can be read as hostile or sympathetic toward the project of growing old.

Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

The Vacant Utopia: Reflecting on the first Polish post-war staging of The Tempest

Przemysław Pożar

Warsaw University, Poland; [email protected]

The paper aims to discuss the first Polish post-war performance of The Tempest, staged in 1947 in Łódź and directed by Leon Schiller, a renowned artist of the pre-war theatre. The apparent aim of the production was to reclaim the spectacular visual style of Schiller’s earlier performances, and thereby set a pattern of continuity, prevailing over the atrocities of the war. Additionally, Czesław Jastrzębiec-Kozłowski was commissioned a new translation of The Tempest, possibly to adhere to the argument for a revision of the canon voiced by Polish Shakespeareans.

And yet the seemingly rich enterprise soon sunk into oblivion, with virtually no records upholding its aesthetic or intellectual value. The emptiness of the staging is rendered even more conspicuous if juxtaposed with Schiller’s last pre-war production of The Tempest (1938) directed with the Jewish Folks un Jungt-Teater in Łódź and pulsating with heartbreaking political message about the inevitable surge of brutish anti-humanist forces. However, both these visions turned out to be made of baseless fabric and the play’s inherent utopianism laid bare the vanity of Schiller’s artistic efforts, both as a prophet and narrator of history.

The new translation was found lacking and the playscript – quite paradoxically – employed fragments of the old version, thereby hinting at the regressive preferences of the cast. Thus, the nerve of the staging withered away as the pieces ceased to fall into place and began instead to mirror more of an interim period when the cultural processes are moulding, the new Shakespearean canon is but intuitively anticipated and Shakespeare our Contemporary is only about to enter the stage.

Seminar - “Something Rich and Strange”: Remapping Shakespeare’s Utopia

Keywords: Shakespeare, Utopia, Monstrosity, Science Fiction, Film

Utopia and the Monster: Ridley Scott’s Alien: 'Covenant as an Adaptation of The Tempest'

Yuki Nakamura

Kanto Gakuin University, Japan; [email protected]

The combined the topoi of a monster and utopia effectively depict the human anxiety that persisted within the Renaissance. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest suggests, rather intelligibly, that the utopia sometimes discloses the inhumanness of the Renaissance humanity. Four hundred years later, Shakespeare’s latent skepticism about humanity is intensified in a modern film, Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017), an obvious adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Scott’s Alien, the corresponding character to Prospero is scientist Weyland. The AI android David also partly corresponds to Prospero, while he also relates with Ariel at the same time. The menace of dehumanized existence, Caliban, is intensified in the figure of the aliens called Xenomorph. Ariel is represented through the AI android Walter, and Miranda is replaced by a scientist, Daniels. Furthermore, Ariel’s song, the shipwreck in the tempest, and other details in The Tempest are adapted to this movie. Alien interprets and expands the problem of humanity and utopia/dystopia. On Prospero’s island in The Tempest, many factors shatter humanity. Firstly, encountering a cultural Other, an indigene of the New World, disturbs the Renaissance idea of humanity. Caliban is a dehumanized, enslaved Other in the sense of the Aristotlian natural slave and is recognized as a monster. Furthermore, Scott’s interpretation uncovers the latent possibilities of retaliation from the alienated and enslaved existences of Caliban and Ariel. Secondly, another dystopian factor in The Tempest is the tyranny of Prospero. His tyrannous characteristics are merely hinted at, while they are emphasized in Alien in the characterization of Weyland and David. Tyranny is portrayed as an anti-value in the Renaissance definition of humanity, such as with Pico della Mirandola’s idea of a human with dignity. The discovery of the New World allowed the Renaissance people to dream of realizing the world of the Testament or a politically ideal society. However, the no-man’s-land depicted through the literature serves as a touchstone to bring out the most undesirable aspects of the human for illumination.

Seminar

The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

Camilla Caporicci1, Armelle Sabatier2

1Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy; 2Panthéon-Assas University, Paris, France; [email protected]

Suspicion, mockery, fear: these are only some of the reactions that foreigners elicit in Shakespeare’s plays. Geographical borders turn into mental borders in the moment in which the person who comes “from outside” is identified through a series of stereotypes and prejudices that annihilate his/her individuality in the eyes of the other characters, fostering both physical and psychological marginalization. However, exactly as it happens now, not all foreigners are perceived and treated in the same way. The “Europeans” can be political and military allies or enemies, fighting for a redefinition of physical maps and borders, but they are usually perceived as essentially akin to the English, and treated accordingly. The case is different with people coming from outside Europe, belonging to different races, religions and cultural backgrounds. Even in this case, however, the perception and treatment of the foreigner is deeply influenced by a series of elements such as wealth, social status, cultural level and gender. For instance, the prince of Morocco may be laughed at by Portia because of his blackness, and yet he is received at her court and has the right to aspire to her hand; Othello is a liminal and divisive figure, raising issues of identity and belonging; Shylock is despised for his religion and profession, but he is made use of by a community that tacitly acknowledge its need for such figures as his, while his (beautiful and rich) daughter Jessica undergoes a different process of inclusion. This seminar aims to explore and promote a discussion on the ways in which various factors, such as race, religion, socioeconomic status, cultural level and gender, impact on the process of conceptualization and acceptance/exclusion of the “other”, offering many opportunities of reflection on the differences and analogies between the early modern and the current geopolitical situation.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Bauer, Katrine Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich Heijes, Coen University of Groningen Sansonetti, Laetitia Université Paris Nanterre, France and member of the Institut Universitaire de France Tanase, Iuliana University of Bucharest uygur, ipek Adnan Menderes University, Turkey

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Seminar - The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

Coming to Terms with Alterity in W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Iuliana Tanase

University of Bucharest; [email protected]

Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” is dominated by radical encounters with the other. The play introduces the other in many contexts and from many perspectives, spatial, ethnic, racial, political, etc. Different types of otherness are often tamed by some form of sameness. Shakespeare problematizes aspects of the inherited tradition, local and European. While he is generally held to be Eurocentric and politically conservative, the perspective on the other seems to be not so clear-cut and easily grasped, and at some points remains elusive. This accords with the changing mindset of the emerging modern world in which traditional perspectives are challenged. However, “The Tempest” also problematizes the relation self-other by introducing the other which resists relation and stresses its own alterity. The aim of the paper is to delineate the complexity and paradoxes of Shakespeare’s approach to otherness and his underlying perspective on the relation self-other as it emerges from the play.

Seminar - The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

Foreign Fencers: a Threat to English identity?

Laetitia Sansonetti

Université Paris Nanterre, France and member of the Institut Universitaire de France; [email protected]

As Continental techniques of fencing became more and more fashionable in early modern England, French and Italian fencing masters came to settle in England, where the local masters, advocating more traditional practice, resented the novelties introduced. In polemical texts such as George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence (1599), English national pride is extolled as jealousy over the material success of those foreign rivals in trade accused of stealing English jobs, in particular a few Italian masters including Vincentio Saviolo.

Italianate fencers feature in several plays by Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet, where they are mocked for a lexicon and attitudes that they seem to have been drawn out of Saviolo’s Practise In two Bookes (1595), in ways that anticipate Silver’s jibes. It thus seems that Shakespeare is not only reflecting contemporary debates, but contributing to their very phrasing by his stage representations of them.

I would like to triangulate several aspects in the representation of Italianate fencers in Shakespeare’s plays, analysing together their ‘foreignness’, their socio-economic status, and the genre of the play in which they feature, in order to show that foreign fencing points to mixed identities, mixed locations, shared spaces of potential conflict, tragic duels or comic pranks.

Seminar - The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

The Hidden Face of a Nation: What does Shylock Tell us about the Dutch?

Coen Heijes

University of Groningen; [email protected]

While research on stage productions of The Merchant of Venice has never shied away from discussing the Jewishness in these productions, or how actors and directors deal with the topic of the outsider, it is much rarer to come across studies that relate Shylock on stage directly to the specific national context after the Shoah. An exception is Germany, where the representation of Shylock has been an instrument of soul- searching and of making sense of the German past and the horrors of the Shoah. In many other European countries, however, there seems to be no comprehensive study of the representation and reception of Shylock in relation to the country’s war-history and anti-Semitism during and after the Shoah. Within a timeframe, in which anti-Semitism seems to be on the rise, this topic is increasingly relevant.

I will demonstrate how in the Netherlands specific national conditions influence the representation of Shylock after World War Two, and how this has led to a different approach to the play and its reception than in surrounding countries. I will discuss how, rather than focusing on the Jewishness in the production itself, as an almost isolated entity, a more multidisciplinary approach to Merchant might provide new and valuable venues for research. In such an approach the specific historical, political, and cultural context would be addressed, and how these find their ways into representations of Shylock.

Seminar - The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

Keywords: Self, Other, black-skinned foreigners, transgressive sexuality

The Question of Racial Otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello

Ipek Uygur

Adnan Menderes University, Turkey; [email protected]

The images of the Self and the Other displayed on the early modern English stage were determined by a variety of factors, ranging from political, religious, social to economic considerations. What was the framework of assumptions concerning black-skinned foreigners when Othello was written? Othello was written at a time when the European construction of the Other was changing from a medieval to a modern paradigm, which contained a shift from religion to race and colour as the key markers of difference. Elizabethan dramatists tried hard to distinguish ‘Englishness’ from Otherness in terms of race in their art. Whereas the racial Other did not accommodate an objective quality of whatever was distant, unreachable, strange, unknown, or unfamiliar but it was substantially constructed through subjective experience or knowledge. Accordingly, otherness suggested a process of being labeled as intolerable, unfit or inferior through which the Self acquired superior traits while attributing to the racial Other all but negative characteristics. In essence, the early modern period was an era of representation in geography. Despite the fact that Shakespeare’s scenes almost always take place in Christendom, and thus his plots, themes, and scenes are extremely European, people of ethnic and religious otherness, and things not rooted in European soil intrude now and then. And that’s why each of these scenes leads us to a careful consideration of Shakespeare’s construction of Europe and its exterior, along with an inquiry into the otherness of Shakespeare’s foreigners. In Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, John Gillies contends that the geography of those plays accommodating Self-Other encounters is ‘much more than a literal quantity and much more than a backdrop. It is a complex and dynamic imaginative quantity with a characterological and symbolic agenda’ (p. 3). Moreover, Shakespeare’s black-skinned foreigners, as well as the natives who aspire to go beyond the boundaries, and thus experience cross-cultural interactions, appear to be transgressive. But more importantly, transgression through the transgressive sexuality of a black man and a white woman is most frequently ‘depicted as the ultimate romantic-transgressive model of erotic love’ (Boose 1994; 41), which serves as an enormous barrier to the tradition of getting a lawful race. Similarly, both ‘Valiant Othello’ (1.3.48), the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger/ Of here and everywhere’ (1.1.135-6), and Desdemona, who publicizes that she ‘did love the Moor [Othello] to live with him’ (1.3.246), for she has seen ‘Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.250), strive to transcend the cross-cultural barriers through disapproved sexuality.

In this paper I intend to argue, despite the fact Shakespeare’s Othello is constructed in accordance with the prerequisites of nobility- Othello is born of ‘royal siege’ (1.2.22), occupies the post of Christian general, for he is best suited to defend Cyprus against the ‘malignant and Turbaned Turk’ (5.2.352), the dominant ideology has a subversive tendency to treat all black-skinned foreigners as inferior, thereby, displays an amazing capacity to variously construct, co-exist with and marginalize its Others.

Seminar - The Conceptualization and Treatment of the Foreigner in Shakespeare’s Work: the Impact of Cultural, Socio-Economic and Gender Factors

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” – Foreigners in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Katrine Bauer

Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich; [email protected]

This paper sets out to suggest a new look at a much-debated question: the functions of foreignness in The Tempest. Taking up the definition of the foreigner as a “person who comes ‘from the outside’” from the call for papers, it becomes clear quickly that the roles in The Tempest are not as distinct as would be expected. The issue of who is the foreigner and who is not is, as I want to argue, nowhere more pertinent than in The Tempest. Summed up in Miranda and Prospero’s famous exchange in Act 5 of the play about which is the “new” world, we can see that in The Tempest, the categories of foreigner/other and native/self do no longer hold up.

The Tempest takes place on an island which while firmly set in the Mediterranean by the textual evidence, also clearly evokes images of the Americas and the Caribbean. Against this background, I examine how the various encounters with the – from a European perspective – other on the island influence the Italian nobles and their sense of identity – a process, arguably, which reflects early modern engagements with the emerging sense of globalisation. In this context, Prospero’s relationship to Caliban has often been discussed. Yet the focus has usually been on their colonial connection, with the European exerting power over the colonised. In contrast to this traditional perspective, I propose to see Prospero and his relationships to Ariel and Caliban as different personifications of the Other, so as to explore how the Other’s influence initiates and shapes not just Prospero’s personal development but also the structure of the entire play. The subversive power of the Other, which directly engages with the self and is thus no longer geographically or ideologically remote, is necessary I suggest to enable the play’s reconciliatory conclusion. This reading also offers insights into the workings of the social relations at the heart of the play as well as of early modern cultural encounters in general.

Seminar

The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

Maria Elisa Montironi1, Cristina Paravano2

1Università degli Studi di Urbino, Italy; 2Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy; [email protected] Shakespeare, his works and his characters have been used to promote brands and to sell products since the beginning of modern advertising. This seminar aims to investigate the commercial use of Shakespeare in a European context. Whereas the use of Shakespeare in advertising in a US and UK setting has received critical attention, the appropriation of Shakespeare in Europe, and in non-Anglophone countries especially, is still to be mapped. The seminar invites participants to consider how Shakespeare has variously served as a symbol of the elitism of a suffocating past, which has to be surpassed; as a traditional icon infusing positive brand values; or as a meme like cultural reference, that can be easily cited and spread across platforms. Participants might also address questions of location: critical reflection upon the most common kinds of products advertised through Shakespeare, the type of imagery linked to Shakespeare, and the use of the globally famous playwright’s name to boost sectors including tourism, theatre, and the film industry, is both timely and valuable in the light of urgent contemporary debates within Europe about political and cultural boundaries. Participants might locate, describe and interpret the features of ‘Shakespearean ads’ as they spread across European countries and examine how Shakespeare’s cultural capital interacts with the medium of advertising in different contexts; or investigate how this interaction has changed over time, and explore the way it can have an impact on ‘Shakespeare’ as a cultural field. Or they might consider how, in the context of a globalised advertising industry, European Shakespeare ads produce a cultural homogeneity, or (re)iterate Anglophone cultures and values, or (re)imagine European identities and histories. Focusing on the politics of appropriating Shakespeare, this seminar will expand research into intermedial Shakespeares and its embeddedness in the culture industry.

List of Participants (in alphabetical order)

Caponi, Paolo University of Milan, Italy Di Nallo, Ileana “Roma Tre” University of Rome, Italy Montironi, Maria Elisa University of Urbino, Italy Paravano, Cristina University of Milan, Italy Zanoni, Roberta University of Verona, Italy

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Seminar - The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

"My kingdom for an iphone": Shakespeare and mobile phones

Cristina Paravano

University of Milan, Italy; [email protected]

The paper examines how Shakespeare and his works have been appropriated for promotional purposes in the field of mobile phone communication in the 21st century.

On the one hand, I will investigate the strategies used to advertise merchandising related to mobile phones. Capitalising on Shakespeare's iconic status, producers have invented covers and phone cases, featuring pictures of the Bard, which range from the traditional Chandos portrait to more creative depictions of the playwright as he takes a selfie or wears sunglasses. One can also find images associated with the plays, such as a skull or a balcony, as well as famous quotes used as motivational slogans or just funny jokes.

On the other, I will present a casestudy by discussing four commercials advertising mobile communication providers (Nextel, 2003; T-Mobile, 2008; Vodafone, 2013) and the iphone7 (Apple, 2016). They all reinterpret the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, relying on a play which also dramatises lack of communication on different levels. The marketing specialists have however downplayed the play's tragic and erotic qualities in a bid to attract potential buyers with a more amusing rendition of the story.

Seminar - The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

Shakespeare as a marketing strategy and the Italian theatre crisis

Maria Elisa Montironi

University of Urbino, Italy; [email protected]

Contemporary Italian theatre has witnessed a wide range of Shakespearean productions, whose significance with respect to the theme of crisis has been twofold. On the one hand, Shakespeare has been employed in Italy to face the radical reduction in economic support suffered by theatre professionals, who have then relied on the marketability of the Bard’s ‘brand’ for funding and to draw audiences to the theatre. In Italy, the name of Shakespeare has proved to possess both selling power and the ability to create a bull market, even in the notably unfavourable early Millennium economic quandary. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s plays have proved functional to unravelling cultural, social and political problems in Italy. This paper focuses on the function of Shakespeare as a marketing strategy through the analysis of Shakespearean theatre productions, but also of other forms of reception, such as Shakespeare-themed or Shakespeare-inspired projects, advertisements and newspaper articles.

Seminar - The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

Shakespeare in Chinese adverts

Ileana Di Nallo

“Roma Tre” University of Rome, Italy; [email protected]

This contribution aims at analysing the use of Shakespeare and his works in Chinese contemporary advertising. Shakespeare plays have been spread in China between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth century but it was during the Eighties of the Twentieth century that Shakespearian works have become very popular. Chen Xiaomei stated that Chinese Shakespearian performances, such as Macbeth, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, are a particular type of Occidentalism. In those performances, through an adaptation to Chinese cultural context, Chinese audience could find allusions and references to their past and to Cultural Revolution. The juxtaposition of the two cultures and histories created a process of appropriation of Shakespeare in Chinese context. The contribution aims to understand whether this interpretation still influences the use of Shakespeare in contemporary Chinese media or, since the increasing globalization, it conveys meanings more related to the original cultural context. The contribution will focus on some Chinese advertisements starting from the 2010 BMW’s where an image of Shakespeare winking at the famous Hamlet sentence “to be or not to be, this is the question 存在或者不存在,这是个问题” is near to the image of the BMW cabriolet with the slogan “open or not open, none of these is a problem 敞开或者不敞开,都不是问题” and it will illustrate how the figure of Shakespeare is incorporated into contemporary Chinese media context.

Seminar - The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

Shakespeare’s static. The Tempest and its Italian reception

Paolo Caponi

University of Milan, Italy; [email protected]

Although rather neglected, when not underrated in its cultural impact by academic research, the radio has proved to be essential in the affirmation of Shakespeare’s canon in Italy. During Fascism, and after, the radio represented an alternative to the physical stage and concurred, in the anni mirabiles of its domestic history, in the affirmation of radio drama as a most respectable literary genre.

In my essay, Shakespeare’s presence in Italian radio programming will be mapped and evaluated, especially through the analysis of the stage history of The Tempest, whose Italian radio premiere, directed by Alberto Casella, took place in 1939 under the aegis of the Fascist public radio authority EIAR. A valuable source will be provided by the extant scripts kept at the Archivio Mondadori in Milan.

Seminar - The Geopolitics of Shakespeare European Adverts

The Italian Reception of Shakespeare in Advertising

Roberta Zanoni

University of Verona, Italy; [email protected]

Shakespeare has become nowadays an instrument always available and re-usable for advertising campaigns all over the world. The advertising passage from a culture to another, however, as a sort of translation, implies alternatively the adaptation to or disregard of the target culture. This paper will take into consideration two emblematic examples of this passage: Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Levi’s 501 commercials. The first is an Italian commercial inspired by Romeo and Juliet which quotes some lines from The Tempest attributing them to Juliet. The discordant quotation does not strike the average Italian audience: it constructs an aura of Shakespeareanicity which ultimately acquires its own connotation for the Italian recipients. The second commercial - inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream – will allow me to compare the English and the Italian versions and to show the different messages the two apparently equivalent commercials convey.

In both Alfa Romeo and Levi’s commercials Shakespeare has become a cultural symbol which projects internationally shared and standardised connotations on the products advertised. The commodities seem to be legitimised and sponsored by the Bard. In the cases taken into consideration Shakespeare provides a dream world, a poetic scenario for the commodity advertised. Conversely, the commercials also demonstrate the different reception of the references to the Bard: the Italian examples reveal the preconceptions and mis-conceptions concerning Shakespeare on which the advertisers play when addressing an Italian audience. They provide an example of the “translation” not only from a language to another but also from a cultural system to another, which results in the need of eliciting some details and in the inevitable loss of a part of the message’s content. The commercials ultimately prove the presence a culture- specific interpretation existing along the universally shared connotations usually attached to the Shakespearean references in advertising.

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List of Panels

“In dark uneven way”: Mapping Europe through World Systems Theory: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões

Panelists: Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Lisbon Remedios Perni, University of Alicante Christian Smith, Independent researcher Beyond Performance/Inside the Classroom: Interactive Workshops on Teaching Shakespeare

Panelists: Katherine Gillen, Texas A&M Esther Schupak, Bar-Ilan University Ellen Spolsky, Bar-Ilan University Centre and Periphery: Roman Women in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Panelists: Michela Compagnoni, Roma Tre University Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University Domenico Lovascio, University of Genoa Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia Literary and Linguistic Elsewheres in the Roman Shakespeare

Panelists: Gilberta Golinelli, University of Bologna Rory Loughnane, University of Kent Iolanda Plescia, Sapienza University of Rome Mapping Asian Shakespeares

Panelists: Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, University of Lodz Tianhu Hao, Zhejiang University Renfang Tang, Nanjing Audit University Navigating the Unknown: Shakespeare, Immigration and Exile

Panelists: Stephanie Chamberlain, Southeast Missouri State University Amy L. Smith, Kalamazoo College James M. Sutton, Florida International University New Spaces/Places for Shakespeare Performance & Reproductioon

Panelists: Thomas Cartelli, Muhlenberg College Diana Henderson, MIT Aneta Mancewicz, University of Birmingham Remapping the Early Modern World in Recipes

Panelists: David B. Goldstein, York University Amy L. Tigner, University of Texas 267

Shakespeare, Europe and Geopolitical Displacement (Past and Present)

Panelists: Paul Frazer, University of Northumbria Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire Inmaculada Sánchez García, University of Northumbia Monika Smialkowska, University of Northumbia Shakespeare’s Waste/Lands: Wet, Vast, West

Panelists: Joseph Campana, Rice University HiLlary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia Julie Sanders, Newcastle University The Strangers in Shakespeare. 'Difference' after Fiedler

Panelists: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of California Shaul Bassi, Ca’ Foscari University Miles Parks Grier, Queens College Carol Chillngton Rutter, University of Warwick

Panel

Keywords: World-systems, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, geography

“In dark uneven way”: Mapping Europe through World Systems Theory: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões

Miguel Ramalhete Gomes1, Christian Smith2, Remedios Perni3

1University of Lisbon, Portugal; 2Independent researcher, Berlin; 3University of Alicante, Spain; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

The historical development of the European map, from the early modern period to the present, has been a process of combined and uneven development. This unevenness, which has resulted in a Europe beset by wide discrepancies in life and liberty, is driven by a chiasmatic system of advancement and hegemony in the core at the expense of impoverishment and subjugation at the periphery. Shakespeare, writing at the historical moment when this world system began, registers the dialectical motor of this combined and uneven world through the use of inversions – rhetorical, symbolic and generic. The three papers in this panel will explore Shakespeare’s registration of this development and its role in constructing and mapping Europe – historically, politically, economically.

Smith will explore the intertextuality between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This literary nexus generated a synthesis in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio. This paper will read dialectical inversions in the intertextual nexus, as the mechanism through which Shakespeare and Cervantes registered the start of the modern world system in the schismatic rise of England with the fall of the Spanish empire. Gomes will compare Shakespeare’s interest in Italy to a previous moment building up to the world-system of capitalism: Luís de Camões’ narration of Portugal’s maritime explorations in The Lusiads (1572), by which Portugal’s positioning at the centre of the pre-modern world system was celebrated, a project spurred by a naïve understanding of the acquisition of wealth through conquest. Shakespeare did not write much about Renaissance colonial imperialism, turning instead to an increasingly semi-peripheral Italy, which was, however, the breeding-ground for financial instruments and institutions that, beyond the limitations of Portuguese imperialism, would go on to characterise the world-system of capitalism. Perni will interrogate the role of rape culture in the combined and uneven development of European powers – a process whereby women’s downfall through violation and rape structurally forms part of the rise of the core hegemonic powers – turning to the Lucrece figure in Shakespeare and linking her to Cervantes’ Cardenio, to Livy and Ovid. The three papers will turn dialectically upon the potential power of the defeated – the survivor of rape, subjugation and economic defeat who resides in the periphery. Critique of the literary registration of their tragic condition allows for the realisation of J. G. Ballard’s insight that “the periphery is where the future reveals itself".

Panel

Keywords: performance pedagogy, active learning, interdisciplinary, theater, kinesic, genre-based

Beyond Performance/Inside the Classroom: Interactive Workshops on Teaching Shakespeare

Esther Schupak1, Ellen Spolsky1, Katherine Gillen2

1Bar-Ilan University, Israel; 2Texas A&M--San Antonio; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

The “performance” or “active” method of teaching Shakespeare can no longer be designated a new methodology. Based upon the performance theories of Grice, Schechner, and Worthen, performance methodologies for teaching Shakespeare were initiated by Homer Swander in the 1960s and have been further developed by the efforts of individual academics and organizations such as the Folger Shakespeare Library and Shakespeare’s Globe, among others. In his introduction to the 1990 special teaching issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, Ralph Allen Cohen concludes that performance pedagogy has become so accepted as to represent a methodological “given” and that “the argument for its benefits has won the field” (iii).

This approach to teaching Shakespeare represents an opportunity, but also a problem: most of those who teach Shakespeare in English departments have received literary, rather than theatrical, training. Certainly, if performance pedagogy is to occupy a central place in our pedagogical repertoire, acting training will need to be integrated into our studies. But even theatrical talent and training is not enough: the acting that takes place in a theater is qualitatively different from the acting that takes place in the performance-based Shakespeare classroom. Theatrical acting is transformational; it represents an attempt to produce a unified and compelling interpretation of a given script. In the English classroom, performance often has a diametrically opposite purpose; it is used to explore a range of possible interpretations. That is, in theatrical performance, the text is a tool for producing the performance, whereas in the literature classroom, performance is a tool for analyzing the text. So what is needed are interdisciplinary approaches that can bridge the gap between the theatrical and the literary.

The goal of this session is to provide tools for performance-based instruction that is truly interdisciplinary in its orientation. Furthermore, in order to instantiate the pedagogical research on the efficacy of active learning, we have chosen to give interactive workshops, rather than a traditional reading of papers. These short workshops will call upon expertise from multiple fields to enhance the repertory of methods that pedagogues bring to the Shakespeare classroom.

Ellen Kaplan, whose expertise is in theater, will conduct a workshop on performing Shakespeare in the classroom: action and image. Ellen Spolsky will conduct a workshop on cognitive approaches to performance-based teaching, focusing on kinesic intelligence. Katherine Gillen will discuss the benefits of a genre-based approach to teaching Shakespeare adaptation and appropriation.

Panel

Keywords: ancient Rome, Shakespeare, women, gender

Centre and Periphery: Roman Women in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Domenico Lovascio1, Lisa Hopkins2, Cristiano Ragni3, Michela Compagnoni4

1Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy; 2Sheffield Hallam University, UK; 3Università di Perugia, Italy; 4Università di Roma Tre, Italy; [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Centre and Periphery: Roman Women in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries is a panel exploring the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While plenty of attention has been devoted to male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, not nearly as much has emerged regarding what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their still all too often supposed function as supporting characters or even backdrops for the male protagonists.

In a setting laden with such a variety of meanings as ancient Rome -- distant in time and place but ever present in the early modern English imagination -- exploring the dynamics between male and female as a metaphorical one between centre and periphery might yield compelling and fresh insights into crucial issues such as gender, social relations and identity.

The reception of the Roman past in early modern English literature and culture has attracted renewed and vigorous scholarly interest over the past fifteen years. This panel will therefore display relevance and timeliness by contributing to such a burgeoning area of research. Through the exploration of a diverse array of works produced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this panel seeks to contribute to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were dealt with in early modern English drama especially in relation to a periphery/centre dialectics.

Regrettably, not enough has been done recently about what might be gathered about the representation of female characters in the specific context of Roman drama, especially since the narrative of the founding of the Republic was centrally bound up with the story of a woman, Lucrece. Do female characters in Roman plays feature the same traits found in other genres or do they present any peculiar traits? Does the Roman ideal of virtus in any way clash with the popular stereotype of woman as disorderly and sexually insatiable? Are Roman female characters somehow ‘special’ in early modern English drama? Do their portrayals mirror to any extent the actual condition of English women by projecting English values onto their implicit judgments or do they constitute a privileged mental space on which to project desires and aspirations about women through the creation of idealised female characters? These are among the urgent questions this panel sets out to explore.

Panel

Keywords: Roman plays, Englishness, Alterity, National identity, Language development

Literary and Linguistic Elsewheres in the Roman Shakespeare

Gilberta Golinelli1, Iolanda Plescia2, Rory Loughnane3

1University of Bologna, Italy; 2Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; 3University of Kent, UK; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Rome was a world-wide stage in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. It was not only the arena on which to imagine, perform and produce the Elizabethans’ (new) colonial and imperial geographical space and language, but a backdrop against which to recover English national origins and (re)fashion the nation’s controversial past.

The Roman plays, with their clear juxtaposition between Rome and the rest of the world, expose the mechanisms underpinning the shaping of margins and centres as well as their permeability. In doing so they clearly show how time (past) and space have always been categories instrumental in the construction and consolidation of national identities and dominant ideologies. “There is no way in which people of the world can act, can speak, can create, can come in from the margins, can begin to reflect on their own experience unless they come from some place, they come from some history […]” stated Stuart Hall in 1989, proving how the ‘past’ is both a position from which to speak, and a necessary resource in what one has to say: an important and essential ‘point’ in a spatial and temporal map.

In the last decades the recovery of the ‘past’ during sixteenth and seventeen century England has been seen as an attempt to establish historical precedent and continuity and to ‘purge’ a primitive savagery that needed to be exorcised according to the new logic and language of the translation imperii. Vital and highly productive international research on these aspects has recently been led by the University of Rome 3 on the interfacing between Renaissance Literature - Shakespearean (Roman) plays in particular - and the rise of the ‘new science(s)’.

“This Island of Great Britain”, announced the ‘new’ scientist par excellence Francis Bacon in his famous speech delivered after the ‘union’ proclaimed by James I, “was united under one King […]. And yet there be no Mountains […], there be no Seas […], there is no diversity of Tongue or Language, that hath invited or provoked this ancient Separation or Divorce”, showing how it is mainly through geographical (space), historical (time) and (older) linguistic grounds that the identity and centrality of the new nation, of Britain, could be conceived and built.

Moving from these critical and methodological debates, the panel will investigate the following topics:

Gilberta Golinelli: “Roman Histories and Britain’s (new) Geography in Cymbeline (provisional) Iolanda Plescia, “Linguistic alterity and identities in the Roman Shakespeare” Rory Loughnane: “Titus Andronicus and Englishness”

Panel Keywords: Mapping Asian Shakespeares

Mapping Asian Shakespeares

Kujawinska Courtney Krystyna1, Tianhu Hao2, Renfang Tang3

1 University of Lodz, Poland; 2Zhejiang University, China, People's Republic of China; 3Nanjing Audit University, China;

[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

How Shakespeare has become Shakespeare is a story of metamorphoses across the world, including Asia. Our panel “Mapping Asian Shakespeares” aims to explore the multiple images of Shakesepeare in Asian cultural contexts, which testify to the extraordinary resiliency and universal relevance of the Bard.

The project of Asian Shakespeares initially grew out of colonialism and missionary work. In the nineteenth century Western colonialists and missioanries brought to East Asia new media forms along with Shakespeare and Milton. These modern media, such as the journal, the newspaper, and huaju, play an important role in the modernization process of East Asian countries. The three papers in the panel investigate the history and current situation of the cultural transformaitons of Shakespeare in China and Japan, and demonstrate how that complicated process reflects and contributes to the cultural life of the whole nation. Taken together the papers reveal the liveliness and complexity of Asian Shakespeares by focusing on intercultural theory and practice.

Panel

Keywords: exile, immigrant, tolerance, refugee camp

Navigating the Unknown: Shakespeare, Immigration and Exile

Stephanie Chamberlain1, James M. Sutton2, Amy L. Smith3

1Southeast Missouri State University, United States of America; 2Florida International University; 3Kalamazoo College; [email protected]

Mass dislocations of refugees and immigrants from the Middle-East and Africa are challenging the routine of everyday life throughout western and central Europe. If an exile is but an immigrant who, instead of embracing life, work and ritual in the host country, ceaselessly looks backward to a lost home that she cannot fully re-find or recover, except perhaps in fleeting moments of memorial reconstruction, do Shakespeare’s plays shed any light on the plight and the rights of the exile in their new lands? Are the plays fertile ground, or sterile promontories, in the search for signs of toleration, respect and generous hospitality afforded to the exile? Can Shakespeare bridge the gap between diverse cultures, speaking to the travails of those removed from their native borders? These papers will examine representations of the exile and the refugee in Shakespeare’s plays and their reception in twenty-first century Syrian refugee camps. Dr. James M. Sutton examines Shakespeare’s frequent use of narratives of exile and immigration, exploring the depiction of uprooted lives—due to religious intolerance, political tyranny and even racial injustice—from the early histories and comedies straight through to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Dr. Stephanie Chamberlain reads The Merchant of Venice’s Jessica as both immigrant and exile. Represented as a land of opportunity, Belmont promises Jessica respite from the turmoil she experiences both as the daughter of a controlling Jewish father and as an alien resident within Venice. By the end of the play, however, it becomes evident that Belmont fails to deliver on its promise as a color-, culture-, and religion-blind mecca to would-be immigrants. Dr. Amy L. Smith examines twenty-first century receptions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a Syrian refugee camp in Calais, France. Variously billed as a chance to relieve some of the boredom in the camp and as a "story that is going to translate to thousands of people who are in a similar position (to Hamlet)," the descriptions of the performance in that context and the refugees' reactions to it allows us to examine what it might mean to take a British theater English language production of Hamlet to a largely middle eastern refugee camp. In some ways, Shakespeare's Globe to Globe initiative seems, to have been more about The Globe than the globe.

Panel

New Spaces/Places for Shakespeare Performance & Reproductioon

Diana Henderson (MIT), "Remediating the Venice Ghetto Merchant of Venice."

Aneta Manciewicz (University of Birmingham), "Motion Capture Shakespeare."

Thomas Cartelli (Muhlenberg College), "Disassembly, Meaning-making & Montage in The Rub, an experimental filmic reenactment of Hamlet."

Panel

Keywords: Remapping Early Modern World in Recipes

Remapping the Early Modern World in Recipes

Amy L. Tigner1, David B. Goldstein2

1University of Texas, Arlington, United States of America; 2York University, Canada; [email protected]; [email protected]

This panel will explore the ways in which seventeenth-century English recipe books (or receipt books as they are called in the period)—both in manuscript and print—demonstrate how England’s increasing involvement in global travel, international political and colonial affairs, and environmental geographies appear in quotidian domestic life. Evidence of worldly geography and the notion of remapping boundaries appears in the recipes as medicinal and culinary ingredients, references to foreign provenances, and as narratives within the recipes themselves. The panel will also examine how notions of remapping in recipes appear in Shakespeare’s works as they correspond to similar political and social re-imaginings of the culinary/medicinal geographies.

David B. Goldstein considers how the strange little fruits called medlars appear everywhere in English printed books—except where one would most expect them: books of cookery. Through an analysis of medlars in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Romeo and Juliet, and other publications, Goldstein will demonstrate the complex status of the medlar in the early modern English consciousness, and the ramifications of this status for its strange and often invisible journey through written records of the English diet.

Exploring the notion of remapping environmental geographies, Jennifer Munroe shows how women’s manuscript recipes provide alternative ways to think about the relationship between early modern women and “the environment.” While women were very much connected to household spaces and the bodies that occupied them, their work took them well beyond the walls of the house into less cultivated and controlled environs as they identified and gathered plants that were not always accessible in their kitchen gardens.

Lisa Smith demonstrates how Margaret Baker’s three manuscript recipe books reveal the porousness of geographical boundaries when it came to the transmission of medical knowledge and recipes. In addition to a wide range of medicinal and culinary recipes, Baker also included excerpts from medical treatises by Italian and German authors. Her recipe contributors also frequently had non-English names. In this talk, I will compare the sources of medical information in the manuscripts to create Baker’s intellectual geography.

Examining Othello and recipes from various manuscript receipt books, Amy L. Tigner studies how culinary and medicinal knowledge travels through the masculine spheres of exploration, war, and colonization to the feminine domestic spheres. This paper interrogates how recipes attributed to sailors, soldiers, and slaves traversed the routes of global expansion to change the bodily geographies of the English kitchen.

Panel

Keywords: Shakespeare, Europe, Geopolitical Displacement

Shakespeare, Europe and Geopolitical Displacement (Past and Present)

Paul Frazer1, Douglas Lanier2, Inmaculada Sánchez García1, Monika Smialkowska1

1Northumbria University, United Kingdom; 2University of New Hampshire; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

In times of political conflict and division, Shakespeare’s works form an important platform upon which to consider issues of displacement, exclusion, division and problematic codes of cultural memory and learning. This panel brings together papers on Shakespeare and European geopolitical displacement, ranging from the context of some of Shakespeare’s early writings, to present pedagogical opportunities and perspectives – across literature, film, and commemorative political writing.

Shakespeare’s own politics form our starting point. Across a number of works (and genres), the playwright writes sympathetically about the experience of exile and political persecution. Looking to what Shakespeare wrote in a flurry of creativity in the mid-1590s (c.1593-1597), Paul Frazer argues that this period of the playwright’s career was coloured by a stated interest in (and sympathy for) Europe’s religiously displaced subjects (including English Catholics). Monika Smialkowska’s reading of the geo-politics of Tercentenary commemorations of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 opens out our discussion to consider how Shakespeare was remembered three centuries on – within the cultural horrors of the First World War. The refugee experience was, in this context, served by complex political uses of Shakespeare – forming a vital hinge between displaced communities including Belgian nationals, Eastern European Jews and wider international discussions of integration, assimilation and in/tolerance. Shifting focus to the aftermath and memory of the Second World War, Inmaculada Sánchez García explores the 1960 Czechoslovakian film, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (dir. Jirí Weiss). Weiss’s dark adaptation locates its forbidden love-affair between Czech Romeo and Jewish Juliet in the claustrophobic (politically and ethnically coded) domestic spaces of Nazi- occupied Prague. Probing questions of present as well as past geopolitical displacement, Adele Lee’s contribution considers wider questions of pedagogy, including the challenges and opportunities of teaching Shakespeare through sustained attention to his geographies (real and imagined). Lee showcases a new course entitled ‘Shakespearean Journeys’, demonstrating how mixed-media analysis and technology- enhanced learning can illuminate Shakespeare’s locations – in light of issues of race, ethnicity and national identities (then and now).

Panel

Keywords: ecology, wetlands, west, vast, waste

Shakespeare’s Waste/Lands: Wet, Vast, West

Joseph Campana1, Hilary Eklund2, Vin Nardizzi3, Julie Sanders4

1Rice University, United States of America; 2Loyola University New Orleans, United States of America; 3University of British Columbia, Canada; 4Newcastle University, UK; ; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Waste is omnipresent. The more it surrounds and shapes the conditions of life and culture, the more urgently it solicits attention. Since the pioneering anthropology of Mary Douglas, who understood waste as “matter out of place,” a range of disciplines has comprehended waste through materialities or objects. A set of linked terms—garbage, detritus, rubbish, and trash—have come to the fore in our historical moment, as have analyses dominated by tools, commodities, and things. Waste is not merely an assemblage of things to be analyzed; it is a set of activities and impulses and has a history. To trace the history of waste to the era of Shakespeare is to understand waste with respect to cultures of use. The European Renaissance is a moment in history not yet afflicted by mountains of garbage, an international waste economy, or a Pacific trash gyre; even so, there was perhaps no aspect of use more urgent in Europe than land use.

“Shakespeare’s Waste/Lands” offers an eco-philological approach to spatial aspects of waste and investigates the interrelated nature of usable territories, resources, and people, from the waste spaces of the Old World to the vast “waste wildernesses” of the New. In telling these stories, our focus remains Shakespeare, but we connect to developments in Amsterdam, London, Virginia, Mexico, Ireland, and Rome.

Hillary Eklund's "Wet," ponders the impulse to convert wetlands into dry, arable land, as recorded in early modern colonial narratives and drainage records. Comparing the wasteful behavior of Shakespeare's king Richard II with representations of bogs in Ireland (where Richard goes personally to put down a rebellion), she uncovers how fantasies of transforming the purported "wastes" of wetlands gave rise to modern practices of ecological, political, and cultural waste. Vin Nardizzi’s “Vast,” explores how what was once called “waste” became “vast” by the seventeenth century; he does so through a reading of Shakespeare’s Roman poem, “The Rape of Lucrece.” Joseph Campana’s “West” considers an etymologically tenuous yet historically vivid loop connecting waste and west through the virtuous use of uncultivated land and the virtuous exercise of idle populations in the myriad promotional pamphlets about Virginia by Hariot, Gray, and Hakluyt, which help explain dramas of population in Shakespeare’s “romances.” Julie Sanders will serve as a respondent.

“Shakespeare’s Waste/Lands” explores how waste could have great explanatory power for describing how the European Renaissance became enmeshed within broader global ecologies of labor and exchange.

Panel

Keywords: stranger, identity, ethnicity, gender, difference

The strangers in Shakespeare. 'Difference' after Fiedler

Abdulhamit Arvas1, Shaul Bassi2, Miles Parks Grier3, Carol Chillngton Rutter4

1University of California, Santa Barbara; 2Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia; 3Queens College, CUNY; 4University of Warwick; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

In 1972 Leslie A. Fiedler published The Stranger in Shakespeare, a study of four ‘essential myths’ - the Woman, the Jew, the Moor, the New World Savage - which was bound to become a classic, in spite of some resistance from the academia.

The aim of this panel is to engage with a reconsideration of Fiedler’s myths ideally underlining the existence/persistence of a cartography of diversities and a diversity of cartographies in Shakespeare’s oeuvre throughout time and place, exploring in particular how this cartography rooted itself in European and Western culture via trans-medial migrations, literary rewritings, specific mise-en-scène, etc. Since Fiedler, new ‘strangers’ have been conceptualized on the critical scene. Have Fiedler’s four myths survived until today and how; are they still useful, can we think of new ones? Decades of postcolonial, gender, queer, feminist, cultural, race, ethnic studies on the issue Fiedler was amongst the first to tackle and on its corollaries have produced a variety of approaches and readings on/of Shakespeare’s work. In what way can we talk about a politics of identity related to ‘the stranger’ in Shakespeare? To what extent does his geography of ‘cultural exclusion’ affect his (and our) ideas of agency, relationships with and representation of power, the boundaries between (and the shaping of concepts such as) Right/Wrong, Moral/Immoral, Order/Disorder, Civilized/Uncivilized, Nature/Culture, etc.? Can we isolate an epistemology of difference according to which Shakespeare’s dramatic characters could be ‘classified’? How has this epistemology been (mis)used and how has it changed in history and across geography in the many performances and diverse interpretations of his works? If Fiedler’s critical perspective was informed by his cultural identity and positionality, should we theorize and question the positionality of each critic discussing difference in Shakespeare? We would like to engage with the actuality, relevance, and also the possible obsolescence of such studies’ outcomes.