2017 ESRA Congress Programme

2017 ESRA Congress programme Shakespeare and European Theatrical Cultures: AnAtomizing Text and Stage 27 – 30 July 2017 Organisers: University of Gdańsk and Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre I. PLENARY SPEAKERS 1. Peter Holland University of Notre Dame, USA "Forgetting Shakespeare Performance" This paper will range widely across the topic of Shakespeare and forgetting before concentrating on the ease with which performance is forgotten. Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre, and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He moved there in 2002 from the UK where he was Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. He is co-General Editor for a number of series, including Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press), Shakespeare in the Theatre (Arden Shakespeare), Great Shakespearean (Bloomsbury Academic) and the Arden Shakespeare 4th series. He is Editor of Shakespeare Survey. He was elected Chair of the International Shakespeare Association in 2017. He is currently editing King Lear for Arden 4 and writing a book on Shakespeare and Forgetting. 2. Diana E. Henderson Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA "Hard Hearts and Coronets: Anatomizing Resistance and Community with Shakespeare Now" After a year of Shakespearean commemorative celebrations, “the fierce urgency of now” has intruded upon scholarly pursuits and theatrical events in more incongruous ways. In the US, making Shakespeare our contemporary has led to death threats directed at that (seemingly) most benign of theatrical subgenres, the outdoor summer festival. In Europe, the uncertainty unleashed by the Brexit referendum challenges border crossings and collaborations, while the core issues of violence and inequity that have prompted mass migrations grow ever more grotesque; at the same time, remarkable performances and conferences provide precious, fragile occasions for considering what boundary-crossing Shakespeares can do. Both celebrating and resisting comedy as a genre and humor as a nationalized fiction, this talk reflects upon the recent Merchant in Venice project and a classic Ealing Studio film to examine the errant, timely potential of the outsider, the literary, and the academic observer. Diana E. Henderson, Professor of Literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance, and many scholarly essays. She edited Routledge’s Alternative Shakespeares 3 and Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, and (with James R. Siemon) is co-editor of the annual Shakespeare Studies. Henderson served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2014, and has worked as a dramaturg and professional theatrical consultant in the US and Europe. She is currently involved in both online and performance projects, including MIT's Global Shakespeares curricular and archival initiatives and an aligned MITx module drawing on The Merchant in Venice project. 3. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska University of Warsaw, Poland “Shakespeare's curtain. The stage revealed or the stage re-veiled?” In their reflections concerning the phenomenology of perception, contemporary philosophers stress the difference between being witness to the “extravagant rhapsody” of the visible (J.-L. Marion) and the purposefulness of looking which involves “concentrating diffuse visibility” (M. Merleau-Ponty). In traditional, classic realist theatre our perception is controlled by the curtain which rises at the beginning and is lowered at the end of the performance (or of each act). In early modern plays, on the other hand, the audience was frequently reminded of the “extravagant rhapsody” of the casually visible, for instance when they saw the shape-shifting clouds floating over their heads during performances in open-air theatres. Shakespeare, however, also made ample use of a kind of curtain: the traverse or hangings which allowed him to separate the action displayed on the stage from that which – at least for the time being – had to remain hidden and secret. In The Winter’s Tale, for example, the curtain concealing the statue of Hermione statue brings to mind the veil which covered the face of Alcestis raised from the dead at the end of Euripides’s play. It may thus add to the mystery enveloping her apparent resurrection. The use of a space of concealment/discovery not only enhances the dramatic effect, but opens theatre to the incandescence of that which remains partly (or temporarily) out of sight. In my paper, I will try to analyse the interplay of concealment and discovery in contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays. In other words, I wish to show how the phenomenology of the (in)visible gives way to the metaphysics of the revealed in contemporary theatre. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska is Professor of British Literature and current Head of the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. She has published extensively on William Shakespeare, English drama and poetry of the 16th and 17th century. Her first book, Medicine of Cherries. English Renaissance Theories of Poetry (Institute of English Studies UW, 2005), dealt with the impact of the Reformation on English Renaissance poetics. Her most recent books include a study of George Herbert’s poetry viewed through the prism of Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophy of donation (A Gift for Our Times. George Herbert and Post-Phenomenology, Peter Lang 2016); and a collection of meditations on the interplay of divine Word and literature: Światłocienie. Osiem odsłon Słowa w literaturze brytyjskiej od Hopkinsa do Hughesa [Literary Chiaroscuro. Eight Glimpses of the Word in British Literature from Hopkins to Hughes, Homini, forthcoming]. She has also co-edited (with Jean Ward and Mark Burrows) two volumes of essays devoted to the intersections of poetry and theology: Breaking the Silence (Peter Lang 2015) and Poetic Revelations (Routledge 2016). Her main areas of interest include the connections between literature, philosophy and theology (in her research she focuses on the existentialist thought of Søren Kierkegaard, René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophy of donation). Together with Abbot Szymon Hiżycki OSB she convenes a cycle of workshops Poetry and Meditation in the Benedictine Monastery of Tyniec. II. PANELS PANEL 1: “Shakespearean hybridities: Appropriations, gestures, alternative realities” Convener: Martin Procházka, Charles University, Czech Republic In his “Foreword” to the volume Philosophical Shakespeares (2000), Stanley Cavell points to Shakespeare’s “appropriability” as a potential explanation for his uniqueness. For Cavell, “the idea of appropriability is not meant to prejudge the degree to which lines, scenes, plays may resist certain appropriations less or more than others;” instead, it helps in “assessing cultural position.”1 The papers in this panel discuss Shakespeare not as an inherent attribute of any text or production but as a marker of “appropriability” resulting from a cultural consensus in every age. Through the lens of the theoretical concept of hybridity, the proposed panel offers innovative contributions to our ongoing deliberations about author Shakespeare and his works. These contributions understand hybridity both ontologically, since no unmediated, authentic presence of Shakespeare’s works exists, as well as performatively, since these works function as “interfaces” facilitating cultural communication. Our contributions draw on recent works such as Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation2 and recent articles in the Journal Borrowers and Lenders and Multicultural Shakespeares,3 but our proposed panel will argue that the potentiality of Shakespeare’s appropriations arises in the structural openness of Shakespeare’s works, whereas ethical implications are secondary, referring only to the impact of individual appropriations. Panellists: 1. Márkus Zoltán, Vassar College, USA “The (Un)timeliness of Shakespeare’s Hybridity” With the aid of a specific (or idiosyncratic) understanding of the concept of appropriation that suggests appropriations are reciprocal manoeuvers of hybridization that negotiate and construct both their subjects and their objects at the same time, this contribution investigates Shakespeare as a cultural hybrid produced in various historical and cultural contexts. This paper accepts the view that Shakespeare’s works have no immediate, unmediated authentic presence; they are always already displaced. At the same time, it proposes that temporal 1 Stanley Cavell, “Foreword,” Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) xiii. 2 Ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2014). 3 http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/, ISSN 1554-6985. Gen. Eds. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia; http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/mstap, ISSN 2300-7605. Eds-in-Chief Krystyna Kujawińska- Courtney and Yoshiko Kawachi. University of Łódż. dimensions of Shakespearean appropriations remain crucial: the “originality” of Shakespeare’s plays rests in the (ongoing) history of these appropriations. In this sense, Shakespeare’s originality is not an inherent feature of his plays but a retroactive and relational outcome of appropriating Shakespeare. By drawing on current philosophical debates about perdurantism versus endurantism as well

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