PLENARY LECTURES
PLENARY 1: Thursday 10.00 - Auditorium: Gary Taylor: Hamlet, Macbeth and Nordic History
Chair: Richard Wilson
PLENARY 2: Friday 10.00 - Auditorium: Sirkku Aaltonen: Shakespeare and National Theatre
Chair: Nely Keinänen
PLENARY 3: Friday 14.00 - Auditorium: Lisbeth Wærp: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Drama
Chair: Stephen Unwin
PLENARY 4: Friday 19.00 - Hampton Church: Graham Holderness: Shakespeare in Scandinavian
Fiction
Chair: Per Sivefors
PLENARY 5: Saturday 10.00 - Studio: Howard Caygill: Kiekegaard’s Shakespeare
Chair: Jon Cook
PLENARY 6: Sunday 10.00 - Auditorium: Eero Tarasti: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Music
Chair: Robert Layton
PLENARY 7: Sunday 16.30- Studio: Gunnar Sorelius: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Film and TV
Chair: Martin Regal
1 PANELS
PANEL 1: THE NORDIC HAMLET
(Thursday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Roy Eriksen)
Patricia Harris Gillies: Hamlet and its Scandinavian Sources: The Nature of Shamanistic Kingship
Régis Augustus Bars Closel: Anglo-Danish Reformation in Hamlet
Jón Viðar Jónsson: Requiem for a Passing Aristocracy: Shakespeare and the Icelandic Sagas
PANEL 2: BALTIC SHAKESPEARE ITINERARIES
(Thursday 11.30, Studio. Chair: Sonja Fielitz)
Eva Griffith: Early English playing abroad: Will Kemp, John Green and Roaming for Queen Anna
Ildiko Solti: 'Who's there?' or, Revolution in Theatre History at Kronborg
Kelly Hunter: Hamlet: Still Alive in Gdansk
PANEL 3: ROYAL PATRONS
(Thursday 14.00, Gallery. Chair: Edward Chaney)
June Schlueter and Dennis McCarthy: Shakespeare, Two Norths, and Anglo/Swedish Affairs
Sara Smart: The Palatine Wedding: Confessional Tension and Cultural Transfer
Neville Davies: Getting the Facts Straight: Play Performances for Christian IV during his 1606 Visit
to England
2 PANEL 4: SHAKESPEAREAN AUTHORSHIP AND PRINT
(Thursday 14.00, Studio. Chair: Graham Holderness)
Terri Bourus: Shakespeare’s Earliest Hamlet
Sara Marie Westh: Shakespeare, Brahe, and Authorial Anxiety
Anna Swärdh: The 1904 Discovery of the Titus Andronicus First Quarto in Sweden: Negotiating
Value
PANEL 5: THE ENGLISH IN DENMARK
(Thursday 16.00, Gallery. Chair: Frank Whately)
Sonja Fielitz: “Going over the wild world”: Will Kemp in Scandinavia
Edward Chaney: Inigo Jones in Denmark
Chantal Schutz: “I haue beene twice vnder sayle for Denmarke” – The Travails and Excuses of Iohn
Dovvland Batcheler of Musick
PANEL 6: MISSION IN FINLAND
(Thursday 16.00, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Sirkku Aaltonen)
Jyrki Nummi: The Build-Up of Finnish Semiosphere: Historical Transfromations in J. F. Lagervall’s
Ruunulinna
Eeva-Liisa Bastman: From Tragedy of Mind to Imagined History: The Scottish Play in Kalevalaic
Guise
Erika Laamanen: Transforming Macbeth into Kalevalan metre
3 PANEL 7: SHAKESPEARE AND DANISH POST-ROMANTIC LITERATURE
(Friday 11.30, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Dominic Rainsford)
Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen: The Making of a Storyteller: Hans Christian Andersen and Family Reading
in the Nineteenth-Century
Paul Binding: Andersen and Shakespeare’s Danish Translators
Jacob Bøggild: The influence of William Shakespeare upon Canonical Post-Romantic Danish
Literature: Anxiety and the Imaginary in Blicher, Kierkegaard and Blixen
PANEL 8: COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE
(Friday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Delilah Brataas)
Joanne Greenwood with Kaarina Karjula: Shakespeare and Finnish theatre RTT
Kiki Lindell: Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance in Sweden: Method or Madness?
Gweno Williams: Beyond the ‘Balcony Scene’: Actively Engaging Norwegian Undergraduates and
Teachers with the Fullest Range and Experience of Shakespeare’s Plays
PANEL 9: IBSEN AND STRINDBERG
(Friday 15.00, Gallery. Chair: Martin Regal)
Nataša Šofranac: Hamlet’s Scandinavian Descendants: Miss Julie and Nora
4 Per Sivefors: Dreams, Subjectivity and the Author: the Cases of Shakespeare and Strindberg
Víctor Grovas Hajj: Ibsen and Shakespeare in Mexican Theatre during the Nineteenth Century: A
History of Two Rivals
PANEL 10: NATIONAL THEATRES
(Friday 15.00, Studio. Chair: Charles Lock)
Pirkko Koski: Shakespeare and the Finnish National Theatre in the 1970s & 1980s
Aleksandra Sakowska: Baltic Shakespeare: The Gdansk Theatre
Christina Sandhaugh: Girdle Round the Earth: Toralv Maurstad's Fifty Years as Puck
PANEL 11: THE VISIT OF KING CHRISTIAN VII
(Friday 18.10, Hampton Church. Chair: Frank Whately)
Richard Wilson: Christian VII and Garrick: The Visit of the Royal Playgoer
Anne Sophie Refskou: The Prince of Denmark in Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair
PANEL 12: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 1
(Saturday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Ewan Fernie)
John Gillies with Dan Watts: A Dialogue at the Borders of Literature and Philosophy
PANEL 13: PROBLEM PLAYS
(Saturday 11.30, Studio. Chair: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen)
5 Riitta Pohjola-Skarp: Dramatic and Tragic Irony in Aleksis Kivi’s Drama Karkurit and in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Roy Eriksen: Reconfiguring Falstaff in Hans E. Kinck's tragedy Den sidste Gjest [The Final Guest]
(1910)
Martin Humpál: Knut Hamsun’s Criticism of Shakespeare
PANEL 14: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 2
(Saturday 14.00, Studio. Chair: Anne-Sophie Refskou)
Nina Sanderhoff Hansen: Hamlet the Ironist
Peter Kishore Saval: Demonic Despair and Timon of Athens
Ewan Fernie: Shakespeare’s God via Kierkegaard and Hegel
PANEL 15: CANONIZING SHAKESPEARE
(Saturday 14.00, Gallery. Chair: Lisa Hopkins)
Clas Zilliacus: Shakespeare for Stage and Family: Wilhelm Bolin
Pentti Paavolainen: Birth of a Tradition: Kaarlo Bergbom
Tony Pinkney: Hamlet in Iceland: Erik Magnusson
PANEL 16: THE MODERN HAMLET
(Saturday 16.00, Gallery Chair: John Gillies)
Annelis Kuhlmann: The Hecuba Discussion in Postwar Theatre in Denmark
6 Frank Brevik: Hamlet through a Presentist Lens
Timo Uotinen: Critique of Modernity in Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business
PANEL 17: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC FANTASY
(Saturday 16.00, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Per Sivefors)
Lisa Hopkins: Hamlet, Dracula and Iceland
Sven-Arve Myklebost: The Organist Conspiracy: Shakespeare as Treasure Map
Anthony Johnson: The Journey to Melonia (Resan till Melonia, 1989): The Tempest as a Nordic
Fantasy
ROUNDTABLE: TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE
(Saturday 17.30, Gallery: Chair: Dominique Goy-Blanquet)
Niels Brunse: Denmark
Þórarinn Eldjárn: Iceland
Alice Martin: Finland
Edvard Hoem: Norway
Eva Ström: Sweden
7 PANEL 18: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC MUSIC
(Sunday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: David Nice)
Michelle Assay and David Fanning: Carl Nielsen, Shakespeare and the Modern Breakthrough
Daniel Grimley: ‘Some heavenly music’?: Lateness in Sibelius’s Stormen
Annika Lindskog: How They Like It: Midsummer Night Dreams in Swedish Song
Elke Albrecht: The final challenge? Aulis Sallinen’s last opera King Lear
PANEL 19: ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE
(Sunday 14.30, Gallery. Chair: Christina Sandhaug)
Alice Martin: From Macbeth to Hamlet - A Ten-Year Learning Process in Editing and Translating
Shakespeare
Jessica Allen Hanssen: “Which when he has a house, he'll deck withal”: Northern Norwegian
Language and Cultural Translation in The Tempest
Delilah Brataas: The Shadow’s Shadow: The Chiaroscuro of Gendered Ambition in Svend Gade’s
1921 Hamlet
PANEL 20: FILM AND TV
(Sunday 14.30, Studio. Chair: Ken McMullen)
Susanne Greenhalgh: Venus and Adonis in Per Fly’s TV Forestillinger
8 Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García: Nothing, and Be Silent: Shakespeare in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
Dominic Rainsford: Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice: Shakespeare’s Swedish Apocalypse
9 ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
PANEL 1: THE NORDIC HAMLET
Patricia Harris Gillies: Hamlet and its Scandinavian Sources: the nature of shamanistic kingship
The Hamlet text often adverts to the natural world: firmament, promontory, sea, trees, whale, hawk and cloud. These sometimes enigmatic images are fundamental elements in the Scandinavian sources for the play. For example, Saxo Grammaticus’ Vita Amlethi features Amleth amid a complex of animal references. Other sources adverted, such as Saxo’s account of King Olaf of Denmark’s family and the Saga of Hrolf Kraki feature shifting animal and human identities in relation to the struggle over kingship. Clive Tolley’s recent book, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (2.vols.Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2009) suggests a thought-provoking framework in which to read kingship as a mediation between the community and the dangerous spaces of death, a mediation warranted by identification with the codes and configurations of the natural world. The advantage of this type of reading is that it implicates the play text more deeply with language and events in the Scandinavian sources that are often regarded as playful or atmospheric features.
Dr. Patricia Harris Stäblein Gillies teaches in the Department of Literature, film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex-Wivenhoe Park. She holds a Ph.D. in French Literature and Language from Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois. Her doctoral thesis featured a comparative study of heroism and kingship in Germanic, Latin and Romance literatures. She continues to research, publish and lecture in those domains.
Régis Augustus Bars Closel: Anglo-Danish Reformation in Hamlet
The Ghost in Hamlet prompts his son many times to remember him. Remembrance is present throughout the play, highlighting the importance of public memory. A historical approach to the play may make one wonder: “Which king is Hamlet asked to remember?” Hamlet was a play about a Danish prince performed to an English audience. If a foreign place is a site for discussing local problems, a mimetic model of the Ghost may be previous English and/or Danish kings. This paper proposes a connection between the Kings of England and Denmark, going back to an English King whose reign parallels a Danish one from the same period. The Danish Frederick I faced many of the same Reformation problems as Henry VIII. Both struggled against ecclesiastical law, confiscated monasteries, made jurisdictional changes, yet avoided drastic doctrinal measures. At the time of Hamlet, Henry VIII would have been the last King to provide an English avatar of the Ghost. And with the accession of James I, desires were awakened for a further Reformation among certain groups. Moreover, although plays about the Tudors did appear, their references to Reformation topics were usually more indirect. This paper will shed light on the connections between the Danish and English past through Hamlet in light of the dramatic remembrances of the Tudor past and Reformation.
Régis Augustus Bars Closel is currently finishing a PhD thesis at Universidade Estadual de Campinas about the play ‘Sir Thomas More’, involving its first translation into Portuguese and a study on Elizabethan/Jacobean drama and the English Reformation with a scholarship provided by FAPESP. He has recently concluded a one-year period as a visiting research student at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, also supported by FAPESP. He co-organized a book about Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (2010) and its followers and a book about
10 Brazilian Shakespearean Studies (2015) and published many articles and book chapters. Closel's main interests are textual collaboration, historical drama and translation.
Jón Viðar Jónsson: Requiem for a Passing Aristocracy: Shakespeare and the Icelandic Sagas
With the exception of Hamlet, there has been very little research conducted on the correspondences between early Scandinavian Literature, especially the Icelandic Sagas, and Shakespeare's plays. This paper primarily examines Shakespeare’s apparent nostalgia for a disempowered aristocracy and similar sympathies evinced by the author of Njal’s Saga and evident in other sagas. For example, the manner in which Shakespeare treats tyranny, revenge and duplicity in the first Henriad, where Edward IV and then Richard of Gloucester aspire to absolute power through kingship, appears to parallel power struggles among the Icelandic chieftains and between them and their ostensible overlords, a line of Norwegian Kings. In both, individual noblemen/chieftains, and sometimes entire “houses,” are undermined and eventually destroyed to bolster the power of the throne. Similar sympathies may be seen in Richard II and Julius Caesar, where the act of regicide itself is condemned but where Shakespeare appears to sympathize with the noblemen who make a stand against tyranny. Indeed, like some of the most celebrated Icelandic sagas, certain of Shakespeare’s plays can be read as amounting to a requiem for a passing aristocracy, and one that is predominantly tragic in tone.
Jón Viðar Jónsson was Head of Radio Drama at RÚV from 1982-1991. After completing a DPhil in theatre studies at the University of Stockholm (1996), he first taught dramatic literature and theatre studies and then became a theatre critic. From 2003-11, he was Director of the Icelandic Theatre Museum. His main area of research has been fin de siècle Icelandic theatre and especially the works of Jóhann Sigurjónsson (1880-1920. He has published numerous articles and essays, both academic and in the popular press, and edited the complete plays of Jökul Jakobsson (1933- 1978) and Guðmundur Steinsson (1926-1996), Icelandic two most important modern playwrights.
PANEL 2: BALTIC SHAKESPEARE ITINERARIES
Ildiko Solti: 'Who's there?' or, Revolution in Theatre History at Kronborg
Elsinore Castle had a formative impact on Shakespeare's Hamlet through the well-documented performance by actors of Shakespeare's acquaintance at the castle in 1587. Another performance by English players at Kronborg, Tyrone Guthrie's Hamlet with Laurence Olivier in the title role in 1937, has changed the course of theatre history, contributing to the development of the reconstructive movement and Original Practices of production. It is surprising why the startling insights of that performance that led eventually to the construction of theatres such as the Globe or Rose Kingston itself, have only patially materialised in these theatres, or indeed in productions at Kronborg today.
In this paper, I suggest that the significance of the Kronborg Hamlet of 1937 cannot be fully appreciated without theorising Original Practices (OP) as a process of Practice Research (PR, formerly PaR). I show through the Mousetrap scene that the Great Hall, rather than the courtyard, is the architectural environment that is more historically relevant to the play's production, and can therefore yield more discoveries about the composition to which it contributes. One of these discoveries, I propose, is that Kronborg's Holger the Dane may overturn completely the hitherto assumed dominant action pattern of Shakespeare's Hamlet. 11 Ildiko is an actor-director, researcher and teacher. She trained in Dramatic Arts at Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA. Having returned to Hungary, she obtained her MA at Eotvos Lorand University, and was Artistic Director of an English language theatre company, The Phoenix, in Budapest. In 1999 she moved to London where she has been teaching and conducting research and experiment in performance, focusing on Elizabethan/Jacobean working theatre reconstructions through the method of research through practice in performance (PaR). She holds a PhD from Middlesex University.
Eva Griffith: Early English playing abroad: Will Kemp, John Green and Roaming for Queen Anna
Dr. Eva Griffith is a seventeenth-century theatre historian who has published extensively on the Earl of Worcester’s/Queen Anna’s men and the Red Bull playhouse. Work on this company is found in Richard Dutton's Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre and Huntington Library Quarterly as examples. Her book, ‘A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse: the Queen's Servants at the Red Bull Theatre c.1605-1619’ is published by Cambridge University Press. Acting as Durham University's AHRC Research Associate on ‘The Complete Works of James Shirley’ for OUP (2008-2012), she has written on Shirley in England and Ireland for The Times Literary Supplement and for Four Courts Press, also publishing on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the TLS. She is currently editing her performance history of Webster's ‘The White Devil’ for Bloomsbury-Arden and continues writing on James Shirley for a monograph with a theatre history twist. Eva spent twenty years as an actor before her BA, MA and PhD, all achieved at King’s College, London. When she was sixteen she performed the part of Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in two productions – with the second at the National Theatre. Michael Bryant was Gregers, Stephen Moore, Hjalmar, and Sir Ralph Richardson, Old Ekdal.
Kelly Hunter: Hamlet: Still Alive in Gdansk
Kelly Hunter is an actress on stage, film, TV and radio, having been directed by Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn and acted in several RSC, National Theatre and BBC productions. She has been nominated for an Olivier award (1993, Best Actress in a Musical, Lola in Trevor Nunn’s ‘The Blue Angel’) and received the 1996 TMA Best Actress Award, for playing Rosalind in As You Like It, directed by Stephen Unwin as well as a 1997 Sony Gold Best Actress Award, for Transit of Venus, directed by Alison Hindle for BBC Wales Radio 3. More recently, she has focused on directing with several productions of Shakespeare in the US and UK, and most recently directing her own adaptation of Hamlet ‘Hamlet’, ‘Who’s There?’) in the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival 2015. She is the Artistic Director of the Flute Theatre and has created and taught a distinctive methodology, The Hunter Heartbeat Method, which uses Shakespeare to release the communicative blocks within children with Autism—which is being researched in Ohio State University. She has also recently authored two books, ‘Shakespeare’s Heartbeat ‘(2014) and ‘Cracking Shakespeare’ (2015).
PANEL 3: ROYAL PATRONS
June Schlueter and Dennis McCarthy: Shakespeare, Two Norths, and Anglo/Swedish Affairs
This two-part co-authored paper is concerned with two Englishmen named North: Thomas, well-known to Shakespeareans for his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, and George, sometime ambassador to Sweden and author of The Description of Swedland, Gotland, and Finland, intended to introduce Englanders to the country of Eric XIV, Elizabeth’s suitor. In the first part, we argue that Thomas was the author of Titus and Vespasian, a play, now lost, that served as source for Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and that (like its predecessor Gorboduc) cautioned against
12 marriage to a Goth. In the second part, we introduce an unknown essay on rebels and rebellion that George dedicated to Roger North at Kirtling Hall in 1576. The essay is not just the only unpublished document that has substantive relevance to the canon; it is also one of the most important Shakespearean source-texts in any form. It is, in brief, a storehouse of Shakespeare’s political speeches, serving as the basis for no fewer than 20 canonical passages. It also helps resolve long-standing questions about Jack Cade’s final hours in 2 Henry VI and the pseudo-Chaucerian Merlin prophecy in King Lear.
June Schlueter is Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emerita, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of books and articles on the early modern period and on modern drama, her most recent ‘The Album Amicorum and the London of Shakespeare’s Time ‘(British Library, 2011). For 20 years, she co-edited ‘Shakespeare Bulletin’.
Dennis McCarthy is the author of ‘Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth’ (Oxford University Press, 2009). An independent scholar residing in New Hampshire, USA, he has published papers on geophysics, biogeography, and English literature. His 2007 article for ‘The Journal of Geophysical Research’ was the first to provide the correct explanation for the global distribution of continents and oceans. At present, he is completing a book on Sir Thomas North.
Sara Smart: The Palatine Wedding: Confessional Tension and Cultural Transfer
The wedding in 1613 of Elizabeth Stuart to Elector Friedrich V of the Palatinate is an event of at least twofold significance. First, with regard to confessional allegiance, the wedding of the daughter of James VI/I and Anna of Denmark to the leader of the radical Protestants in the Empire signalled, or so German Protestants hoped, James’s support in their struggle with the Catholic Habsburgs, which erupted in the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. Second, the wedding is of immense cultural importance, leading to a period when the Palatine court was part of network influenced by traditions typical of the Oldenburg and Stuart dynasties. Based on the findings of the interdisciplinary study The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (eds. Sara Smart and Mara Wade), the paper traces the role of Elizabeth Stuart as an agent of cultural transfer, who, following the interests of her mother, promoted court dance in Calvinist Heidelberg. The paper also demonstrates that the cultural openness fostered by Elizabeth was matched by a rigid confessional identity, which found expression in the image of Friedrich as leader of a pan-European Protestant crusade.
Sara Smart is Associate Professor in German at the University of Exeter. Her research is focused on German court culture of the early modern period. Interests include court festivities and stylization of the ruler. At present she is working on the court in Berlin with specific focus on the portrayal of the wives of the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg. Recent publications include ‘The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival,’ a co-edited volume with Mara Wade, which explores the context and celebration of this major dynastic event and its impact on cultural exchange and transfer.
Neville Davies: Getting the Facts Straight: Play Performances for Christian IV during his 1606 Visit to England
Five plays were performed at the English court during the state visit of Christian IV in 1606. This paper assesses the evidence afresh and provides new dates for some of those performances. It also considers the question of whether Macbeth was one of the three plays presented by the King's Men and seen by Christian.
For many years before his retirement, Neville Davies (University of Birmingham) taught English Literature at the University of Birmingham, but he has also taught at Liverpool, Oslo and Bangor Universities. His publications range 13 widely and include essays both on Shakespeare and on Ibsen. Recent publications have been on the entertainments for Elizabeth I at Elvetham (1591). Currently at press is a collection of reprinted essays by the late Maren-Sofie Røstvig to which he has contributed a Preface surveying her life and work.
PANEL 4: SHAKESPEAREAN AUTHORSHIP AND PRINT
Terri Bourus: Shakespeare's Earliest Hamlet
The dominant textual theories about Hamlet all agree that the 1603 quarto, though printed earlier than the 1604/5 quarto and the 1623 folio, must represent a derivative version of the play, and therefore must date from 1599 or later. This paper argues that all such theories are fundamentally flawed. Theatrical evidence clearly indicates that the 1603 text represents an earlier version, written and performed eleven years before composition of the more familiar, longer texts. This interpretation places the 1603 version near the beginning of Shakespeare’s playwriting career.
Terri Bourus is a Professor of English Drama at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) and an Equity actor. She is also the Director of the New Oxford Shakespeare project at IUPUI, one of the General Editors of the ‘New Oxford Shakespeare’ edition of the Complete Works, in old-spelling and modern-spelling (forthcoming in 2016), and Founding Artistic Director of Hoosier Bard Productions in Indianapolis. She has published on film and stage, the early modern book trade, and Shakespeare, Middleton and Fletcher. Her most recent book is ‘Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance’ published by Palgrave in October 2014.
Sara Marie Westh: Shakespeare, Brahe, and Authorial Anxiety
In this paper I am going to discuss two very different early modern individual’s approach to the printing press: that of playwright William Shakespeare and astronomer Tycho Brahe. These two exceptional men came from vastly different backgrounds, worked in fields that had little or no relation to each other, and have led separate afterlives. However, though both their personal and public histories are very dissimilar, their actions in relation to the press are motivated, I argue, by a comparable authorial anxiety. I identify the origins of this anxiety as the change undergone by the concept of authorship in the decade following the invention of the printing press and the resulting fluidity of text.
Comparing the history of the printing press in early modern Denmark to that of a contemporary England, this paper explores the motivations that moved Shakespeare and Brahe to handle their words in print in the particular ways they did. From London to Hven the question of when the author’s words enter into print to be propelled outwards and become communal property was a particularly pressing problem of the time, and this has I propose, left its mark on both Shakespeare and Brahe.
Sara Weath writes: I research authorial intent from a mixed textual and philosophical platform, looking at theory and editorial practise with philosophy of mind in the back of my head. I explore the many paradoxes belonging to authorial intent: textual instability and immediacy, authorial materiality and immateriality, the universality and historicity of readerly experience - the conundrums that deeply influence how we edit and read Shakespeare in our time and his own. As a Shakespearean, Brahe is slightly left of my usual field, but I hope to combine two labours of love without getting lost.
14 Anna Swärdh: The 1904 discovery of the Titus Andronicus First Quarto in Sweden: negotiating value
The first quarto of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, printed in 1594, exists in a unique copy owned by The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. The volume was discovered in Sweden in November 1904, and purchased by Henry Folger in January 1905. This paper traces the Swedish reactions to the discovery and sale through letters, postcards, telegrams, newspaper articles, photographs, and court documents. In drawing on hitherto undisclosed material, the paper substantially adds to the account given by J. Q. Adams in his 1936 facsimile edition of the play. In the surviving documents, the material volume’s monetary value is of central interest. This is neither surprising nor new; the point of the activities instigated by the owner and the Lund University librarian Evald Ljunggren to whom he turned for help was to sell the book, and, as Lukas Erne has shown, already in his lifetime ‘“Shakespeare” became a coveted book trade construction with which quite a number of stationers tried to make money’ (Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 89). Still, the negotiations involved in establishing the monetary value of the ‘old book’ soon came to involve other kinds of value (artistic value; academic and professional prestige; philanthropic value; the value of peace of mind, of health, of family relations), all of which—understood in terms of the ‘labour’ that goes into producing the value of an object of art or an artist (Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 172)—contributed not only to negotiating the value of the Titus quarto, but also to producing and reaffirming the value of ‘Shakespeare’. The paper will pay special attention to the activities of Ljunggren in furthering the sale but also in contributing information to the academic community.
Anna Swärdh is a senior lecturer in English literature at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her dissertation ‘Rape and Religion in English Renaissance Literature’ (Uppsala, 2003) studied a number of literary texts against the background of religious controversies in the wake of the English reformation. She went on to studying formal and generic aspects of late Elizabethan complaint poetry in a project sponsored by The Swedish Research Council, ‘The Emulative Complaint’. She has also published on historical and contemporary adaptations and productions of Shakespeare.
PANEL 5: THE ENGLISH IN DENMARK
Sonja Fielitz: “Going over the wild world”: Will Kemp in Scandinavia
In his Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood states that the father to the present King of Denmark, Christian IV (1588-1648), that is, Frederick II (1559-1588) “entertained into his seruice a Company of English comedians, commended vnto him by the honourable the Earle of Leicester… ” In 1586, the Earl of Leicester commanded the English forces in the Netherlands to aid the United Provinces in their resistance to Spain, and he had with him a company which included “Will, the Lord of Leicester’s jesting player”. This “Will” is generally identified as Will Kemp, one of the most famous theatrical fools in the 1590s who joined the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 and became a sharer when they built the Globe Playhouse in 1599. In my paper, I will trace the role that Will Kemp and the early English companies of actors played in bringing the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to Scandinavia.
Sonja Fielitz is Professor of English Literature at the University of Marburg (Germany). She received her PhD in 1992 with a study of Shakespeare’s ‘Timon of Athens’. Her post-doctoral thesis, published in 2000, examines the status of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ within the various theoretical and critical discourses in England between 1660 and 1800. She has published about 45 essays and has edited six collections of essays on various topics. Her main field of expertise in research and teaching is the early modern period with a focus on religious discourses such as the early Jesuit mission, as well as Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
15 Edward Chaney: Inigo Jones in Denmark
Our first record of a payment to Inigo Jones is for £10, dated 28 June 1603 from Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland ‘to Henygo Jones, a picture maker.' In my edition of Inigo Jones's Roman Sketchbook I drew attention to the fact that this was the same date as Jones's departure with Rutland and his brothers for Elsinore to present Christian IV with the garter and attend the baptism of his son. I argue that the first, rushed publication of Hamlet, which also occurred at this time was prompted by this then much celebrated mission to Denmark. Although Jones had probably already travelled in Italy with the Manners, and indeed their major domo Robert Dallington (who also accompanied them to Denmark), he would have been very interested in some of the buildings he saw in Denmark. When Christian IV visited England in the summer of 1606, Robert Cecil asked Jones and Ben Jonson to devise an entertainment for him at Theobalds. At least in terms of travel, Jones could by this time claim superior experience to his friend, rival and eventual enemy, Jonson. In 1613 Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, went on to commission an impresa from Shakespeare which Richard Burbage painted for the Accession day ceremony for which Jones, albeit on the point of returning to Italy, may ultimately have been responsible.
Edward Chaney is the Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts at Southampton Solent University. He taught for six years at the University of Pisa and was a Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has published widely on the history of collecting, the Grand Tour, Inigo Jones and G.B. Edwards. He is currently working on the legacy of ancient Egypt in Early Modern England.
Chantal Schutz: “I haue beene twice vnder sayle for Denmarke” – The Travails and Excuses of Iohn Dovvland Batcheler of Musick
John Dowland was employed as a court lutenist by Christian IV of Denmark between 1598 and 1606 where he received high pay and was granted regular leave of absence for extended periods. He alludes to this ‘Kingly entertainment in a forraine climate’ in the preface to one of his last publications after his return to England. The title pages of an earlier publication had boasted of his being lutenist “to the most high and mightie Christian the fourth by the grace of God king of Denmark and Norwey, &c.” in 1603 (Third and last booke of songs or aires), increasing this “to the most royall and magnificent, Christian the fourth, King of Denmarke, Norway, Vandales, and Gothes, Duke of Sleswicke, Holsten, Stormaria, and Ditmarsh: Earle of Oldenburge and Delmenhorst” in 1604 (Lachrimae, or Seven teares).
Dowland’s employment at court included acting as an agent to procure instruments and probably also acting as an informant during critical times in Anglo-Danish relations. This paper will examine the tension between Dowland’s self-fashioning efforts to establish his reputation in England through his printed collections and the constraints engendered by his position at the court of Christian IV.
Chantal Schutz is a Professor of English at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), Head of English and Vice-President of Languages; and she is a member of the PRISMES research group at Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure and Université Paris 7 (B.A., M.A.) and received her PhD from Sorbonne Nouvelle (supervisor François Laroque) for ‘A Mad World, my Masters ‘by Thomas Middleton, critical edition and translation. She was French lectrice at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and has been treasurer of the French Shakespeare Society since 2012 as was a member of the organizing team of the Shakespeare 450 Conference in Paris in 2014. She is also a talented soprano.
16 PANEL 6: MISSION IN FINLAND
Jyrki Nummi – Eeva-Liisa Bastman – Erika Laamanen: Macbeth, Ruunulinna and the Poetics of Adaptation
J. F. Lagervall’s early dramatic text Ruunulinna (‘The Castle of the Crown’, 1834) is the first five-act drama in Finnish language. The play, subtitled as ‘tragedy’, is an adaptation and a transposition (in Genette’s taxonomy) of Shakespeare’s Macbeth the plot and characters of which it closely follows. Ruunulinna’s position in the history of Finnish literature and drama presents a neglected problem. The status of the work has been low due to its epic nature (length), to the supposed clumsiness in diction and character, and to the lack of originality. The play is, however, an illustrative example of the ways the early Finnish authors tried to understand the need for a literature of its own in the new-born Finnish nation by linking their works to the major European tradition and by using resources of folk tradition. We propose to examine this early Shakespearean connection to Finnish literature by examining (1) the strategy of Ruunulinna’s generic choices in relation to the domestication of the text to the Finnish literary horizon; (2) the precise relation of it to Macbeth – how do the compositional changes affect the structure of the target text; and (3) the experimentations with several metrical schemes and their function in relation to the source text.
Jyrki Nummi: The Build-Up of Finnish Semiosphere: Historical Transfromations in J. F. Lagervall’s Ruunulinna
Ruunulinna is the first attempt in Finnish literature to fuse several sources of national identity into a literary form: history, mythology, folk poetry, the language of the “people” of Väinämöinen. The new repertoire is linked to the canonical tradition of the European literature through adaptation. Although adaptations in the contemporary European theatre and opera were a norm and a fully accepted way to create new works to new environments and media, the initially positive critical attitude towards Lagervall’s work changed radically in the end of the 19th century as the modern idea of the work of art as a unique and original artefact was born. Ruunulinna was considered a shameful and childish representative of a peripheral literary culture while important Finnish artists made serious contributions to European art, music and literature. This tension between the major (European) and the minor (folk) tradition was to become a durable and complex trait in Finnish culture. Little attention has been paid to the generic transformation that Lagervall undertook in adapting a Shakespearean “tragedy of mind” to a historical drama. The idea of this paper is to examine how the drama creates an early idea of the history of Finland (which did not exist yet) as a response to the identity problem in the newly found “nation among European nations”.
Jyrki Nummi is a professor of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. His latest publications include two critical editions on Aleksis Kivi’s plays, ‘Nummisuutarit’ and ‘Kullervo’.
Eeva-Liisa Bastman: From Tragedy of Mind to Imagined History: The Scottish Play in Kalevalaic Guise
In J.F. Lagervall’s Finnish version of Macbeth, the main story is unaltered and also the classical five act structure has been preserved. However, there are some major differences between Shakespeare’s Scottish play and its early Finnish adaption. The material is reorganized, some scenes are left out entirely, and there are considerable changes in the characters. By adopting the style of folk poetry and making use of mythological characters from Finnish folklore as well as Karelian names and places, Lagervall situates his adaption in a local, quasi-historical setting and endows it with a pronounced national romantic overtone. In my paper, I examine some differences between the two plays and discuss the consequences of Lagervall’s modifications. How do the changes in structure and dramatis personae affect the nature and the overall theme of the play? In short, what does Macbeth look like in Kalevalaic guise? 17 Eeva-Liisa Bastman is a postgraduate student in Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on hymn poetics and Finnish Pietist hymns from the late 18th to the early 19th century. Her publications include articles on hymn poetry and self-taught peasant writers.
Erika Laamanen: Transforming Macbeth into Kalevalan metre
Abstract: In my paper I examine the function of divergent metrical schemes in Lagervall’s adaptation of Macbeth , Ruunulinna (1834). The play has a folklore basis that is created by the so called Kalevala metre. The key elements are (i) a line of trochaic tetrametre, (ii) the rules regarding the first syllable of the word, (iii) parallelism, and (iv) alliteration. However, Lagervall occasionally departs from the folklore metre and, by using the rhythmic changes of iambic and prosaic passages in Macbeth as a frame, adds features altogether alien to it. In the light of my analysis the folklore metre carries out the nationalist ends of the play, whereas the diversions from it are purely experimental in nature – nationalism and the urge to experiment both being in accordance with the spirit of age. In the beginning of the 19th century, Finnish poetry, apart from folklore, was only beginning to emerge, and one of the major issues was the direction into which Finnish metre should be developed. Ruunulinna proves to be an experiment in mixing the folklore elements with European models.
Erika Laamanen is a postgraduate student in Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation deals with the Finnish Modernist Lauri Viita (1916−1965) and the metalyrical aspects of his poetry. Her publications include popular articles on modern poetry.
PANEL 7: SHAKESPEARE AND DANISH POST-ROMANTIC LITERATURE
Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen: The Making of a Storyteller: Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen and Family Reading in the Nineteenth-Century
This paper is a discussion of the influence of popular communal reading practices around Shakespeare’s works on Hans Christian Andersen’s practice of composition and the construction of his own author-figure in the first half of the nineteenth century. The paper will trace the importance of ‘reading aloud’ in Danish Biedermeier culture to the construction of a ‘Danish Household Shakespeare’ and, conversely, how Andersen modelled his own authorship on such reading practices and on Shakespeare as a Romantic author-genius.
Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL since 2010. He received his PhD in English Literature from Aarhus University with a thesis on Henry James. He has edited books on World Literature, Nordic Publishing and Book History, and published several articles on Hans Christian Andersen, Henry James and Scandinavian Crime Fiction. He is currently involved in the AHRC-funded research project ‘Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations’.
Paul Binding: Andersen and Shakespeare’s Danish Translators
While he will of course pay tribute to Hans Christian Andersen’s lifelong fascination with Shakespeare, and to his creative friendships with eminent Shakespeare translators Commodore Wulff (Danish) and Ludwig and Dorothea Tieck (German), Paul Binding will concentrate in his talk on Andersen’s ‘Hamlet’ novel, “At være eller ikke være”
18 ‘To Be or Not To Be’ (1857, simultaneously published in Danish, English and German). The quotation that forms the title points to the profound and governing concerns of the book. Niels Bryde, one of Andersen’s best-drawn protagonists, is Hamlet-like in the tests and existential confrontations he undergoes rather than in emotional situations, though we should note here that he is early deprived of his blood-father and adopted by a stepfather, Japetus Mollerup, a Jutland clergyman with whom relationship becomes for a long period impossibly strained. Niels moves through religious questioning and doubt into a science-based atheism, despite following Japetus into the ministry. Yet circumstances and engagements with the culture and public events around him lead him back to Christianity; he conducts intellectual dialogues with contemporary thinkers whose modern radical Christianity Niels finds interesting but ultimately unsatisfying – D.F. Strauss, L. Feuerbach, N.F.S. Grundtvig – just as Hamlet’s debates relate outwards to contemporary thought. At the heart of this novel (cf. Hamlet’s soliloquy) is concern with life after death; absence of a belief in immortality does damage to the individual and to society alike in Andersen’s view. The novel contains many analogues for characters in Hamlet: for instance, a Jewish Ophelia (Esther), and the touching figure of her Laertes brother, Julius. Important sections of the novel take place during the First Schleswig (Three Years’) War, the vivid scenes of which are not only moving in themselves but vital to the author’s championship of an inclusive Christianity which does not eschew either the supra-natural or the paramount need for unselfish love.
Educated at Oxford where in 1999/2000 he was a Senior Associate Member of St Antony’s, Paul Binding is an independent writer and scholar - novelist, literary critic, cultural historian – who has lectured in universities and cultural institutes in many countries, notably the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Estonia. The culture of the Nordic countries has interested and absorbed him since youth, and in his twenties he was a Lektor at the University of Umeå in Sweden. He contributes regularly to many British and international periodicals, most often on Nordic subjects, with regular appearances in the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman. He is the author of the J.R. Ackerley Prize-winning memoir St Martin’s Ride (1990), of a critical study of Ibsen ‘With Vine-Leaves in His Hair: The Role of the Artist in Ibsen’s Plays’ (Norvik 2006) and ‘Hans Christian Andersen; European Witness’ (Yale 2014) which was awarded ‘Hans Christian Andersen Prisen’ 2015.
Jacob Bøggild: The influence of William Shakespeare upon Canonical Post-Romantic Danish Literature: Anxiety and the Imaginary in Blicher, Kierkegaard and Blixen
The main thesis of this paper is that Shakespeare is a major influence upon what one could call the post-romantic imagination in Danish Literature. Where the romantics hailed the imagination as the supreme faculty, while also exploring the risks it might imply to let it roam freely, the post-romantics found it to be an even more fundamental factor in human existence – from a psychological and existential perspective.
First, I will argue, that this idea of the primacy of the faculty of the imagination – or the imaginary – is to be found in the plays of Shakespeare and that this is why he became so influential upon the writers I discuss. Secondly, I will argue that they use this influence in order to explore the human condition of the individual in what in a broad sense might be called modernity – a condition of being at the mercy of contingency and prone to anxiety. The third part of my argument will be that the collapse of the distinction between tragedy and comedy in plays such as The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale is absolutely crucial in this context.
Along the way I will discuss the Novelle “Hosekræmmeren” [“The Pedlar”] by Steen Steensen Blicher, Søren Kierkegaard’s “The Reflex of Ancient Tragic Drama in Modern Tragic Drama” (from Either-Or) and The Concept of Anxiety (as well as Kierkegaard’s interest in the figure of Hamlet) and a couple of tales by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen).
19 Jacob Bøggild, is a Dr.phil. and Professor at the Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of monographies about Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard and numerous articles about Andersen, Kierkegaard and Karen Blixen.
PANEL 8: COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE
Joanne Greenwood with Kaarina Karjula: Shakespeare and Finnish theatre RTT
“What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here” (Puck, 3.1). During the past twenty years Romulan Taiteellinen Teatteri, a Community Theatre Company in Finland has produced The Tempest, A Midsummer Night´s Dream, Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and most recently Macbeth; directed and designed by British professionals and performed in Finnish. What began as an experiment in cross culture discipline has become an integral part of the company and community programming.
Kaarina Karjula, founding Director of RTT, and Designer Joanne Greenwood discuss the processes and challenges of bringing Shakespeare to a small Dramatic Society at a time when the term Community Theatre was relatively unknown in Finland. Recognising the differences in the dramatic approaches and performance practices the company not only took on the challenges of Shakespeare’s poetic language but also embraced the practical structures of British Theatre. Links to local colleges now enable Stagecraft students to gain credits for their participation on the productions and businesses regularly offer their support through goodwill, expertise and venues. Utilizing local skills and resources has always been one of the most rewarding aspects of the project, creating a dialogue with the community and thereby gaining new audiences and participants through Shakespeare.
Kaarina Karjula holds a BA from University of Turku and has worked a Professional Teacher and Coordinator of Expressive Arts at Satamala Community College between 1980 -2013. Since 1982 she has been the Artistic Director & Producer of Romulan Taiteellinen Teatteri. Her interests include communities at home and abroad, words, communication.
Joanne Greenwood has a BA (Liverpool) and an MA from University College Chester. Since 1990 she has worked as an Independent Theatre Designer and Workshop Leader and from 1996 she has been a Theatre Designer and Productions Manager at Bedales Olivier Theatre. She has also been the English Drama Course Leader at Länsi- Suomen Opisto between 1992 -1993.
Kiki Lindell: Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance in Sweden: Method or Madness?
For the last ten or fifteen years, I have been teaching a university course which combines the academic study of one of Shakespeare’s plays (through continuous lectures, papers to be handed in, etcetera), with a more hands-on approach: the students are given a part, rehearse (with me as their director) and finally perform the chosen play (slightly abridged), in English, in costume, before an audience of friends, family, fellow university students, inveterate Shakespeare zealots and innocent bystanders. (The performance constitutes the students’ ‘oral exam’, although in order to maintain an academic alibi for the course, the actual grading is based on their written work.)
20 The course (which is elective) has drawn sizeable groups every time it has been given – yet I have never taught a course which requires anything near the hard work, the hours and the commitment that this course demands from the students. What is it about Shakespeare that calls forth this enthusiasm and commitment within the groups? And what is it about learning Shakespeare through performance that proves so beguiling that these students (amateur actors and non-native speakers) will work harder than they have ever done before in their lives? In my paper, I want to address and discuss these questions further.
Kiki Lindell is Senior Lecturer of English Literature, Lund University, Sweden. She also stages Shakespeare plays with her students. She is Associate Editor of the SBT blog Reviewing Shakespeare, reviewing performances in Sweden and Denmark, and has recently revised and extended the chapter on Shakespeare in Scandinavia for the third edition of the ‘Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’. Her article ‘Exit Pursued by a Bugbear: Stage Renderings of Mythical Moments in The Winter’s Tale’ was recently published in ‘Shakespeare en Devenir’ (University of Poitiers). Her doctoral dissertation ‘Staging Shakespeare’s Comedies with EFL University Students’ (2012) will be published in Lund Studies in English in the second half of 2015.
Gweno Williams: Beyond the ‘Balcony Scene’: Actively Engaging Norwegian Undergraduates and Teachers with the Fullest Range and Experience of Shakespeare’s Plays
This paper argues for and discusses ways to promote active engagement with the fullest range and experience of Shakespeare’s plays for Scandinavian students and readers of English. With Norway as an example, this paper explores how curriculum emphasis on intercultural awareness, understanding and communication can provide rich starting points for active positive engagement with a wide range of Shakespeare’s plays in different modes and media. Examples will include Macbeth, Richard III and The Winter’s Tale, illustrating how impressively high Scandinavian levels of English competence can readily enable multiple transferable access points to Shakespeare, beyond the ‘Balcony Scene’ from Romeo and Juliet which can, at worst, be students’ single textbook learning encounter.
Professor Gweno Williams teaches literature and pedagogy at the Norwegian Study Centre, University of York. The NSC provides enhancement courses in literature, culture, politics and language for Norwegian undergraduates from all Norwegian HEIs, and Norwegian teachers of English from across Norway. Gweno is Visiting Professor at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, where she runs a Master’s course on Literature for the English Classroom. With Anna Birketveit, she co-published ‘Literature for the English Classroom: Theory into Practice’ (Fagbokforlaget, 2013). Gweno is a British National Teaching Fellow and Professor Emerita of York St John University.
PANEL 9: IBSEN AND STRINDBERG
Nataša Šofranac: Hamlet’s Scandinavian Descendants: Miss Julie and Nora
21 Just as Macbeth is referred to as “the Scottish play”, Hamlet may as well be called “the Scandinavian play”. Not only because it is situated in Denmark, but for its numerous other references and affinities, too. The very name of the eponymous character, meant “fool” in late Icelandic (“amlothi”), and Hamlet sometimes is a wise fool; his jester also belongs here - an old Norse belief was that skull was the shrine of soul, the eternal part left behind.
Moreover, there are characters of Scandinavian stock whom Shakespeare brought back home – through his influence on Scandinavian playwrights. Shakespeare’s Scandinavians are anything but cold and reticent; even if they appear so, they are like volcanoes under the iceberg, which we witness watching Ophelia's emotional and nervous breakdown, or Gertrude given to feelings improper to her age. This brings us to their Scandinavian literary descendants, Strindberg's Miss Julie and Ibsen's Nora: constant suppression and male domination, obliteration of identity and quest for love in the loveless world.
Inevitably, many phenomena were explained through women or the relationships between male and female characters: Oedipal complex, participation mystique, women as suffocating mothers and suffocated daughters, and the gender aspect of insanity.
Nataša Šofranac is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, Belgrade University and holds a Ph.D. degree in English literature, Shakespearean studies (her thesis was entitled ‘The Motif of Madness in the Four Great Tragedies by William Shakespeare’). She has won scholarships from the British Scholarship Trust for Former Yugoslavia (1998) and Globe Education (2011) and has presented at many international conferences, most notably the IX World Shakespeare Congress in Prague in July 2011.
Per Sivefors: Dreams, Subjectivity and the Author: the Cases of Shakespeare and Strindberg
This paper presents a parallel reading of the use of dreams in the drama of Shakespeare and Strindberg. Of course, dreams are a common device in theatre from all times, although their significance and dramatic function vary over time. Specifically, dreams in early modern drama such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream could sometimes serve as a figure for the audience, as in Puck’s address to the spectators: “You have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear”. In other cases such as John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon the play is deferentially suggested to be the author’s dream, with deference to his patron: “Remember all is but a Poets dreame, / The first he had in Phœbus holy bowre”. By contrast to such concessions to the audience and their patronage, Strindberg’s symbolist drama of the early 20th century – itself strongly inspired by Shakespeare – utilizes the dream device in a way that reflects the structure of the human psyche. His A Dream Play (1907) deliberately sets out to “reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream”, in which characters “are split, double and multiply”. Moreover, the fin-de-siècle sensibility of Strindberg’s play suggests a different conception of the author: dreams no longer represent the will of the audience so much as the condition of the writer. In other words, the Shakespearean dreams of Strindberg's plays reflect both changing conceptions of interiority as well as historically conditioned changes in the status of the author.
Per Sivefors is Reader in English literature at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. Among his research interests is the representation of dreams in early modern culture, and he has published articles on dreams in Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Lyly and others in volumes appearing with Ashgate, Rodopi and Manchester University Press. He also publishes on early modern urban culture, masculinity and satire. His most recent book publication is the edited volume ‘Urban Encounters: Experience and Representation in the Early Modern City’ (Pisa, 2013).
Víctor Grovas Hajj: Ibsen and Shakespeare in Mexican Theatre during the Nineteenth Century: A History of Two Rivals
22 The purpose of this paper is to discuss the reception and rivalry between Shakespeare and Ibsen in the Mexican Stage during the late Nineteenth century, through the eye of contemporary critic Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari, one of the most important theatre experts of this period in Mexico. The paper will discuss how the two authors were received by Mexican writers and audiences in this period considering the different interpretation styles needed, in a moment in which theater schools and theater newspapers begin to appear in Mexico, using these authors as references to discuss acting styles. It will give special importance to the Mexican history of the first representations of both dramatists. Shakespeare was represented quite late in Mexican history, almost at the same time than Ibsen. The paper will therefore examine the presence of both authors in the Mexican scene from the 1880’s to 1910’s, and discuss how literary figures were comparing Ibsen and Shakespeare’s productions. Finally it will consider the press reception of European theatrical companies visiting Mexico which presented both Ibsen and Shakespeare in the same seasons.
Dr. Víctor Grovas Hajj (Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro) is Professor at the UAQ, UNAM, UCLA and CSU, and researcher for the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts. The only representative of Mexico at Ibsen conferences in Grimstad, Oslo, Tromsoe, Dhaka, and Shanghai, and at Strindberg Conferences in Harvard and Stockholm, he has held a Post- doc Scholarship from the Norwegian Research Council; and is author of twelve books, among them, ‘Ibsen a la Mexicana, Dirigiendo a vikingos y trolls and Strindberg: el alquimista infernal del teatro,’ a Critical edition of ‘A Doll’s House’ and two theatre plays about Ibsen´s and Strindberg’s Life: ‘Ibsen: ensayo sobre sí mismo’ and ‘Strindberg: camino hacia la Isla de la Muerte’.
PANEL 10: NATIONAL THEATRES
Pirkko Koski: Shakespeare and the Finnish National Theatre in the 1970s & 1980s
When Kai Savola assumed his position as the Director of the Finnish National Theatre in 1974, he was known for his expertise in drama and knack for discovering interesting plays. The position was well-suited for him, because the National Theatre was expected to make fresh content choices and to be one of the leaders in theatrical expression. At the same time, however, the theatre was expected to stage classical repertoire, including a steady flow of Shakespeare plays. The presentation examines how Savola managed to balance between these expectations during his office in 1974-1992 and discuss the results of his Shakespeare choices in reference to the general repertory policy of the National Theatre. In 1974-1992, the National Theatre produced eight Shakespeare plays. In addition, there were a number of guest productions: Hamlet by the Old Vic Company (London, UK), King Lear by Rustaveli National Theatre (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Coriolanus by the English Shakespeare Company (UK). It seems that the National Theatre met the expectations of staging classic drama, at least in the quantity of productions. A closer investigation of the repertoire shows that the choice of plays was intended to strengthen the image of being a venue for new type of repertoire and first performances. In addition to such canonized plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and Macbeth, the National Theatre staged the first Finnish-language productions of three Shakespeare plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, Timon of Athens and The Comedy of Errors. Furthermore, the National Theatre produced two other plays that had been rarely staged in Finnish translation: Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale. Most of the Shakespeare productions at the National Theatre were directed by visiting directors, including four foreign directors from different countries.
Professor emerita Pirkko Koski was responsible for the Department of Theatre Research in the Institute of Art Research at the University of Helsinki, and the director of the Institute of Art Research until the end of 2007. Her research concentrates on performance analysis, historiography, and Finnish theatre and its history. Except scholarly 23 articles, she has published several books in these fields, the most recent of them ‘Näyttelijänä Suomessa’ (“Acting and Actors in Finland”) in 2013. She has also edited and co-edited several anthologies about Finnish theatre, translated Christopher B. Balme’s ‘The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies’ into Finnish (in 2015) and edited volumes of scholarly articles translated into Finnish.
Aleksandra Sakowska: Baltic Shakespeare: The Gdansk Theatre
The recently built Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, located at the Polish Baltic seaside, is caught between the global and the local thinking about theatre and the world and shows that ‘Polish’ Shakespeare and Polish theatre have never developed in isolation. It also encapsulates all the issues that are characteristic of the struggles for identity in Poland, specifically centred on the recovery of the past and past meanings. My research into social, literary and performative history of the new theatre dating back to its humble 17th century beginnings, namely the Fencing School where English travelling actors played early modern drama, demonstrates that the local does not correspond as strongly to the national as it does to the personal, the individual and the social. The Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, then and now, may be perhaps considered, most of all, as a monument to entrepenurship, social and artistic diversity and mobility, multi- culturalism and the quest for freedom, so characteristic of the diverse Baltic region. Can the Gdansk Theatre play, however, an important role in Polish theatre from a national perspective? And can it achieve this as a ‘Baltic Shakespeare’?
Aleksandra Sakowska completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2014 and specialises in ‘Shakespeare in Performance’. She is Executive Director at British Friends of the Gdansk Theatre Trust, translator of drama, theatre critic, curator and she has written for and edited such journals as ‘Shakespeare Bulletin and Multicultural Shakespeare.’ She is on the organising committee for the next European Shakespeare Research Association Congress, which will take place in Gdansk in 2017.
Christina Sandhaugh: Girdle Round the Earth: Toralv Maurstad's Fifty Years as Puck
When Toralv Maurstad tap-danced onstage as Puck in a tuxedo and bow-tie in the 2009 production of “En Midtsommernatts Drøm” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) at the National Theatre in Oslo, fifty years after bouncing onstage as ‘Pukk’ conceived as a Norwegian fairy of the woods in the 1958 production of “En Sommernattsdrøm” (“A Summer Night’s Dream”) at the same theatre, even the script performed in new garb: André Bjerke’s 1958 translation and Øyvind Berg’s 2009 translation were both freshly printed. In a survey of Shakespeare productions at the Norwegian National Theatre in the period “girdled round” by Maurstad’s two performances, this paper explores the significance subtly reflected in the choice of ‘Pukk’ versus ‘Puck.’ The post-war 1950s nation-building and the popcultural, post-modern self-reflection of the 2000s shape translations and productions alike, also moulding the theatrical career of Maurstad himself, whose nimble feet had to master the Jacksonian moon-walk at the noble age of 82. The paper suggests that this development also reflects the continual need to find functional equivalents to Shakespeare’s metadramatic reflections – when theatre changes both in terms of function and functionality, its theatrical reflection of itself changes, too.
Christina Sandhaug is currently teaching English literature and English didactics at Hedmark University College, while simultaneously working on her forthcoming PhD dissertation on the metadramatic nature of Stuart court masques. She has taught at several Norwegian Universities and Colleges since 2000. Her research interests comprise rhetoric, reception studies and renaissance theatre, drama and book history.
24 PANEL 11: THE VISIT OF KING CHRISTIAN VII
Richard Wilson: Christian VII and Garrick: The Visit of the Royal Playgoer
In October 1768 Christian VII visited David Garrick at Hampton, and was entertained by the great actor in his Temple to Shakespeare. Influenced by his physician, Johann Struensee, the nineteen-year-old King was about to revolutionize Denmark. So, Christian asked Garrick to perform Hamlet. Not surprisingly, however, the doctor forbad it. For within four years, the King had gone mad, divorced his young Queen, the sister of King George III, and signed the death warrant of her lover, Struensee. But what would have happened if Garrick had held a Shakespearean mirror up to ‘the Majesty of Denmark’?
Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of ‘Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will’ (2015); ‘Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage’ (2013); ‘Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows’ (2007); ‘Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance’ (2004); and ‘Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority ‘(1993). He has also edited many books on Renaissance culture, including ‘Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy’ (2014); ‘Shakespeare’s Book’ (2008); ‘Theatre and Religion’ (2003); ‘Region, Religion and Patronage’ (2003); ‘Christopher Marlowe’ (1999); and ‘New Historicism and Renaissance Drama’ (1992). Previously Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, he was until 2005 Professor of Renaissance Studies at Lancaster University. He has been Visiting Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and Visiting Professor of the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). In 2011-12 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne (Paris IV). He gave the 2001 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, and he was 2006 Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. His forthcoming book is a study of Shakespeare and totalitarianism: ‘Modern Friends: Shakespeare and Our Contemporaries’.
Anne Sophie Refskou: The Prince of Denmark in Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair
Johann Friedrich Struensee, born in 1737 in Germany, was the royal physician to the Danish King Christian VII. Struensee’s place in history was secured, when he effectively took over the ruling of Denmark, introducing several Enlightenment-inspired changes to the Constitution, and when he began a love affair with Queen Caroline Mathilde. Nikolaj Arcel’s film from 2012 freely portrays these events, and while foregrounding the love affair, it also pays much attention to the complex relationship between the young and evidently insane king and his doctor. Arcel’s explicit choice of Shakespearean references in order to portray and explain this relationship is interesting in that it goes far beyond a perhaps obvious representation of Christian as a Hamlet-figure. This paper will focus on a central scene in the film: the first meeting between the King and Struensee, in which Struensee seems to gain Christian’s interest and trust, thanks to a surprising ability to engage in dialogue consisting almost exclusively of Shakespearean quotations. These quotations function both on narrative and symbolic levels within the film, and also exemplify Shakespeare’s significant - but underexplored - place and appropriation within past and present Danish cultural identity building.
25 Dr Anne Sophie Refskou is a postdoctoral research fellow at Kingston University, UK. She has recently completed a PhD entitled ‘Touching Experiences: Compassion and Early Modern English Drama’ at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her main interests are cultural conceptions of emotions, compassion and theatre both in the early modern period and the present day. She also works theoretically and practically with Shakespearean performance, adaptation and translation from a global perspective.
PANEL 12: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 1
Dan Watts and John Gillies: Kierkegaard and Shakespeare: A Dialogue on the Borders of Literature and Philosophy
On the face of no two authors could have less in common than Kierkegaard and Shakespeare. Yet Shakespeare is a constant inspiration for Kierkegaard. Even though (as Kierkegaard readily concedes) Shakespeare is silent on the existential horror religiosus at the heart of faith, he is nevertheless the indispensable resource for this very mystery precisely by virtue of his silence about it. This central paradox of Shakespeare’s meaning for Kierkegaard serves as a point of departure for a wide ranging discussion between a philosopher specializing in Kierkegaard and a literary critic specializing in Shakespeare. Our method will be to proceed via a series of key references to Shakespeare drawn from Kierkegaard. The singularity of Kierkegaard’s allusions and their systematic quality also raise the question of their justice as readings of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is vital to an understanding of Kierkegaard, is the reverse true: that Kierkegaard is a vital and reliable guide to the meaning of Shakespeare?
John Gillies is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of ‘Shakespeare and the geography of difference’ (Cambridge, 1994), and co-editor of ‘Performing Shakespeare in Japan’ (Cambridge, 2001) and ‘Playing the Globe: genre and geography in early modern drama’ (AUP, 1998). He has written numerous pieces on early modern literature and drama, most recently: “The question of original sin in “Hamlet””, ‘SQ’ 64:4, 2013, and “Calvinism as tragedy in the English revenge play”, ‘Shakespeare’ 9:4, 2013. . He is currently working towards two books: ‘Complicity, a cultural and intellectual history’, and ‘Shakespeare under Sin’.
Dan Watts is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex. His research focuses on Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the phenomenological tradition. He also has interests in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of language and moral philosophy. He is the author of several articles in these areas, including: “Kierkegaard and the Search for Self-Knowledge”, European Journal of Philosophy 21 (2013); and “The Exemplification of Rules”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2012). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, Thinking Humanly: Kierkegaard on Subjectivity and Thought. He is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, “The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today”.
PANEL 13: PROBLEM PLAYS
26 Riitta Pohjola-Skarp: Dramatic and Tragic Irony in Aleksis Kivi’s Drama Karkurit (The Fugitives) and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
“He didn’t study at all. He only read Shakespeare”, said one of the fellow-students of Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kivi’s second serious drama was called Karkurit (The Fugitives), written in 1865 and published in 1867. It is often regarded as one of his weakest plays. In his preceding comedy Nummisuutarit he had succeeded in developing a realistic view of the Finnish folks and their lives. This is abandoned in Karkurit. Kivi writes his play in an idealistic-romantic mode that has been said to be already out-of-date in the 1860’s.
In Karkurit Kivi clearly uses some patterns of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The influence of Romeo and Juliet can mainly be felt at the level of plot and language. Kivi is using blank verse for the first time in this drama. Kivi read Shakespeare in a Swedish translation by Karl-August Hagberg. The German romantic translations of Shakespeare by A.W. Schlegel and Tieck influenced both Hagberg’s translations and Kivi´s reception of Shakespeare.
Romantic irony was one of the main features in German early romantic theory. The concept of tragic (and dramatic) irony was developed along with it. I will discuss the use of dramatic and tragic irony in Shakespeare´s and Kivi’s dramaturgy.
Riitta Pohjola-Skarp was University Lecturer (2011-12) and is now Professor (2012-13) in Theatre and Drama Research at Tampere University. Currently a member of the editorial committee of a critical edition of Aleksis Kivi’ s works (editor-in-chief of Kivi’s play ‘Karkurit’) at the Finnish Literary Society; she has published on Georg Büchner, Heiner Müller and Theory of Drama.
Roy Eriksen: Reconfiguring Falstaff in Hans E. Kinck's tragedy Den sidste Gjest [The Final Guest] (1910)
In his play on the last year in the life of Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), Den sidste Gjest (1910), the Norwegian writer Hans E. Kinck (1865–1926) focuses on his protagonist's relationship to the body and the exploitation of girls and young women, in particular the young girl, Pierina. A writer of great repute among his contemporaries Aretino is today famous for his letters, plays, scandalous dialogues and pornographic sonnets.
Kinck portrays the notorious Italian letterato into a tragic victim of his own drives and designs by means of Shakespeare’s comic Falstaff character, known in Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. By redescripting Shakespeare’s comic metaphors for the body familiar in Renaissance grotesque style, he turns the character’s famed obesity and incessant appetite into metaphors for Aretino's failed quest for fame and immortality. That appetite also becomes a sign of the fetishisation and expenditure of young girls in Early Modern Venice. In this process Kinck does not limit himself to reconfiguring metaphors and genre, he also meticulously recreates certain features of Shakespeare’s style of speech construction, revealing himself to be a diligent student of his great predecessor’s drama.
Roy Eriksen is Professor of English Renaissance Literature and Culture at University of Agder, Norway. He publishes widely in English and Italian interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies and is Series Editor of Early Modern & Modern Studies (2006–) and co-editor of ‘EMCO’ with Professor Stuart Sillars. Eriksen currently works on monographs on dramatist and poet Marlowe, Alberti and Renaissance Urbanism, and Bruno and the Elizabethan Stage. The edited volume (with Peter Young), ‘Approaches to the Text: From Proto-Gospel to Post-Baroque’ (EMMS vol 9), and the Italian monograph ‘L’Edificio testuale’ appeared in 2014.
Martin Humpál: Knut Hamsun’s Criticism of Shakespeare
27 After publishing his groundbreaking, early modernist novel Hunger (Sult, 1890), Knut Hamsun set out on a lecture tour around Norway in 1891. In a series of lectures (published posthumously in 1960) he attempted to convince the readers that the most revered contemporary Norwegian writers, including Henrik Ibsen, were producing literature of little value, because none of them was a good psychologist. The 1880s were the heyday of realism and naturalism in Norway, and Hamsun was clearly trying to make space for a different type of literature which he himself called “psychological” and which one nowadays often sees as early modernist. In his attacks on some of the great authors of his time, as well as canonical writers of earlier centuries, he criticizes William Shakespeare, among others. He claims that Shakespeare’s characters are, psychologically speaking, very flat, and he gives several reasons for this opinion. Some of Hamsun’s reasons are superficial and amusing, but some of them do make sense in the framework of the author’s view of literature’s function, and they offer an interesting perspective on the genre differences between drama and prose.
Martin Humpál is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the Department of Germanic Studies, Charles University, Prague. In his research he focuses on literature of the 19th and 20th centuries; his areas of specialization include modernism, narrative theory, and Knut Hamsun. He has written two books, one in English and one in Czech: ‘The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun’s Novels “Hunger”, “Mysteries”, and “Pan”’ (Oslo: Solum, 1998) and ‘Moderní skandinávské literatury’ 1870-2000 [Modern Scandinavian Literature 1870-2000] (Prague: Karolinum, 2006). He has also published numerous articles in scholarly books and journals.
PANEL 14: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 2
Nina Sanderhoff Hansen: Hamlet the Ironist
This paper will look into how Hamlet can be seen as an example of Søren Kierkegaard’s ironist as presented in The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard’s idea of the ironist will be explored as a description of both Hamlet and Hamlet’s trajectory during the course of the play. How Kierkegaard’s notion of what happens when actuality is threatened by an ironic subject compares to what happens at Elsinore is also taken into account.
By examining Kierkegaard’s description of the ironist or the ironic subject with reference to specific points in Hamlet a correlation between Hamlet the character as well as Hamlet the play and Kierkegaard’s notions emerges. In turn both the character and the play seem parallel with Kierkegaard’s ironist and his description of what happens when an ironic subject, in this case Hamlet, changes his environment by questioning its validity. Discrepancies between the Kierkegaardian notions and the play will be taken into account as well showing the varying degrees of correlation between the different aspects of Hamlet examined in relation to Kierkegaard.
Nina Sanderhoff Hansen, 27, Denmark, MA in English from Aarhus University. Nina Sanderhoff Hansen completed her MA from Aarhus University in December 2014 with the thesis ‘The Importance of Duality in ‘The Winter’s Tale:’ How Hermione’s Possible Death Shapes the Play’.
Peter Kishore Saval: Demonic Despair and Timon of Athens
Stanley Cavell’s explicitly philosophical readings of Shakespeare remind us that philosophy need not be strictly historicized in order to provide the material for a revitalized criticism of Shakespearean drama. I attempt just such a philosophical reading and appeal to Kierkegaard to interpret the problem of spite in Timon of Athens. I do so, however, not in order to show how Shakespeare is like Kierkegaard, but in order to demonstrate why critics are mistaken by attempting to re-interpret Shakespeare’s hatred through a certain kind of metaphysics. The existence of spite is a rebuke to anyone who wishes to see human beings as motivated primarily by self-interest, since spite implies
28 the presence of hatred or rage that goes beyond the self-protection or self-interest of the ego. Timon’s hatred in the second half of the play is spiteful, because it is completely divorced from vengeance or his own advancement. Critics like G. Wilson Knight have celebrated Timon’s spite as a kind of emancipation from human limits. I appeal to Kierkegaard in order to indicate how a certain vision of the relationship between emotions and freedom has been appealing to critics, but leads us away from the emotional universe that we find in Shakespeare.
Peter Kishore Saval is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University. He is the author of two books, ‘Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy’ (Routledge, 2014), and ‘Shakespeare in Hate’ (Routledge, forthcoming 2015).
Ewan Fernie: Shakespeare’s God via Kierkegaard and Hegel
This paper will consider parallels and differences in Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s responses to Shakespeare, suggesting that though both thinkers recognise only part of Shakespeare’s achievement, what they deny helps us to see that achievement more fully, and as to see its occluded relevance to Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s own thought.
Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His latest book is ‘The Demonic: Literature and Experience.’ He has two new books at press: ‘Thomas Mann: Something Rich and Strange’, co-edited with Tobias Doering; and ‘Macbeth, Macbeth’, co-authored with Simon Palfrey. Fernie is also completing ‘Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter’ for Cambridge University Press.
PANEL 15: CANONIZING SHAKESPEARE
Clas Zilliacus: Shakespeare for Stage and Family: Wilhelm Bolin’s Adaptations (1879-1887)
The rapid canonization of Shakespeare in 19th-century northern Europe was accompanied by a zooming in on selected beauties of his. Bowdler (1807) had blazed the trail for expurgated versions; many followed suit. One of them was Wilhelm Bolin, a Finnish philosopher with a focus on the family as pillar of society. Bolin was also a man of the theatre, serving in the 1880s as director of the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki.
Leaning chiefly on German forerunners Bolin devised versions for the stage and for the family. His tools were Carl August Hagberg’s Swedish translations (1847-1851) of the plays, and scissors and paste. Bolin’s edition includes the twenty-nine plays he considered susceptible of revision and improvement.
My paper examines the rationale behind the project, drawing its examples mainly from Hamlet. Stage and family could indeed in this project be targeted in one swoop. Both were in equal need of protection from the vulgarities forced upon Shakespeare by an unrefined age, and all three of them – stage, family, and bard – could profit by the intermediate advancements in the arts of drama and the theatre. In an age of certainties, fine old plays became refined new plays.
Clas Zilliacus was professor in Comparative Literature between 1986-2008, at Åbo Akademi, Finland), and is the translator of three Shakespeare plays. He worked with Benno Besson on his Hamlet in Helsinki 1979. His production analysis was published in ‘The Brecht Yearbook 1990’ and he won the Finnish Ministry of Education award for the published translation 1984. He has published articles on ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and metrical problems in Shakespeare. He did his PhD on Beckett and radio (1976) and was The Beckett Society Board member (1997- 1999). More recently, he has been on the board of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (2003-2015). He won 29 the Swedish Academy’s Finland Prize 1996. He has various publications on Finland-Swedish literature, inluding. ‘Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria: 1900-talet’ (2000), and on documentary genres.
Pentti Paavolainen: Birth of a Tradition: Kaarlo Bergbom
In two decades (1881–1902) Dr. Kaarlo Bergbom, leader of the Finnish Theatre Company (Suomalainen Teatteri) directed 14 productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Helsinki. They were welcomed as landmarks and victories for the theatre. They were also the first performances of Paavo Cajander’s newly prepared translations, whose order was discussed with Bergbom. Karl Bergbom (1843–1906) got acquainted in Shakespeare through C. A. Hagberg’s Swedish translations. His doctoral thesis was on German historic drama (1868). In the emancipation campaign for the Finnish language, he adopted “Kaarlo” as his first name, and was the founder of the first Finnish speaking theatre company until his death (1872–1904). He spent his summers on the continent, saw theatre in Berlin, Vienna and Paris, but never visited England. There were several factors that can explain why certain plays in the Shakespeare canon were chosen and why he did not touch some others. Some were rather obvious choices while certain actors or actresses in the company were available or needed challenges. What was missing? Which aspects of Shakespeare remained in the shadow? What kind of Shakespeare was initiated in Finland by this strong legacy of Bergbom?
Docent, PhD Pentti Paavolainen (b. 1953) is a free scholar who is writing a scholarly biography of Kaarlo Bergbom, the central figure of 19th theatre and opera in Finland. The first volume is out (2014) and two others are projected for 2016 and 2017. Paavolainen’s dissertation (1992) at the University of Helsinki was on the theatre repertories and the mental landscape of the 1960s Finland, a decade of a rapid and traumatic urbanization. Between 1993 -2007, he held the Chair of Theatre Research in the Theatre Academy (today University of Arts, Helsinki) developing its first doctoral programs and is active in the Nordic scholarly community.
Tony Pinkney: Hamlet in Iceland: Erik Magnusson
Abstract: This paper develops ideas first floated in my blog post on 'Eirikr Magnússon 100 Years On' (at williammorrisunbound.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/eirikr-magnússon-100-years-on). In addition to being William Morris's guide and co-worker in all things Icelandic, Magnússon translated The Tempest into Icelandic. His pupils Israel Gollancz and Bertha Phillpotts made significant contributions to Shakespeare studies and the theory of drama, and their influence in those fields extends as far as the Leavises. I therefore ask whether the hypothesis of a 'Magnússonian school of British Shakespeare studies' might hold water.
Tony Pinkney is senior lecturer in the English Department at Lancaster University. He is the author of books on T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Williams and, most recently, of ‘William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years 1879-95’ (2007) and ‘William Morris: The Blog’ (2011).
PANEL 16: THE MODERN HAMLET
Annelis Kuhlmann: The Hecuba Discussion in Postwar Theatre in Denmark
My paper deals with the discussion of Hecuba as a master trope for a historiographical postwar approach to theories of acting and directing. The recycling part of the antique myth of Hecabe, via Shakespeare’s emphasis of it in Hamlet, has transformed the Hecuba discussion into a basic narrative of a conscious art and interpretation of acting and
30 directing throughout western history of theatre. This narrative has to do with resistant values of the stage artist’s professional identity. The paper draws on examples from the theatre critique Frederik Schyberg (1905-50) and the theatre director Sam Besekow (1911-2001).
Annelis Kuhlmann, PhD, associate professor in Dramaturgy, Aarhus University, Denmark. Leader of Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies (CTLS) – a research collaboration between Odin Teatret and Dramaturgy Studies at Aarhus University. My current major research project is on postwar traditions of theatre directing in Denmark.
Frank Brevik: Hamlet through a Presentist Lens
This paper examines three modern and post-modern adaptations of that most Nordic play Hamlet, two cinematic and one theatrical. These are adaptations/interpretations that, to varying degrees of success, tackle the current and/or contemporary Nordic and Scandinavian political dimensions that Hamlet can potentially invoke in a fashion that reveals much about the strictures of audience appeal and genre.
I am particularly interested in the relatively conventional ways in which commercial Hollywood film makers from the United States make use of Scandinavian visual tags in Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) and in contrasting these with the far more radical and mischievous ways in which both Svend Gade’s and Heinz Schall’s 1921 German silent film Hamlet and Alex Scherpf's 2003 Hamlet in Ice managed to explore presentist issues of both gender and nation identity.
Frank Widar Brevik is a native of Kristiansand, Norway and has switched Scandinavian winters of shivering discontent for the warmer climes of the American South. He teaches Shakespeare and British literature at Savannah State University in Georgia, USA. He is the author of the book ‘The Tempest and New World-Utopian Politics’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). His recent work focuses on film adaptations of Shakespeare and criticism, especially Presentism, as well as issues of the pedagogical dissemination of Shakespeare in a university setting.
Timo Uotinen: Critique of Modernity in Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business
Hamlet, the archetype of modern subjectivity, is transformed into a self-centered, murderous man-child by Aki Kaurismäki’s satire, who is left in charge of his family’s wood, paper, weapon, and shipping industry. Tragedy is exchanged for a grotesque nihilist satire where a seemingly dim-witted Hamlet is revealed as a Machiavellian mastermind only to be poisoned by his chauffer, a spy for the trade union who finally absconds with the maid into a seeming happy ending. This is done to keep the factories open when faced with the liquidation of the company’s industrial assets in favour of speculation on the rubber duck market. As Tony Howard notes, we are left ‘to decide how ludicrous this is.’ ‘Kaurismäki’s lugubriously funny film noir,’ Howard continues, ‘is a post-industrial epitaph for a dying system doomed indefinitely to repeat its tragedies as farce.’ While an accurate assessment, Howard’s comment misses the dialectically reflective aspect of Kaurismäki’s film: it is a ham-fisted attempt at satire that hides its criticism in its ham-fistedness—a pun with which Kaurismäki introduces Hamlet.
Drawing on the critical philosophy of Theodor Adorno, I will analyse Kaurismäki’s interpretation of Hamlet and the critique of modernity it produces. At the centre of this, as I shall argue, is that the working-class, supposedly toppling the rich upper class by killing its remaining representative Hamlet, has already capitulated to the industrial capitalist way of life with its committal to wage labour.
Timo Uotinen has Master’s degree in English Philology from the University of Tampere and a MA in Modern European Philosophy from the CRMEP, now at Kingston University. He is towards the end of his PhD at Royal
31 Holloway, University of London, working murder and suicide in Shakespearean tragedy read through Baconian philosophy—he also runs online affairs for Kingston Shakespeare.
PANEL 17: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC FANTASY
Lisa Hopkins: Hamlet, Dracula and Iceland
The first (and remarkably early) translation of Dracula was into Icelandic, by Valdimar Ásmundsson in 1901. Valdimar Ásmundsson was the editor of Fjallkonan, in which he published an article in 1885 on the enfranchisement of women, followed by another one on the same theme by his future wife Bríet Bjarnhédinsdóttir. Ásmundsson might perhaps have been attracted to the novel because of its interest in the New Woman or because of an interest in spiritualism, but in fact he himself is only part of the story. In this paper, I argue that what links Dracula and Iceland is a shared interest in revenants, and in one revenant in particular. In 1898, a year after the first publication of Dracula, Israel Gollancz pointed out in his book Hamlet and Iceland that the first allusion to Hamlet occurs in a poem by Snorri Sturlason, two centuries before Saxo Grammaticus, who had usually been credited with originating the story. Dracula openly announces its own status as a novel influenced by Hamlet by quoting from it repeatedly and also echoing it in other ways. In Dracula, Icelandic literary culture found a way of connecting itself to Hamlet.
Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of Shakespeare and of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. She writes mainly on Marlowe, Ford and Shakespeare, including ‘Hamlet Smokes Prince: 101 Reykjavik on Page and Screen’, ‘Adaptation 1’ (2008), 140-50, but nurtures a guilty passion for ‘Dracula’ and has also published ‘Bram Stoker: A Literary Life’ (Palgrave, 2007), ‘Screening the Gothic’ (University of Texas Press, 2005) and ‘Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution’ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004).
Sven-Arve Myklebost: The Organist Conspiracy: Shakespeare as Treasure Map
I will address a peculiar specimen of Scandinavian Shakespeare reception focusing on The First Folio, secret codes, conspiracy theories, astronomy and buried treasure. For about a decade, the theories of the church organist and hobby cryptographer Petter Amundsen have received much attention and airtime in Norwegian media. He has produced a book, a lecture tour, an e-book, a TV series and film where he presents his theories about Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Rosicrucianism, and Oak Island in Nova Scotia.
Amundsen’s ideas are not new – what is unique about his work is the way in which it draws together a host of conspiracy theories, mystery tales, cryptography, and more from a variety of places from in- and outside the world of Shakespeare; and the way in which his theories have been disseminated and received in Norway.
In my paper, I will present Amundsen’s “findings” before I move on to look at some intriguing points of convergence between his approach to Shakespeare and that of the academe. I will discuss his work in relation to Shakespeare studies as well as the burgeoning field of Western Esotericism, in the process teasing out some perspectives and facts he seemingly would prefer to conceal.
Svenn-Arve Myklebost is Associate Professor at Volda University College, Norway, where he teaches American and British literature, culture and film adaptation, among much else. Myklebost has written on graphic novel and manga
32 adaptations of Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne, on the influence of emblems on Shakespeare’s art, name symbolism in Shakespeare and much else. He edits the Open Access Journal ‘Early Modern Culture Online’ (www.uia/emco). Myklebost’s most recent interest is in Western Esotericism in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and their reception.
Anthony Johnson: The Journey to Melonia (Resan till Melonia, 1989): The Tempest as a Nordic Fantasy
As recent work in Cultural Geography and Imagology has made abundantly clear, the local habitations (not to mention the names) accorded to realisations or adaptations of early modern plays frequently draw imaginative resonance from the regional as well as temporal settings in which they are presented. After a brief consideration of multimediality within the stage-history of The Tempest and the fortunes of the play in Scandinavia, the present study homes in on Resan till Melonia (dir. Per Åhlin, 1989), a Nordic adaptation of Shakespeare’s work. Applying the tools of Geographical and Historical Imagology to this award-winning children’s animation in order to unpick and open up its dialogue with Shakespeare, the paper develops Johnson’s previous work on The Tempest and Prospero’s Books (2008), alongside insights from historians of Cultural Geography and Ecocriticism. Particular attention is paid here to: 1) the ‘resurfacings’ of early modern image patterns (occult or otherwise) within their new context; and 2) the ‘portability’ of Shakespeare’s text from the initial settings in which it is known to have been presented to its later realisation in a different medial, cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical space.
Anthony W. Johnson is J.O.E. Donner Professor of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His interests focus on interart relations in the early modern period. Books include ‘Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture’ (OUP); ‘Three Books Annotated by Inigo Jones’ (ÅAU); Cavendish, ‘The Country Captain’ (Malone Society); ‘Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres’ (co-ed. with Roger D. Sell and Helen Wilcox), and (eds Johnson/Sell), ‘Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689’ (both Ashgate). Forthcoming editions include: John Boys’s ‘Fasti Cantuarienses (1670)’ (Lit Verlag); and (co-ed. with Jyri Vaahtera and Paul Sullivan), ‘Five Restoration Plays from the King’s School, Canterbury’ (Roskilde).
ROUNDTABLE: TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE
Niels Brunse
Niels Brunse was born in 1949 and grew up in Helsingør, Denmark (Shakespeare’s Elsinore). He has been a literary translator for almost fifty years, dealing mainly with English, German and Russian literature, and has translated more than 230 books, plays and radio features. He is currently working on a new Danish version of all of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets; 30 plays and about a third of the sonnets have been completed by now.
He has also written novels, short stories, plays and poetry of his own, a small book on Shakespeare for Danish readers, and literary reviews for Danish newspapers. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the life- long grant from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Thornton Niven Wilder Award (Columbia University, New York), and the Übersetzerpreis der Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany). In 2011, he was appointed Knight of the Order of Dannebrog.
He is married to musicologist Nila Parly. They have two daughters and live in Blovstrød, 30 km north of Copenhagen. 33 Website: www.nielsbrunse.dk.
Þórarinn Eldjárn
Thorarinn Eldjárn was born in Reykjavík in 1949. Studied literature and philosophy in Sweden and Iceland. Published his first book of poems in 1974 and has since then published countless collections of poetry and childrens’ verse as well as short stories and novels some of which have been translated into other languages, such as English, French, German, Finnish, Danish and Swedish. His novel The Blue Tower (Brotahöfuð, 1996) was nominated for the Nordic Literary Prize and shortlisted for Aristeion 1998 – the European literature and translation prize. Awarded many literary prizes in Iceland and in 2013 the Swedish Academy's prize for introduction of Swedish culture abroad. Eldjárn has translated into Icelandic the works of many authors, among them Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Lewis Carroll, Astrid Lindgren and Göran Tunström. He also has written and translated plays, musicals, cabarets and songtexts.
Alice Martin
Alice Martin is a well-known Finnish translator who has translated a lot of children’s literature (into Finnish and English), especially poetry. She has worked as a publishing editor, for which she received the Alval Renqvist award in 2005, for WSOY since 1993 and took part in the decade long work of translating anew the whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic works into Finnish.
Edvard Hoem
Norwegian fictional writer, well known and much read in his homeland, novels in German and Russian and seven other languages. Poet and hymnologist, eleven Psalms in the the new Norwegian Hymn Book (Salme 2013.) He has translated 13 Shakespeare plays into New Norwegian: ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘As You Like It’, ‘Richard II’, ‘Richard III’, ‘Henry IV, I and II’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Othello’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’.
Eva Ström
Eva Ström was born 1947 and studied medicine, and worked as a medical doctor for 15 years before she became a full-time writer. She is mostly known as a poet, and has been awarded many prizes for her poetry. In 2010 she translated Shakespeare's sonnets into Swedish.
PANEL 18: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC MUSIC
Michelle Assay and David Fanning: Carl Nielsen, Shakespeare and the Modern Breakthrough
In May 1916, three months after the premiere of his Fourth Symphony (The Inextinguishable), Carl Nielsen was commissioned to compose four songs for the Prologue to the 300th anniversary commemoration of Shakespeare’s death, staged on the hills outside the castle at Helsingør (Elsinore). Following a tradition established 100 years earlier, the main part of the celebration consisted of extracts from Hamlet. But the songs themselves included personifications of Ariel and Caliban from The Tempest - yet another duality to add to the many that animate Nielsen’s oeuvre as a
34 whole. Although reviews suggest that the event itself was no great success, the chorus that Nielsen was asked to add to the four songs enjoyed an anthemic afterlife with a new text as ‘Danmark i tusind År’ (the original idea had been for the chorus to be sung to the melody of ‘God save the King’).
The Shakespeare commemoration also included a speech by Georg Brandes (1842-1927), the Danish critic and scholar best known for articulating the principal currents within Scandinavia’s ‘Modern Breakthrough’. Brandes was the author of a three-volume study of Shakespeare (1895-1896) that almost immediately appeared in English and was widely admired. It would be unwise to force connections between those two strands of Brandes’s work. But Nielsen certainly knew about him and was occasionally in direct contact with him, as some of his lesser-known letters and diary entries indicate. Nor are this by any means the only documented contact between Nielsen and the works of Shakespeare. For example, in 1890 Shakespeare features in the composer’s select list of those who ‘gave their times a black eye’ and who would therefore be remembered longest; in the run-up to Saul and David (1901-1902), Nielsen was considering an opera on the subject of The Merchant of Venice (to be titled Portia); and in the months after the Helsingør event he speculated about using the Ariel/Caliban duality as the basis for a string quartet.
In the year of Nielsen’s 150th anniversary, and in between the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and the 400th of his death, this paper considers what can be made of the seemingly tangential connections between the two. For instance, the idea for a Tempest-based string quartet may never have materialised, but perhaps it nevertheless bore fruit ten years later in the Flute Concerto.
David Fanning is Professor of Music at the University of Manchester and has a varied career as scholar, pianist and critic. Author and editor of books, articles and critical editions on Nielsen, Shostakovich and the 20th-century symphonic tradition, and editor of a five-volume performing edition of Russian operatic arias, his ongoing research projects include a historical survey of the Symphony in the Soviet Union and completion of the late Per Skans’s life- and-works study of Weinberg, both of these in collaboration with his wife, Michelle Assay. His 2010 book Mieczysław Weinberg: In Search of Freedom, published by Wolke-Verlag simultaneously in English and German, is a concise ‘advance’ version of the Weinberg study. He is also active as critic for Gramophone and The Daily Telegraph, and as a BBC broadcaster and public speaker.
Michelle Assay was born in Tehran and studied in Kiev at the Tchaikovsky Academy, graduating with a masters degree in piano performance, musicology, pedagogy and criticism. After a year in Canada, working mainly as actress and pianist, she returned to Europe to work with Carine Gutlerner at the Erik Satie Conservatoire in Paris, where she obtained her DE (Diplôme d’Etat) for piano performance and was laureate in the Concours international musical de France. She is currently finishing her PhD at the Université de Paris Sorbonne and the University of Sheffield, on the topic of ‘Hamlet in the Stalin era’. At the Sorbonne she completed her MPhil in 2011 with a dissertation on Mieczysław Weinberg’s musical dialogue with Shostakovich. With David Fanning, she has published an article about Carl Nielsen and Duality, and the two are currently also collaborating on a life-and-works study of Weinberg. She is also active as a pianist, reviewer and public speaker.
Daniel Grimley: ‘Some heavenly music’?: Lateness in Sibelius’s Stormen
Sibelius's music for 'Stormen' ('The Tempest'), commissioned in 1925 by the Danish Royal Theatre, was his penultimate large-scale work and among his most ambitious and extended scores. In an earlier essay, I've explored the ways in which the music was shaped by notions of nature mysticism, late style, and landscape--topics that were an 35 integral part of Sibelius's work from the mid-1910s onwards, and which also reveal recurrent trends in early twentieth- century Scandinavian Shakespeare reception. In this paper, I will explore the 1927 Helsinki production at the Finnish National Theatre, drawing on new archival research, and discuss Sibelius's earlier interests in allegory and early modern drama, not least through his 1916 score 'Jokamies' ('Everyman').
Daniel Grimley is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow of Merton College. He has written widely on Scandinavian music, including 'Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism' (Boydell, 2010) and 'Jean Sibelius and his World' (Princeton, 2011). He currently leads a Leverhulme-funded International Research Network, entitled 'Hearing Landscape Critically'.
Annika Lindskog: How They Like It: Midsummer Night Dreams in Swedish Song
In 1864, events in Stockholm, as in London and Stratford, commemorated the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. The year also saw the death of C.A. Hagberg, whose pioneering translations had been, and would continue to be, instrumental for an increased engagement with Shakespeare on Swedish stages towards the later half of the nineteenth century. Musical interactions with Shakespeare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sweden are however not numerous.
In the “golden age” of Swedish song in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, most composers primarily set texts by local, Swedish (and occasionally Nordic) poets. Many of these used the natural landscape not only as location, but as an expression of character, mood and emotions. This narrative kind of landscape was further imbued with national and collective intents and overtones, which would intensify towards and beyond the turn of the century. It is therefore interesting to note that two of the very few settings from this period that do engage with Shakesperian texts are in several ways are linked to this understanding of the landscape as a space for particular interactions as well as a place where inherited myths live and collective narratives are constructed.
This paper will consider Wilhelm Stenhammar’s setting of “Blow, blow thou winterwind” and other songs from his incidental music for As You Like It (1920) – ‘a [Stenhammar] Reverenza to the forest, the field, and to love’ – and Wilhelm Peterson-Berger’s setting of Gustaf Fröding’s popular poem Titania (1893) in this particular context, and explore the ways Shakespeare might be said to be adapted and translated into local emphasis and preoccupations.
Annika Lindskog is Lecturer in Swedish in the department of Scandinavian Studies, which is part of the School of European Languages, Cultures and Societies at UCL. She teaches advanced language courses, as well as options in cultural studies. Primary research interests focus on music in the (long) nineteenth century as a cultural expression and as part of contemporary cultural, social and political dialogues, and/or on landscape as both place, space and ideological instrument. Recent publications have for example considered the Norwegian mountain-scape in the music of Delius, or the collective and communicative role of the chorus in Brahms’ German requiem. She is also an active singer, and regularly sings with symphony choruses, chamber choirs and at solo recitals.
Elke Albrecht: The final challenge? Aulis Sallinen’s last opera King Lear
Verdi never finished it; Aribert Reimann took it up early and got it done early. In Aulis Sallinen’s case the “Lear project” turned out to become his last opera –his final challenge? Aulis Sallinen (born 1935) is one of Finland’s most important contemporary opera composers. In 1975, the premiere of his opera The Horseman started the Finnish opera boom. More operas followed: The Red Line in 1978, The King goes forth to France in 1984, Kullervo in 1992, The Palace in 1995 and King Lear in 2000.
36 As opera composing was not very popular among Finnish composers till the seventies, also Aulis Sallinen had to find his own way to approach this genre. While two of his librettists died during Verdi’s Re Lear project, Sallinen took up the challenge and wrote the libretto for this opera himself, in Finnish, based on the translation by Matti Rossi. Altogether he created a work of gripping musical theatre with well-manufactured orchestration and gratifying vocal lines. This paper will be based on very actual research for a book about Sallinen’s operas.
Elke Albrecht studied theatre research and musicology at the University of Vienna and arts management at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Her doctoral dissertation deals with “Kalevala operas”, her research focuses on Finnish operas, the opera boom, Sallinen’s operas and Kalevi Aho’s entire oeuvre. Her latest publication is a collection of essays by 19 Finnish opera composers (together with Eeva-Taina Forsius-Schibli, also translated into German; an English translation (“Finland – an opera nation”) will be published later this year).
PANEL 19: ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE
Alice Martin: From Macbeth to Hamlet - A Ten-Year Learning Process in Editing and Translating Shakespeare
The paper describes the planning and publishing of a new Complete Plays of Shakespeare by the Finnish publisher WSOY in 2004-2013. A project of exceptional nature and scope, it employed twelve translators, four editors and an expert consultant. Many preliminary decisions were required in order to produce a consistent line of work in the progress of over ten years. The time span also allowed it to become a learning process, with those involved gradually making use of work already accumulated and of the solutions and mistakes therein. An overall view of these learnings is presented. Finally, a brief look is taken at the reception the WSOY Shakespeare series has had to date.
Jessica Allen Hanssen: “Which when he has a house, he'll deck withal”: Northern Norwegian Language and Cultural Translation in The Tempest
Stormen, Bodø’s new cultural complex consisting of a library and performance hall, is perhaps the ideal name for such a magnificent space, its contemporary white marble standing stoically amidst Bodø’s famously blustery Arctic storms. The opportunity to present Shakespeare’s final play, which translates to “Stormen” in Norwegian, as one of Stormen’s opening pieces, was not lost on theatre organizers, and the play was performed at Stormen on 20-21 November 2014, just five days after the complex’s gala opening.
Rather than simply rely on meta-irony for local significance, a fresh translation of The Tempest was commissioned: not Norwegian, but Northern Norwegian, using the dialect, language, and landscape of the region to make the play come alive in the local context. Translator Ragnar Olsen and director Birgitte Strid rely on local imagery, characterization, and staging to connect a play that is on the surface about the exotic and remote south to the immediate surroundings of the far north, with visual and thematic consequences.
Analysis of the text and performance of the play Stormen reveals how the use of Northern Norwegian language and imagery creates a transformation of meanings and thereby accents the thematic and cultural significance of The Tempest.
Jessica Allen Hanssen (dr. philos., University of Oslo, 2010) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nordland, Bodø, Norway, where she supervises the Bachelor of English degree. Her research interests include early American literature, short-story theory, and young-adult fiction. Recent publications include book chapters on 37 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys’, fantasy narratives, and classroom approaches to reader-response theory. She is a member of the research groups Young Language Learners (University of Stavanger) and Culture and Education (University of Nordland). Hanssen currently co-teaches a seminar on Shakespeare.
Delilah Brataas: The Shadow’s Shadow: The Chiaroscuro of Gendered Ambition in Svend Gade’s 1921 Hamlet
Hamlet (1604), the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, was the subject of at least thirteen silent films that could make little use of its bounty of words. Among these, Svend Gade’s 1921 Hamlet, starring Asta Nielsen, was unique on several levels, but none more so than its unusual premise that Prince Hamlet was born a woman who secretly lived as a man to protect the throne of Denmark. The film includes almost none of the play’s familiar language in intertitles, nor even the visual icon of Hamlet holding a skull, two elements one would expect a silent Hamlet required. Yet perhaps no other film adaptation captures the play’s thematic ambition as masterfully by visualizing it through the same interrogation of light and dark that the original play realizes through words. In this paper, I explore the film’s chiaroscuro in scenes that illustrate Gade’s strategic balance of light and shadow, the silent film’s greatest tool. I will demonstrate that Hamlet’s regendering allowed Gade to gender ambition through a shift of that ambition from Claudius to Gertrude and the new woman in the play. Her troublesome presence produces a visual contrast that illustrates the film’s perceptive interrogation of gender and ambition by locating the play’s two original women, Gertrude and Ophelia at two ends of a visual spectrum.
Delilah Bermudez Brataas received her PhD in English at Tufts University in Massachusetts and has been working as Assoc. Professor of English at Sør-Trøndelag University College in Trondheim, Norway since August 2010. Her dissertation, “Shakespeare and Cavendish: Engendering the Early Modern English Utopia,” explores the development of utopic themes through the early modern in several works of William Shakespeare and Margaret Cavendish. Her varied research interests consider aspects of gender in utopia from its earliest expressions in early modern literature to its contemporary incarnations in science fiction and fantasy. She is currently working on several articles on Shakespeare in film adaptations. Her last article, “Shakespeare’s Presence and Cavendish’s absence in ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,’ appeared in the journal ‘Shakespeare’ in May 2015.
PANEL 20: FILM AND TV
Susanne Greenhalgh: ‘Love is all truth’: ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the performances of self in Per Fly’s television series Forestillinger
This paper explores the appropriation of Shakespeare in Forestillinger (DR1, 2007), a six-part series made for Danish television. Directed by Per Fly, a director largely concerned with realist explorations of the social psychology of life in contemporary Denmark, the series is set in an experimental theatre in Copenhagen which is mounting an adaptation of Shakespeare’s erotic poem ‘Venus and Adonis’. ‘Forrestillinger’ has a number of possible meanings, referring both to theatrical shows, and to conceptions or notions, suggesting ideas of self-identity and its performance. Blending an overall social realism with metatheatrical “hotseat” interviews with the actors in character, and the avant-garde style of the theatre production, the Shakespearean content and echoes are central to the series’ complex interrogation of the meaning, value, and cost of performance, on stage and in everyday life. The poem’s artifice paradoxically enables intensive psychological probing, as the currents of sexual desire and rivalry, betrayal, fear of death, ambition, and the need to make art drive the characters, and culminate in a performance in which Shakespeare’s words are poignantly combined with those derived from their real-life interactions and problems.
38 Susanne Greenhalgh is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton, where she directs the Research Group for Renaissance and Classical Studies. Her extensive work on media and literary adaptation includes ‘Shakespeare and Childhood’ (CUP), special issues of ‘Shakespeare and Shakespeare Bulletin’, articles on Webster, Ford and Shakespeare on television and radio, and on Shakespeare in writing for children. Forthcoming essays include ‘Our Other Shakespeare: Middleton’s Tragedies on British Television, 1965-2009’ in ‘Theatre Plays on Television’ eds. Amanda Wrigley and John Wyver (MUP 2015), and ‘Shakespeare and Global Television’, in ‘The Shakespearean World ‘eds. Jill Levenson and Robert Ormsby, (Routledge, 2016). She is currently writing a monograph on Shakespeare on radio and researching digital broadcasts of Shakespearean theatrical performance.
Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García: Nothing, and Be Silent: Shakespeare in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Shakespeare makes a fleeting cameo appearance in the shape of a book: the wilfully mute actress, Elizabeth, reads silently a collected edition of Macbeth, King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra while Alma, her nurse, accuses Elizabeth of treachery, airing her views about the artist’s role in society. In this scene, art, identity and authenticity are raised and problematised through a mise-en-scène in which the stark chromatic interplay of blacks and whites foregrounds the presence of a large sunhat, of a pair of sunglasses and of Shakespeare’s book. The hat and the glasses conceal the face and thus the identity of the two characters, which draws the viewer’s attention to the issues of appearance versus reality and authenticity. What is the significance of Shakespeare here? Can such a passing visual reference to the playwright be relevant to the whole film? Might ‘nothing’, the only word uttered by the actress, work as a citation of King Lear? This paper aims to address these questions, and, in the light of poststructuralist theories about meaning, language and identity, argue for King Lear as a text against which this Swedish film can be fruitfully read.
Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García holds a BA in English studies and an MA in European comparative literature, both from the University of Murcia, Spain. She is a postgraduate candidate at the University of Northumbria, UK, currently writing her dissertation on adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare in European film, within the context of regional, national and transnational cinema.
Dominic Rainsford: Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice: Shakespeare’s Swedish Apocalypse
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, Offret (The Sacrifice; 1986), was made in Sweden, in Swedish, with Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Its plot, imagery and language, as with much of Tarkovsky’s work, show a Shakespearean influence (enhancing the film’s brilliance for some viewers, exacerbating its ponderousness for others). The central character is an actor who has retired to a remote island, with his family, after excelling in Richard III. He expresses a Hamlet-like disillusionment with ‘words, words, words’. (Tarkovsky had directed Hamlet on stage in Moscow in 1977 and hoped to make a film of the play.) Offret also has shades of King Lear, and perhaps Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. This paper sets out to explore the full extent and significance of the Shakespearean appropriation/homage/pastiche in Tarkovsky’s film, linking it to ideas of sacrifice, apocalypse and the absurd elsewhere in Scandinavian literature and philosophy.
Dominic Rainsford is Professor of Literature in English at Aarhus University, having previously taught in England, Wales, Poland and the USA. He took his BA and PhD in English at UCL. His publications include ‘Authorship, Ethics and the Reader’ (1997), ‘Literature, Identity and the English Channel’ (2002), ‘Studying Literature in English’ (2014), as well as many articles on Dickens, and on a range of other subjects including Tarkovsky. He is now writing a book on literature, ethics and quantification.
39 40 PARTICIPATING DELEGATES
Sirkku Aaltonen, University of Vaasa ([email protected]) Elke Albrecht ([email protected]) Genette Ashby-Beach, Georgia Perimeter College ([email protected]) Michelle Assay, Université Paris IV: Sorbonne ([email protected]) Eeva-Liisa Bastman, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Jacob Boggild, University of Southern Denmark ([email protected]) Wilhelm Bolin Terri Bourus, Indiana Purdue University ([email protected]) Delilah Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College ([email protected]) Frank Brevik, Savannah State University ([email protected]) Niels Brunse ([email protected]) Howard Caygill, Kingston University ([email protected]) Edward Chaney, Southampton Solent University ([email protected]) Régis Augustus Bars Closel, State University of Campinas ([email protected]) Jon Cook, University of East Anglia ([email protected]) Neville Davies, University of Birmingham ([email protected]) Þórarinn Eldjárn ([email protected]) Audrey Ellison ([email protected]) Roy Eriksen, Agder University ([email protected]) David Fanning, University of Manchester ([email protected]) Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham ([email protected]) Sonja Fielitz, Marburg University ([email protected]) John Gillies, University of Essex ([email protected]) Patricia Harris Gillies, University of Essex ([email protected]) Dominique Goy-Blanquet, University of Picardy, Amiens ([email protected]) Susanne Greenhalgh, Roehampton University ([email protected]) Joanne Greenwood ([email protected]) Eva Griffith ([email protected]) Daniel Grimley, Oxford University ([email protected]) Víctor Grovas Hajj, Universidad Autónoma de Queretaro ([email protected]) Paul Hamilton, Kingston University ([email protected]) Nina Sanderhoff Hansen, Aarhus University ([email protected]) Jessica Allen Hanssen, University of Nordland ([email protected])
41 Erica Hateley, Sør-Trøndelag University College ([email protected]) Anni Hendriksen, Copenhagen University ([email protected]) Edvard Hoem ([email protected]) Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire ([email protected]) Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University ([email protected]) Martin Humpál, Charles University, Prague ([email protected]) Kelly Hunter, RSC, Queen Mary University of London ([email protected]) Anthony Johnson, Åbo Akademi ([email protected]) Jón Viðdar Jónsson ([email protected]) Emilia Karjula, University of Jyväskylä ([email protected]) Kaarina Karjula ([email protected]) Pirkko Koski, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Annelis Kuhlmann, Aarhus University ([email protected]) Erika Laamanen, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Kati Laasonen, Aalto University, Helsinki ([email protected]) Robert Layton ([email protected]) Kiki Lindell, Lund University ([email protected]) Annika Lindskog, University College London ([email protected]) Charles Lock, Copenhagen University ([email protected]) Alice Martin ([email protected]) Dennis McCarthy Ken McMullen, Kingston University ([email protected]) Jan Mosch ([email protected]) Sven-Arve Myklebost, Volda University College ([email protected]) Rupert Nichol, Garrick’s Temple ([email protected]) Jyrki Nummi, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Thomas O'Connor, James Madison University Claudia Olk, Free University, Berlin ([email protected]) Pentti Paavolainen, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Tony Pinkney, Lancaster University ([email protected]) Ingibjörg Þórisdottir, University of Iceland ([email protected]) Margaret Rainey ([email protected]) Dominic Rainsford, Aarhus University ([email protected]) Anne-Sophie Refskou, Kingston University ([email protected]) Martin Regal, University of Iceland ([email protected]) Aleksandra Sakowska, King’s College, University of London ([email protected])
42 Maria Salenius, Helsinki University ([email protected]) Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García, University of Northumbria ([email protected]) Christina Sandhaug, Hamar University College ([email protected]) Peter Kishore Saval, Brown University ([email protected]) David Schalkwyk, Queen Mary University of London ([email protected]) June Schlueter, Lafayette University ([email protected]) Paul Schlueter Chantal Schutz, Université Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle ([email protected]) Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Per Sivefors, Linnaeus University ([email protected]) Riitta Pohjola-Skarp, University of Tampere ([email protected]) Sara Smart, University of Exeter ([email protected]) Nataša Šofranac, Belgrade University ([email protected]) Ildiko Solti, Kingston University ([email protected]) Gunnar Sorelius, University of Uppsala ([email protected]) Francisca L. Stangel, University of Kent ([email protected]) Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, University College London ([email protected]) Eva Ström ([email protected]) Anna Swärdh, Karlstad University ([email protected]) Eero Tarasti, University of Helsinki ([email protected]) Gary Taylor, Florida State University ([email protected]) Stephen Unwin ([email protected]) Timo Uotinen, Royal Holloway, University of London ([email protected]) Dan Watts, University of Essex ([email protected]) Lisbeth Wærp, Arctic University of Norway ([email protected]) Fred Webster ([email protected]) Sara Marie Westh, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham ([email protected]) Frank Whately, Kingston University ([email protected]) Gweno Williams, University of York ([email protected]) Richard Wilson, Kingston University ([email protected]) Clas Zilliacus, Åbo Akademi ([email protected])
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