Download World Shakespeare Congress 2016 – Panels and Roundtables

World Shakespeare Congress 2016 – Panels and Roundtables
Panels
“‘The actors are come hither’: Shakespearean Productions by Travelling Companies in the British
Empire and Asia”
Kaori Kobayashi (Nagoya University, Japan), Michael Dobson (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom), Nurul
Farhana Low bt Abdullah (Universiti Sains, Malaysia), Michiko Suematso (Gunma University, Japan), Richard
Fotheringham (University of Queensland, Australia)
From the late nineteenth century, a number of western acting companies began to tour the British Empire and Asia.
They toured colonial posts and foreign settlements in South Africa, India, Australia, Rangoon, Penang, Singapore,
Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Japan. This panel focuses on the itineraries of Western traveling companies and the impact
that they had on Shakespearean productions in the East and the Empire, spanning the period from the turn of the
twentieth century to the present.

“Travelling Shakespeare in Australia and New Zealand: the Case of Alfred Dampier” (Richard Fotheringham)
Alfred Dampier (1843-1908) was a British provincial actor who made his career in the Australasian colonies. For
many years he starred in “Friday night Shakespeare”, as well as in popular and nationalistic melodrama, often
playing opposite his daughter Lily with his wife and another daughter in the cast. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, audiences in Australia and New Zealand were more likely to have seen a Dampier
Shakespeare production than any other. This paper considers the impact of “the Dampiers” on these late
colonial societies but, drawing on two very different reviews of one performance
and a surviving accounts book which both throw into question what written
sources tell us, also asks methodological questions about what we can know in our
studies of performers whose careers ended just before the age of mechanical
reproduction.

“Travelling Companies in Asia around the Turn of the Twentieth Century and
their Impact on Penang and Singapore” (Nurul Law)
This paper focuses on travelling companies which toured Penang and Singapore
around the turn of the twentieth century. It considers the audience members who
attended such theatrical events in Penang and Singapore, and the effect of
travelling companies on local Malay theatre.

“Travelling Companies in the Empire and Asia Around the Turn of the Twentieth
Century and their Impact on India and Japan” (Kobayashi Kaori)
Shakespearean productions by traveling companies in Asia served as
entertainment for the British in the settlements and also tended to promote
“Englishness” and national consciousness. Companies that came to British theatres
in the East re-created the culture of the motherland, and entertained a largely
British audience of officers, merchants, scholars, and clerks working for the Empire
as well as for English-speaking people in the settlements. Travelling companies had
an effect on natives as well. Such productions provided local intellectuals, critics,
literati, students, and others with opportunities to encounter “authentic”
Shakespearean representations on stage. These new and foreign productions
exerted a significant impact on the cultures of native intellectuals and students,
and eventually stimulated the emergence of new theatrical modes. This paper
focuses on the itineraries of Western traveling companies and the impact that they had on Shakespearean
productions in the East at the turn of the twentieth century.

“A Catalyst for Cultural Convergence?: Contemporary Travelling Companies at the Tokyo Globe Theatre”
(Michiko Suematsu)
The purpose of this paper is to consider the cultural impact of travelling companies on local Shakespeare
performances today, taking the Japanese case as an example. When the Tokyo Globe Theatre, that exclusively
performed Shakespeare, opened in 1988, it was included in a global circuit of touring productions and drew
diverse theatre companies from around the world to stage more than seventy Shakespeare productions until its
closure in 2002. In terms of the scale of its impact, this exposure to the influx of travelling companies matches
Japan’s initial exposure to travelling companies in the late nineteenth century. The paper will first record and
analyze the performance history of touring productions at the Tokyo Globe and then examine how the dynamics
of “cultural globalization” they generated has transformed Japanese Shakespeare performance.
Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and Professor of Shakespeare
Studies.
Richard Fotheringham FAHA is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland and has taught and researched
Shakespeare for over thirty years. He has published extensively on Australian theatre in the years 1788-1956 and also on
the original staging conditions of Shakespearean performance. He convened the 2006 World Shakespeare Conference in
Brisbane, Australia.
Nurul Farhana Low bt Abdullah is a Lecturer in English Literature at the School of
Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. She holds an M.Phil. in Critical Theory from
the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and a PhD in Shakespeare and Critical
Theory from the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her research interests include
translation and intercultural adaptation of Shakespeare for performance.
Kobayashi Kaori, Professor of English at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Nagoya City University, Japan, has published books and essays on Shakespeare
performance history in the United Kingdom. and Asia, and has been deeply interested in
western travelling companies in nineteenth and twentieth century Asia. She is Co-Director
of A|S|I|A (Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive), a web archive of Asian Shakespeare
productions.
Michiko Suematsu is a Professor at Gunma University, Japan. She is the author of
“Import/export: Japanizing Shakespeare” in Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary
Performance, and “Innovation and Continuity: Two Decades of Deguchi Norio's
Shakespeare Theatre Company” in Performing Shakespeare in Japan. She is Co-Director of
A|S|I|A (Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive), a web archive of Asian Shakespeare
productions.
“Recreating Shakespeare on the Latin American Screen”
Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom), Aimara da Cunha
Resende (Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos, Brazil), Julie Sanders (Respondent;
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom), Alfredo Michel Modenessi (Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico)
This session explores and complicates Latin America’s engagement with Shakespeare by focusing on particular regional
sites of adaptation and generic forms. It considers the cultural presence of Shakespeare in films, television productions,
and documentaries, and it explores Argentina, Brazil, and Havana as key sites of Shakespearean production.

“Latin American Shakespearean Cinema and the Arts of Adaptation” (Mark Thornton Burnett)
This paper discusses two recent cinematic Shakespeares by Argentinian filmmaker, Matias Piñeiro. Via
proximation, updating, and transposition, the films discover how Shakespeare reflects our innermost fears and
projections. Thus, in Rosalinda (2010), an adaptation of As You Like It, characters engage with the play via
rehearsal, a sense of the “original” being captured in the setting, a rural backwater that invokes fluidity and
Shakespearean metaphors of change and changeability. Viola (2012) unfolds, by contrast, in an urban milieu
(Buenos Aires), and focuses on personalities who, via a range of relations to Twelfth Night, play with gender
roles and alternative modes of being, thereby underlining the capacity of the play to infiltrate “real life”. In
these art-house works, we see writ large the capacity of Shakespeare, in film, to launch audiences into a
complex of relationships that promise the ending of old associations as much as the opportunity for new
beginnings.

“Sun or Moon?: The Taming of the Shrew on Brazilian TV” (Aimara da Cunha Resende)
During the late twentieth century in Brazil, Globo TV deployed the novela (soap opera) format to bring an
adapted Shakespeare to a new public. My paper discusses the 2000 novela, O Cravo e a Rosa (The Carnation and
the Rose), concentrating on its urban/rural environments and recreation of the 1930s, a boom period for coffee
production. Catarina (Kate) is an independent woman born into a wealthy family; her father is a stingy banker
hoping to be elected Mayor; Julião Petruchio is an impecunious farmer who needs the money offered as
Catarina’s dower. In the production’s translations, we see “exchanges” between early modern and modern
values. Shakespeare’s play, I suggest, is remodelled so as to allow “intrusions”
demanded by the marketability of the novela genre, and this in turn illuminates the
changing status of Brazil in the late twentieth century as well as the emergence of
its global economy.

“‘Both alike in dignity’: Havana and Mexico City Play Shakespeare Today” (Alfredo
Michel Modenessi)
This paper offers a “fair” account of two twenty-first century Latin American
“Veronas”: Shakespeare in Avana: Altri Romeo, altre Giuliette—a documentary shot
in Cuba by Italian director, David Riondino, in 2010—and Besos de azúcar, a feature
film referencing Romeo and Juliet made in 2013 by Mexican screenwriter/director,
Carlos Cuarón. The documentary celebrates a sui-generis “performance” of
Shakespeare’s play in the capital of Cuba, utilizing a long-standing, popular
tradition of improvisational poetry in Spanish reaching back to the source of
Shakespeare’s “story of woe.” The feature film, refusing to sugarcoat its contents
and language, chronicles the star-crossed love of an early-teen couple in the crimeridden heart of Mexico City’s most conflicted neighbourhood. Besides their
common source, these works share a trust in the poetic spirit of their main
characters, and an equally fierce passion for the cities where the films are set,
which play central roles in these remarkable conversations with Shakespeare.
Alfredo Michel Modenessi is Professor of Comparative Studies in English Literature, Drama,
and Translation at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as well as a
stage translator, translation scholar, and dramaturg. He has published on American drama,
translation, cinema, and Shakespeare, and has translated over forty Shakespearean plays.
Aimara da Cunha Resende, President of the Centro Estudos Shakespeareanos (CESh), was
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Universidade Federal and at the
Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais. Her book, Foreign Accents: Brazilian Readings of Shakespeare, was published by
the University of Delaware Press in 2002.
Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of English at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. His most recent books
are Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Great Shakespeareans: Welles, Kurosawa,
Kozintsev, Zeffirelli (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, second edition
(Palgrave, 2012).
“Feminist Criticism: Remaking Shakespeare Studies and Performance”
Marianne Novy (University of Pittsburgh, United States), Catherine Belsey (Swansea University, United Kingdom),
Pamela Allen Brown (University of Connecticut, Stamford, United States), Sujata Iyengar (University of Georgia, United
States), Jessica Slights (Acadia University, Canada), Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, Iowa, United States)
What difference has feminist criticism made to the study and performance of Shakespeare? And where should feminist
Shakespeare criticism go next? Among our topics will be female autonomy, intersectionality with race, theater across
national borders, gender fluidity, and the merits of and limits of approaches such as Actor-Network Theory, Big Data,
and Affect Theory.

“Unfriending the Father: Feminism and the Paternal Law” (Catherine Belsey)
It is surprising how commonly Victorian critics condemned Shakespeare’s tragic heroines who defy their fathers,
while associating women whose fathers are absent or dead with an anarchic and threatening sexuality.
Meanwhile, at the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis reproduced
Victorian values when it identified the father as the lawgiver. On the other hand,
psychoanalysis went on to act as the ally of feminist criticism in treating the
paternal law itself as repressive, exorbitant, and harmful. Misogyny creates
dangerous female phantasms as symptoms of its own anxiety. Feminist criticism
has not only invited a new respect for Shakespeare’s independent women; it has
also allowed us to perceive in traditional critical accounts of menacing female
autonomy an imaginary embodiment of the culture’s worst fears.

“Why Did the English Take Boys for Actresses?” (Pamela Allen Brown)
In 1989 Stephen Orgel asked “Why Did the English Take Boys for Women?” The
question is still unanswered, perhaps because it is not precise enough. Female
impersonation was a stage skill practiced by both boys and women, as the English
knew. Scholars have produced ample evidence that the all-male theater was part of
a much wider performance culture replete with women in arenas high and low,
national and transnational. Women and girls performed at court, at great houses,
in parish halls, and on the street. Foreign troupes featured star actresses. News of
mixed-gender playing flowed across borders via English touring actors and other
travelers. Elizabeth brought mixed-gender Italian companies to court, and, later,
French actresses played in London. English playwrights emulated the foreigners,
creating brilliant, crowd-pleasing female roles: charismatic, self-aware, histrionic.
The stratagem worked. Seeing boy players as skilled substitutes for the virtuosic
actresses reframes the question of why the English took boys for women. Whether
playing Cleopatra or Rosalind, they were never meant to “boy” the “greatness” of a
woman, but the glamour of a star.

“Intersectional Shakespeares” (Sujata Iyengar)
Sujata Iyengar will consider the importance of intersectionality and critical race
theory in feminist Shakespeare criticism, from its origins in the work of Kim F. Hall, Patricia Parker, and Margo
Hendricks to newer feminist or queer work (including work by men, such as Arthur Little's or John Archer's).
Then she will turn to specific instantiations of feminist or womanist appropriations of Shakespeare in criticism
and creative work, surveying African American feminist appropriations of Shakespeare such as Morrison's
Desdemona, Natasha Trethewey’s sonnets and sonnet-like forms, Maya Angelou's prose, and Claudia Rankine’s
multimedia situation videos in Citizen. She will conclude with a pedagogical point by demonstrating through a
reading of the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream how early modern race studies and feminism, far from being
anachronistically presentist, can allow us to recapture historical dimensions of the plays that earlier scholars had
ignored or forgotten.

“Ariel’s Groans, or, Performing Protean Gender” (Kirilka Stavreva)
Shape-shifting Ariel, like Macbeth’s weird sisters, Puck, and King Hamlet’s Ghost, belongs to the category of
non-human, a-real characters, both supernatural doubles and Others to the human protagonists of the plays.
The question of Ariel’s gender remains textually unresolved (the single masculine pronoun referencing “his
quality” is at odds with the quasi-female shapes of harpy, nymph, and goddess s/he takes on), offering vague
direction to the character’s embodiment. For contemporary productions, this opens up an opportunity to use
performance choices—having the character played by one or more actors, emphasizing, diffusing, or confusing
Ariel’s gendered corporeality, vocal experimentation—to explore cultural notions of gendered alterity and the
possibilities for its free expression. This paper will map such explorations in three productions of The Tempest,
directed by, respectively, Petar Pashov (Varna Puppetry Theater, Bulgaria, 2004), Javor Gardev (Adana State
Theater, Turkey, 2004), and Katya Petrova (Sofia Puppet Theater, Bulgaria, 2013).

“Feminist Shakespeare: A Future without History?” (Jessica Slights)
Scholars have begun to challenge the value of historical contextualization for
literary criticism. It is important, especially for feminist critics of Shakespeare, to
query claims that context can and should be suspended. Feminism and historicism
have grown up together in Shakespeare studies, and, although their relationship
has not always been easy, the cultural historicist mode that now dominates the
field can be understood as a product of their alliance. Concerns that attentiveness
to the politico-historical dimensions of literature leads to neglect of its aesthetic
and affective impulses have been dismissed as the anxieties of a retrograde
formalism. Recent and varied critical approaches that draw on natural and social
science models—Actor-Network Theory, Big Data, Affect Theory—offer escape
from a tired text/context dichotomy by appearing to unlink texts from the
constraints of temporality. Reading Othello's female characters allows us to explore
the possible consequences of such a move for the future of feminist Shakespeare
criticism.
Catherine Belsey is Professor Emeritus at Swansea University and Visiting Professor at the
University of Derby. She is joint Editor of The Feminist Reader (1988, 1997), as well as a
number of books on Shakespeare and A Future for Criticism (2011).
Pamela Allen Brown is Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut,
Stamford. Her publications include Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Gender, and the
Culture of Jest in Early Modern England and two co-edited volumes: As You Like It: Texts
and Contexts and Women Players in England 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage.
Sujata Iyengar teaches at the University of Georgia. Recent books include Shakespeare’s
Medical Language (2014) and Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body
(2015). With Christy Desmet, she co-founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The
Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She is currently completing several essays about
intersectional Shakespeares.
Kirilka Stavreva, Professor of English, Cornell College, Iowa, is author of Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in
Early Modern England (Nebraska, 2015), contributing editor of an essay cluster on “Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy” (Pedagogy, 2013), and is currently co-writing an essay cluster, “Operation
Shakespeare and Post-Communist Bulgaria,” for Borrowers and Lenders.
Jessica Slights is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University, Canada.
She is currently editing Othello for Broadview, and co-edited Shakespeare and Character (2009).
“Cut Him Up in Little Stars: Romeo and Juliet Among the Arts”
Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, United States), Joseph Campana (Rice University, United States), Marlene
McCarty (New York University, United States), Viola Timm (University of Fortaleza, Brazil), Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare
Institute, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)
What comes after life? That the creation of icons is both enshrinement and violation is clear in Juliet’s pledge to cut
Romeo “out in little stars” (3.2.22). Constellation is also disarticulation. This panel addresses this afterlife of
disarticulation in art forms other than drama.

“Romeo in Pieces: Cut, Acute, Cute?” (Julia Reinhard Lupton)
Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Interesting, Cute (Harvard, 2012) is a clever and canny accounting
of the minor affects that run through contemporary art, media, and retail forms. In response to Ngai, Lupton
curates moments in Romeo and Juliet that condense the miniaturized and the
magnificent around intimations of scenic design. To cut Romeo into little stars is to
translate the supine lover laid out on the bed into a kind of bedding, a soft canopy
or sheltering heavens of desire billowing into memory through the work of cutting
and appliqué. Juliet’s image anticipates the stellification and dispersal of the lovers
in later artistic responses and the attentive harboring of what Joseph Campana calls
the play’s “velocity and violence” within those subsequent re-purposings.

“Of Dance and Disarticulation: Radio, Romeo, Juliet” (Joseph Campana)
Campana, an arts critic as well as Shakespeare scholar, reads the choreographic
afterlife of Romeo and Juliet for its disturbing undercurrents. To stage Shakespeare
as dance is always an act of disarticulation, no matter how common the balletic
Shakespeare is. This originary disarticulation is, however, intensified in the
evolution of choreographic Romeo and Juliets, which violate the narrative integrity
presumed to secure the immortality of the duo. While there is a strong emphasis
on story in most productions (Lavrosky, Ashton, MacMillan, Cranko, etc.), recent
iterations (Edouard Klug’s Radio and Juliet and Mario Bigonzetti’s Romeo and Juliet)
abandon story for an iconic disarticulation of Romeo and Juliet, the former focusing
on depersonalized love and the latter on violence and the incapacitated body.

"Romeo and Juliet: Beauty and the Modern Horrific” (Marlene McCarty)
Visual artist Marlene McCarty revisits her controversial series of huge ball-point
pen portraits of matricidal teenage girls as responses to the hidden intensities of
Romeo and Juliet. Feminist struggle with patriarchal power may well be
commonplace, but it continues to produce real life tragedies such as the matricides
documented by McCarty in her compelling portraits. Quiet admiration for the
simple humanity that emerges when the public shell is broken by tragedy unites
Shakespeare's creations for viewing publics of all ages with their posthumous re-creations in newly unfolding
contexts and cultural milieus.

"Metamorphoses of the Sycamore: Unrobing Juliet between the Media" (Viola Timm)
Viola Timm responds to McCarty’s visual work by imagining a Shakespearean curatorial practice. Timm offers a
reading of Romeo and Juliet as a self-reflexive portrayal of the relationship among text, performance, and
curation. A psychoanalytic examination of literary metamorphosis informs her reading of the symbolism of the
sycamore grove and traces the common source of Romeo's libidinization of Juliet and of the artist's object of
representation. A psychoanalytic examination of literary metamorphosis informs Timm’s reading of the
symbolism of the sycamore grove and traces the common source of Romeo's libidinization of Juliet and of the
artist's object of representation. The paper shows how Shakespeare and Marlene McCarty's works perform a
transformation that unrobes private anatomies and gardens that can no longer serve the power structures that
made them.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of four books on
Shakespeare, including Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and
Political Theology. She is a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013-14).
Joseph Campana is Associate Professor of English at Rice University. Campana is the author of The Pain of Reformation
and two poetry collections, The Book of Faces and Natural Selections. Current projects include The Child’s Two Bodies:
Shakespeare and the Birth of Sovereignty and Dancing Will: Shakespearean Choreographies.
Marlene McCarty is Clinical Associate Professor of Visual Art at New York University. As a member of Gran Fury, the
AIDS activist collective, McCarty staged public interventions using the language of art and
advertising. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollack-Krasner Grant, the
Skowhegan School Teaching Fellowship, and, as Gran Fury, an honorary doctorate from
Massachusetts College of Art.
Viola Timm is Visiting Professor of Public Health at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil,
former Assistant Professor of German at New York University, Mellon Fellow at Johns
Hopkins University, and Hayman PhD from the University of California. She writes about
global health, tragedy, mourning and mental health, Shakespeare as auto-pathography,
technology, and creatio ex-voto.
Ewan Fernie (Chair) is Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of
Birmingham, where he pioneered the new MA in Shakespeare and Creativity and is
centrally involved in the major collaboration with the RSC at The Other Place. His latest
book is The Demonic: Literature and Experience.
“Authorship, Collaboration, and Computational Techniques”
Gary Taylor (Florida State University, United States), Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle,
Australia), Gabriel Egan (De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom)
The past decade has seen an explosion in computer-supported scholarly studies that have
reshaped our theories of “authorship” and our sense of how early playwrights practiced it.
This panel builds upon that work, expanding the application of such techniques into the
study of alternative versions, genre, chronology, and anonymity.

“Shakespeare and Who?” (Gary Taylor)
There is now a secure consensus about Shakespeare’s Jacobean collaborators
(Fletcher, Middleton, and Wilkins). But with the exception of Peele in the first Act of Titus and Nashe in the first
Act of 1 Henry VI, there is no such consensus about Shakespeare’s collaborators in the rest of the Henry VI plays,
Edward III, or Arden of Faversham. The anonymity of the collaborators makes it hard to situate young
Shakespeare in the networks of the early commercial theatre. Given the stylistic differences between the nonShakespearian scenes in those four plays, more than one author must be involved, and this paper will focus
developing techniques of data-mining on the non-Shakespearian scenes of 1 Henry VI and Arden of Faversham.

"Does Relative Entropy Confirm or Refute the Theory that Some Shakespeare Quartos are Bad?" (Gabriel
Egan)
The notion of entropy in language was invented by the engineer Claude Shannon as he worked on improving
digital signal transmission and it quantifies the informational content of any piece of writing. Used to compare
different writers' habits in collocating function words, relative entropy is a strong discriminator of authorial style
and has successfully been applied by the presenter to the key problems in establishing the Shakespeare canon.
The concept of entropy is first illustrated by a practical exercise for the audience and the talk then applies it to
the perplexing relationships between the Shakespearian bad quartos and their good counterparts. Are the bad
quartos corruptions of better texts and/or early versions of the same plays and/or wholly or partly by someone
else? If the results of computational methods known to be good for authorship discrimination are
indeterminate for the bad quartos, this directs our attention towards distortion during transmission, which is
the problem for which Shannon first invented the notion of linguistic entropy.

"Authorial Attribution and Shakespearian Variety: Genre, Form, and Chronology” (Hugh Craig)
After a couple of decades of computational work on Shakespeare attribution, we know that the authorial signal
is strong in early modern English drama, and can serve as the basis for a distinctive authorial profile and thus for
reliable attributions. However, there are other signals which potentially confuse
the authorial one, and which scholars sometimes mention, and sometimes take
into account in experimental design: genre, date, and mode (prose versus verse). In
this paper I explore this interaction between authorial and other factors in a large
corpus of drama. Shakespeare offers a large and varied canon for testing, and will
provide the main test-bed, with some comparison with others. The paper will ask,
how much variation is there within an author by genre, date, and mode? Should we
be comparing comedies with comedies, late sixteenth century plays with other
plays of the same era, and prose with prose, rather than simply Shakespeare with
non-Shakespeare?
Gary Taylor is Distinguished Research Professor and founder of the History of Text
Technologies program at Florida State University. He general-edited the Oxford Middleton
(2007) and the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016), and co-edited Shakespearean Authorship
(2016). He has published on attribution problems in early modern drama since 1987.
Gabriel Egan is Director of the Centre for Textual Studies and Professor of Shakespeare
Studies at De Montfort University. He researches and teaches on the two key revolutions in
writing and publication technology: printing with movable type, and the computer. His
book Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory is forthcoming from The Arden Shakespeare.
Hugh Craig is Deputy Head of the Faculty of Education and Arts and Director of the Centre
for Literary and Linguistic Computing at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His work is
in the application of statistics to literary language, and to language in general,
encompassing authorship attribution, quantitative literary history, and clinical linguistics.
He is currently completing a project on broad patterns in the dialogue of early modern
English drama with Dr Brett Hirsch.
“Shakespeare and Traditional Stories”
Helen Cooper (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), Jacek Fabiszak (University of Poznań, Poland),Hester LeesJeffries (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), Andrew King (University College Cork, Ireland)
Dozens of early modern writers testify, usually with disapproval, to the abundance of traditional stories, ballads, and
romances current in Elizabethan England, and especially to their influence on children. This panel will attempt to
recover some sense of how such material might have helped to shape Shakespeare’s imagination.

“‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin’: Old Tales and their Material Contexts” (Hester LeesJeffries)
In Twelfth Night, “Come away, death” is associated by Orsino with “the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, /
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones”, a vivid and unsettling frame for both the song and the
scene which follows it. This paper will explore ways in which the material contexts of traditional stories are
evoked in Shakespeare’s plays, and to what effect. Textual borrowings and even “traditional” tunes have tended
to be more accessible to critics, not least because they can readily be included as appendices in critical editions.
Drawing on recent work in historical performance and material culture, this paper will suggest that the
associated things and actions of traditional tales, staged or evoked, can be as potent as their content, especially
in affective terms.

“‘A Shelled Peascod’: The Galfridian Tradition in King Lear” (Andrew King)
Shakespeare’s King Lear was clearly intended to be experienced with a strong sense of intertextual alignment
and generic expectation with the anonymous King Leir (recorded for performance
by Henslowe in 1594, printed 1605), which has its own ultimate origins in Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae of c. 1136. Shakespeare’s play is set up
as a direct challenge to the earlier Leir: he places at the heart of his radical break
with the established form of the narrative an interrogation of received stories and
their sources, even those as sacred as the Galfredian “British history”. With this
narrative taken away, Shakespeare’s play becomes the very essence of
nothingness: a society that is no longer sustained by its central narrative; “a shelled
peascod”.

‘Why Prospero drowned his books, and other Catholic folklore’ (Helen Cooper)
Books are durable commodities: we know from the large number of surviving
copies of the Golden Legend, the compendium of saints’ lives and legends
translated and printed by Caxton, that many of its readers did not dispose of their
copies in the aftermath of the Reformation. This paper will look at the evidence for
Shakespeare’s having some acquaintance with the work, such as he might perhaps
have acquired in the household of the Catholic Ardens, and the ways in which some
of its fantastical stories may have influenced his imagination and some details of his
plays – including why Prospero drowns his books rather than burning them.
Helen Cooper (Organiser) is Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the
University of Cambridge. Her books include The English Romance in Time (Oxford, 2004)
and Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London, 2010).
Jacek Fabiszak (Chair) is Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the Adam
Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He has lectured and published widely on Shakespeare,
and has a particular interest in Shakespeare on screen.
Hester Lees-Jeffries teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature as a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a
fellow of St Catharine’s College. She is the author of Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford, 2013) and England’s Helicon
(Oxford, 2007), as well as many essays and articles. Her monograph-in-progress is Textile Shakespeare.
Andrew King is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance English at University College, Cork. He is the author of The “Faerie
Queene” and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford, 2000), and a number of articles related to
his current work on British Galfridian history in English Renaissance drama.
“Shakespeare in Zoom”
Peter Holland (Notre Dame University, United States), Russ McDonald (Goldsmiths University, United Kingdom), Ruth
Morse (Université Paris Diderot - Paris VII, France), Robert N. Watson (UCLA, United States)
Recent scholarship shows renewed interest in excavating the coherence and complexity of literature before attempting
political advocacy or diagnosing social symptomology. Through very close reading of page and stage, this panel will be
“Recreating Shakespeare” as if by cloning, zooming in on patterns of details that give his works life.

“Shakespeare and Co-: Coriolanus versus the Common” (Robert N. Watson)
Coriolanus refuses to be implicated in “the appetite and affection common / Of the whole body.” His struggle to
define a self that excludes shared creaturely humanity corresponds to Rome’s transition from monarchy to
republic and King James’s struggle for sovereignty over the House of Commons. Coriolanus’s Senecan selfenclosure also reflects the damage the enclosure crisis did to food and community. Menenius’s opening bellyfable links communities of bread with communities of blood, and the rest of the
play explores that connection at the micro-level of diction as well as the macrolevel of plot. “Com-pan” words turn up nine times, and the play is haunted by the
prefix “com-“ or “con-“, abetted by “part”, in tension with “sole”, “lone”, “whole”,
and “wholesome”. The word “common” appears more often here than in any of
Shakespeare’s other works, becoming the unnamed antagonist of the story, and a
prime cause of its debates.

“‘But figures of delight’: Shakespearean Patterns” (Russ McDonald)
My title alludes to Sonnet 98, in which the status of “figures” seems ambiguous, a
concern that manifests itself throughout the canon. The poet-playwright both
delights in and distrusts figuration, deploring the mediation attendant upon
metaphor, verbal schemes, and other poetic patterns. Many critics have endorsed
this authorial suspicion about patterning, reading it back into the earliest work,
notably the first tetralogy of history plays. Therefore this paper undertakes to
reconsider the rhetoricity of the early histories, concentrating on 3 Henry VI. It will
situate the play’s self-conscious poetic surface within the context of Elizabethan
design generally, making connections between poetic ostentation and some
examples of sixteenth century miniatures, textiles, and other products of craft. The
overriding aim will be to demonstrate that Shakespeare was giving his culture the
kind of poetic drama it wanted, the aural equivalent of the highly decorated
surfaces it preferred in its visual arts.

“Shakespeare Dissing: Depriving Particles” (Ruth Morse)
Affixation doesn’t get much attention nowadays, although Charles Barber observed
years ago that in the early modern period “affixation alone produces more new
words than loans from all languages”, and illustrated this lexical expansion with
examples of what sticking a bit on the front or the back of a word could do. More
recent guides seldom mention affixation at all, concentrating on other pressing problems. I am interested in
characters’ judgements as sometimes subliminally contradicted by a word with a prefix. I have taken two, unand dis-, to discuss quite different features: their ethical clustering and their etymological status (one the OED’s
charming category “Teutonic”, the other Latin/Romance). These “depriving particles”, sometimes called
“privatives”, create “particular moments of recusatory dismay”, embedding the values they negate, and thus
emphasizing what they contradict: for example, “uncouth” and “dishonour".

“‘This film has been modified…to fit your tv’: Closely Watching Frames” (Peter Holland)
Where close reading has long been normative in Shakespeare studies, close watching of the text in performance
is a necessarily recent phenomenon, the consequence of technologies creating new normative viewing practices
for analysis. Yet the object closely viewed is filmed, with liveness still precluding re-viewing in most analysis. At
the edge of the performance space in theatre is the audience. At the edge of the screen image is the shape of
the frame. This paper will concentrate on the edge of Shakespeare performances through recorded theatre,
recent theory of the screen frame and the practice of reformatting, in order to consider how performance is
literally reshaped in (re)framing and (re)formatting, (re)marking how closely watching frames charts the limits of
analysis.
Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at UCLA. His books explore
ambition in Shakespeare, parody in Ben Jonson, the fear of death in Renaissance culture, the Renaissance roots of
environmentalism, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. He has also edited several volumes of and about Jonson.
Ruth Morse was professeur des universités at Université-Paris-Diderot. Her most recent books include Shakespeare, les
français, les France (2008), Continuum Great Shakespeareans XIV and Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (with
Peter Holland and Helen Cooper), both 2013. She writes for the Times Literary Supplement,
and is a judge for the UK Crime Writers Association.
Russ McDonald is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. A
specialist in Shakespearean poetics, he is the author of, among other books, The Bedford
Companion to Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, and Shakespeare’s Late
Style. His most recent work, with Lena Cowen Orlin, is The Bedford Shakespeare, an
expressly pedagogical edition. He has won multiple awards for distinguished teaching.
Peter Holland is Associate Dean for the Arts and the McMeel Family Professor in
Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame, and past Director of the Shakespeare Institute. His
first book, The Ornament of Action, studied Restoration comedy in performance. He is
editor of Shakespeare Survey and the Redefining British Theatre History series, Co-Editor of
the Oxford Shakespeare, and Associate General Editor of the Oxford Drama Library.
“When Shakespeare Met Cervantes: Cardenio and Beyond”
José Manuel González (University of Alicante, Spain), Roger Chartier (Collège de France),
Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard University, United States)
This panel aims to show novel aspects not only of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s works but
also of their lives, that can help us explain their being set apart as writers and know how
they managed to give to stories like Cardenio a sense of life with its contingencies and
frustrations.

“When Shakespeare Met Cervantes” (Roger Chartier)
Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day but in different calendars. They
were the literary geniuses of their time. They must have met. As their encounter did not leave any trace, fiction
imagined it. This paper will focus on some of the texts that described their dialogue. They were written by
Anthony Burgess, Carlos Fuentes, and Robin Chapman. These fictional narratives will be confronted with the
historical documents that made them possible: the relations of the embassy of Nottingham in Spain in 1605 or
the copy of the Second Folio owned by the Colegio de los Ingleses in Valladolid (today at the Folger Library).

“Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the Many Lives of Stories” (Stephen Greenblatt)
Shakespeare was a genius who left his mark on everything he touched. But there is also a strange sense that he
was seized by his characters and plots as much as he seized upon them. Moreover, there is throughout his work
a willingness to take up and then let go. Many of the surviving texts suggest a constant refiguring of the stories
he chose. The refiguring is manifested both in changes that Shakespeare wrought to his sources and in changes
that he and his company made in revising a play that had already been performed. And then, of course, there
are innumerable further changes in subsequent productions. We speak of Shakespeare’s works as if they were
stable reflections of his original intentions, but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so
amenable to metamorphosis. Shakespeare’s lost play, Cardenio, is a perfect instance of this metamorphic
principle.

“Bones, Cardenio, and What Don Miguel and Master Shakespeare Have Left Us” (José Manuel González)
In 2016, we will commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. But that celebration will
not be complete without a reference to Cervantes, his equal in literary creativity and genius, whose
quatercentenary will also be celebrated just a year after what appear to be his bones have been found at the
Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid. It is an unparalleled opportunity to know more about their lives,
and about what they experienced and sought as human beings and writers. This paper will explore the
singularity of their lives, as well as the deep humanity of their vision, culminating in
Cardenio, in which the connection between their paradigmatic literary achievement
is manifested. By looking at this and other Cervantine and Shakespearean works,
new light will be shed on their relationship within the context of the early modern
period and beyond.
Roger Chartier is Professor at the Collège de France and Visiting Professor at the University
of Pennsylvania. His latest books in English include The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s
Mind (2014), Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare (2013), and Inscription and
Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (2007).
Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary critic, theorist, scholar, and Pulitzer Prize
winning author. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve and Will in the
World. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton
Shakespeare, and is the co-author of a play, Cardenio.
José Manuel González is Professor of English at the University of Alicante and has been
Visiting Professor at the universities of Delaware, South Carolina, Groningen, Bangor, and
King´s College London. He is the editor of Shakespeare and Spain (2002), Spanish Studies in
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2006), and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Rabelais
(2011). His latest contributions have appeared in Women Making Shakespeare (2013) and
Neophilologus (2015).
“Shakespeare and the Costume Archives”
Patricia Lennox (New York University, United States), Kate Dorney (Victoria and Albert Museum, United Kingdom), Carol
Rutter (University of Warwick, United Kingdom), Catherine Treilhou-Balaudé (Université de Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
This panel focuses on the “material memories” made available through significant use of archive collections in two
museums and one working theatre: in England, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Shakespeare Company,
and in France the Centre National du Costume de Scène (CNCS).

“Stuff that Remembers: Costumes in the RSC Archives as Records of Performance” (Carol Rutter)
Cued by Barbara Hodgdon’s seminal essay that urges me to stop trawling through sale racks on the High Street
and instead do my “Shopping in the Archives” (Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance , Peter Holland [ed.]) I
return to the site of Hodgdon's original work, the Royal Shakespeare Company's costume archives, to look at
what gets saved (as against what, put in the company’s hire wardrobe, gets recycled). How do costumes
remember? What do they remember? Why is the archival memory important? How do costumes remember
technical innovation and the art of the designer’s craft? Archives cost. Aren’t costumes that make money—but
get used up, consumed—more useful to a company like the RSC?

“Shopping for the Archive: Collecting and Curating Shakespearean Costume at the V&A” (Kate Dorney)
The V&A holds an array of Shakespearean and Shakespeare-influenced costume pieces worn by performers
ranging from Henry Irving to Adrian Lester and designs from William Godwin to Nick Ormerod. Our remit is to
document the history and practice of all branches of the live performing arts from
theatre to circus and rock music to grand opera. So Shakespeare has a huge
presence in the collections and design is a large part of that. Ellen Terry and Mrs
Nettleship did their shopping in Bohemia, Hodgdon and Rutter do theirs in the
archive: this paper will explore how V&A curators have shopped for the archive,
literally and figuratively, talking through deliberate acquisitions chased down
through salerooms or private networks, and the happy accidents, like Hermia's
costume from Peter Brook's 1970 Dream, handed to me at the end of a Brook
Study Day by actress Mary Rutherford.

"Shakespeare Costumes, from French Stage to Museum Showcases" (Catherine
Treilhou-Balaudé)
This talk questions how French stage costume collections (Centre National du
Costume de scène, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Comédie-Française) are made
and archived. How—and for whom—do costumes remember stagings of
Shakespeare’s plays, operas, and ballets, and design of their time, as well as the
great performers who wore them?
Patricia Lennox, Global Lecturer, New York University, is Co-Editor of and contributor to
Shakespeare and Costume and edited As You Like It for the New Kittredge Shakespeare
Series. Her articles appear in Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays
on Screen, Shakespeare Survey, and The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare.
Carol Rutter is Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of
Warwick. Her monographs include Shakespeare and Child's Play and Enter the Body, and
she is a contributor to Great Shakespeareans (“Peggy Ashcroft”), The Oxford Middleton
Handbook and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. She reviewed Shakespeare performed in
England for Shakespeare Survey (2007-2014). Her practice as research film, “Unpinning Desdemona: The Movie”, is
online.
Kate Dorney, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Performance at the Victoria and Albert museum, has
contributed to Shakespeare Bulletin and the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia and written on areas of post1945 theatre practice. She is Joint Editor of the journals Studies in Theatre and Performance and Studies in Costume and
Performance.
Catherine Treilhou-Balaudé, Professeur d’histoire et esthétique du theater, l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3;
Director, Design Research Program, Institut de recherches en études théâtrales; co-commissaire of exhibition
“Shakespeare, l'étoffe du monde” at the CNCS. Recent publications: Hamlet, énigmes du texte, réponses de la scène;
Shakespeare, l'étoffe du monde; “Classique ou étranger? Shakespeare à la Comédie-Française, d’Un Conte d’hiver à
Richard III” in Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la Comédie-Française.
“Shakespeare in the Global South”
Sandra Young (University of Cape Town, South Africa), Ashish Beesoondial (Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius),
Donna Woodford-Gormley (New Mexico Highlands University, United States), Pompa Banerjee (University of Colorado,
United States)
This panel shifts the lines of inquiry into Shakespeare’s ongoing cultural life by putting in conversation histories,
scholarship, and “tradaptations” of Shakespeare within Africa, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
We consider the possibilities that emerge with “creolization”, “indigenisation”, and the
“localisation” of a global Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare: an Indian Cultural Export?” (Pompa Banerjee)
Contemporary Indian cinema dislocates Shakespeare from Englishness and the
civilizing mission that first brought Shakespeare to India. This paper examines the
uses of Shakespeare in Vishal Bhardwaj’s films. Bhardwaj’s aesthetically estranged
and politically charged Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet offer reassessments of
Shakespearean tragedy beyond European literary conventions. The films invite
cosmopolitan readings of Shakespeare while inserting regional concerns into global
discourses; local issues ultimately resonate beyond the global south. This paper
also addresses the ways contemporary Indian films renegotiate Shakespeare’s
place in the global market: on the one hand, Shakespearean texts are catalysts,
“foreign” bodies that complicate specifically indigenous concerns. On the other
hand, the foreign becomes local. If Shakespeare was once a British import
instrumental in expressing the colonizer’s values, then Bhardwaj’s films transform
these once-familiar texts into specifically Indian cultural exports. Shakespeare is
made new and meaningful for multilingual and diasporic audiences through the
global reach of Bollywood.

“Shakespeare’s Creolised Voices” (Ashish Beesoondial)
That Prospero’s island could be Mauritius is as weird a claim as it is interesting – a
powerful symbol for the dislocation of Shakespeare.
Translated and appropriated, it is particularly in Dev Virahsawmy’s works that
Shakespeare has found resonance in Mauritius. This paper explores how
Virahsawmy’s tradaptations of Shakespeare are central to his vision as a writer and
how they foreground his socio-political idealism. Soyinka‐esque in his style of
writing, Virahsawmy’s concerns with power politics and social and gender exploitation in a post‐colonial context
cut across his tradaptations. Driving Virahsawmy’s agenda is his advocacy for cultural and linguistic inter-mixings
and both are articulated in his endeavour to creolize Shakespeare. By reclaiming Shakespeare’s English,
Virahsawmy seeks to challenge the reductionist view of Kreol as a patois and parochial form, and instead
valorize his mother tongue. Kreol Morisien, like Shakespeare’s English, can also be the vehicle of philosophical
thoughts and the language of wit.

“Cuban Improvisations: Repentismo and Shakespeare” (Donna Woodford-Gormley)
Cuban adaptations of Shakespeare have ranged from the very traditional to versions that use Shakespeare plays
to explore concerns in contemporary Cuban life. In all of these approaches, however, Shakespeare remains a
foreign import and not a native Cuban art form. An art form that is an integral part of the Cuban culture is
repentismo, or improvisational poetry. Cuban campesinos who have never seen a play performed in a theatre
have likely witnessed and participated in local performances of repentismo. Otello all'improvviso and
Shakespeare in Havana, the film collaborations of Cuban poet, Alexis Diaz Pimienta, and Italian director, David
Riondino, explore Cuban repentismo by giving prompts drawn from Shakespeare plays and then asking poets to
improvise the response of Romeo, Othello, or Juliet. The resulting documentaries present a more fully
Cubanized Shakespeare while allowing for a conversation between a very Cuban art form and the plays of the
English bard.

“Shakespeare’s Transcolonial Solidarities” (Sandra Young)
While scholars have celebrated Shakespeare’s availability as a resource for writers, activists, and politicians
during anti‐colonial and anti-apartheid struggles, contemporary theatre-makers have used Shakespeare in a
manner that complicates the dichotomies of earlier histories. I explore the critical frame of the global south and
the lateral view it privileges, across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds, to
consider the cultural and political resonances of Shakespeare’s work in
contemporary Africa. Shakespeare’s evolving cultural presence in Africa speaks to
the renewal that is possible when he ceases to be thought of as the privileged
route to creative and humanist affirmation or a mainstay of English colonial
education. Contemporary writers and theatre-makers, alert to what Françoise
Lionnet calls “transcolonial solidarity”—creative and political empathy across
oceans of difference in time and place—have helped to reanimate Shakespeare’s
work. Having travelled this far from Elizabethan Stratford, Shakespeare in Africa
has become wonderfully, productively, unhinged.
Pompa Banerjee teaches courses in early modern literature and culture at the University of
Colorado Denver. She has published essays on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, European
witchcraft, and European travel narratives. Her book Burning Women (Palgrave Macmillan,
2002) exposes the links between sati and European burnings of women as witches.
Ashish Beesoondial teaches English and Drama at the Mauritius Institute of Education. His
primary interest is in theatre, creolistics, and performance-based approaches in teacher
development. He has directed numerous theatre productions in English, French, and
Creole. He has published essays on Shakespeare and conducted workshops on teaching
Shakespeare through drama.
Donna Woodford‐Gormley is a Professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.
She is the author of Understanding King Lear, and has published several articles on
Shakespeare and early modern literature in scholarly books and journals. Currently she is
writing a book on Cuban adaptations of Shakespeare.
Sandra Young teaches in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. Her first
book, The Early Modern Global South in Print (Ashgate, 2015), traces the emergence of a
global south in partisan knowledge practices of early modernity. Current projects include a book on “Shakespeare and
the Global South”.
“Shakespeare’s Unteachable Words”
Adam Zucker (University of Massachusetts, United States), Indira Ghose (University of Fribourg, Switzerland), Lucy
Munro (King’s College London, United Kingdom)
Could there be such a thing as an unteachable word in the plays of Shakespeare? This panel explores the creation and
recreation of the Shakespearean text through hard language, shifting meanings, and profanity, shedding new light on
the relation between pedagogical practice and the meaning of Shakespeare’s work.

“Antihonorificabilitudinitatibus: Bad Teachers, Bad Students, and Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Adam Zucker)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, with all its linguistic density and obscure wordplay, is a notoriously difficult play to stage,
to read, and, most of all, to teach. We, in our role as teachers, are needed to lead students through the
minefield of puns and witty reference that makes up the play’s terrain. But dangers lurk along the way. In
Holofernes, Nathaniel, Moth and others, the play contains within itself Shakespeare’s most cutting
representation of the act of teacherly explication. If we do our job as explicators correctly, in other words, we
will lead our students through a bitter (albeit very funny) castigation of the process we have all embarked upon.
Using “honorificabilitudinitatibus” and its opposite as its keywords, this paper argues that unteachable words in
Love’s Labour’s Lost can help us think through this problem in ways that shed light on pedantry, pedagogy, and
textual histories in Shakespearean contexts.

“A Touch of Class: Buried Connotations in Shakespeare's Language” (Indira Ghose)
This paper looks at connotations of class (an anachronism in itself) that often get
lost in today’s world -- not only for students. How many of us remember that when
Holofernes reproaches the courtiers of Navarre with the words, “This is not
generous, not gentle, not humble”, he is referring specifically to their aristocratic
status and the civility it should entail? Or that the term “honest” refers to “honour”,
as does “credit”? And why do these terms often mean something different in
connection with women? Why does Bolingbroke, cousin to the King, claim he is a
gentleman -- as does Malvolio? As William Empson has shown in his marvellous
exploration of the implications of “honest Iago”, the layers of meaning packed into
these terms often reflect a world in flux, in which a rise in status was a dream
shared by a wide swathe of society. In our allegedly egalitarian world, perhaps an
engagement with early modern class might help to make us aware of aspirations we
like to deny.

“‘Sblood! Unteachable Oaths and the Editing of Shakespeare’s Plays” (Lucy Munro)
This paper explores blasphemous oaths, words that are “unteachable” in two
senses: initially unruly, taboo forms of language, these emotionally charged words
have become obsolete and potentially inert. It asks what is at stake in the editing of
blasphemous oaths in Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the ways in which swearing
has been mediated through textual emendation and annotation. The swearing of
different characters is handled in markedly different ways. For instance, Iago and
Hamlet use identical blasphemous oaths – ’sblood and ’swounds – but Iago’s
swearing generally receives detailed commentary, while Hamlet’s is more often
ignored, elided, or dismissed. What does editors’ handling of bad language suggest
about changing attitudes towards swearing and dramatic character? And what
might we gain pedagogically by reforming our editorial treatment of archaic and emotionally charged language?
Adam Zucker is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge UP, 2011), and the coeditor, most recently, of Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015). He is working on a new
monograph about stupidity, nonsense, and incompetence in Shakespearean drama.
Indira Ghose is the author of Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester UP, 2008). She is working on a
book about Renaissance courtesy literature and early modern drama.
Lucy Munro is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge UP, 2005) and
Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge UP, 2013). She is working on a book about the King’s Men and
a study of bad language in Shakespeare and early modern drama.
“‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth’: Interrogating ‘Global’ Shakespeare”
Poonam Trivedi (Delhi University, India), Christie Carson (Royal Holloway, United Kingdom), Judy Celine Ick (University of
the Philippines, Philippines)
Puck’s assurance to Oberon is not needed today: Shakespeare is a widely acknowledged world author transcending time
and cultural space. The panel will debate key aspects of this trajectory, viz. the politics (who speaks for the global, and
how?) and the pedagogy (provincialising or shoring up?) of the “globalization” of Shakespeare in translation,
performance, and criticism.

“The Worlding of the World of Shakespeare: Critical Possibilities” (Poonam
Trivedi)
The “global” is the new halo in Shakespeare studies. It dignifies “him that gives and
him that takes”. The paper will interrogate the current conceptualization of global
Shakespeare and extend its parameters. It will adopt the concept of “worlding”
which has evolved beyond Heidegger’s definition as an intrinsic means of knowing
and being in the world, to a term for western colonial domination, to a recognition
of the existence of a simultaneity of many worlds. It will use these several
empowering significations to probe the configurations of the “global” and to
suggest possibilities of a more broad-based worlding, i.e., existence and knowing of
Shakespeare. Shakespeare is an acknowledged exemplar of world literature today.
Criticism, too, in consonance needs to extend the field of the interpretative and
theoretical imaginary. The paper will ground these arguments with reference to the
translation—linguistic, performative, and cultural—of Hamlet and Macbeth in
India.

“Performance, Presence, and Personal Responsibility: Witnessing the Globe to
Globe Festival” (Christie Carson)
For the Globe to Globe Festival of 2012 I committed myself to watching all 38
productions. The objective in “being there” for every show was to bear witness to
the events but also to experience everything that the participants on stage and off
were feeling; to acquire a “body” of knowledge that could only be achieved
through physical presence. With the Globe to Globe Hamlet tour of 2014-16 the
opposite has been true. I witnessed one performance of the production before it
left London and then contributed a blog post to the website. Since then I have tried
to follow the tour virtually. In this paper I will consider the difference between real
and virtual experience in the global theatrical world and will ask the question posed
by the panel chair: what are the critical and theoretical procedures required to estimate and to appreciate
“global” Shakespeare?

“The Forests of Silence: Global Shakespeare in the Philippines, the Philippines in Global Shakespeare” (Judy
Celine Ick)
When does Shakespeare cease to be just “Shakespeare” and when does it become “global Shakespeare?” What
are its conditions of existence?
This paper explores these questions by looking at contemporary Shakespearean productions in the Philippines,
specifically Ricardo Abad’s Sintang Dalisay and PETA’s William, as they negotiate the evolution of Shakespeare
from colonial artifact into an element of contemporary, post-national global culture. Even as these productions
actively wrestle with the issues attendant to global Shakespeare, however, the institutions of global
Shakespeare remain barely conscious of the place of the Philippines in it. If like that proverbial falling tree,
Philippine Shakespeare resonates only in the forests of global Shakespeare’s archival silences, what then is
revealed about it and other outlier Shakespeares as both enabling and potentially disabling conditions of the
field known as “global Shakespeare?”
Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, has published Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010), India’s Shakespeare:
Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (2005), a CD-ROM King Lear in India (2006), and articles on performance
and film versions of Shakespeare in India. She is Vice Chair of the Asian Shakespeare Association.
Christie Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance at Royal Holloway University of London. She writes on
contemporary Shakespearean performance and the impact of digital technology on scholarship, most recently in
Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (2014), and
Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (2013).
Judy Celine Ick is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at
the University of the Philippines. She is currently Vice Chairperson of the Asian Shakespeare
Association and an occasional actor and dramaturg for several professional theatre
companies in the Philippines.
“Settling In: Reflecting on the Move Indoors”
Will Tosh (Shakespeare’s Globe, United Kingdom), Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford,
United Kingdom), Holger Syme (University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada)
By 2016, three seasons of theatrical performance will have elapsed at the Globe’s Sam
Wanamaker Playhouse. “Settling In” provides a forum for scholars to discuss what the new
playhouse has taught us about Jacobean drama on stage, and the indoor theatrical culture
of the early seventeenth century.
Tiffany Stern is Beaverbrook and Bouverie Tutorial Fellow in English and Professor of Early
Modern Drama, University of Oxford. She is the author of Rehearsal from Shakespeare to
Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey,
2007), and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009), and Co-Editor of
Shakespeare’s Theatre and the Effects of Performance (2013). She has edited King Leir, The
Rivals, The Recruiting Officer, and The Jovial Crew.
Holger Syme is Associate Professor of English and Chair, Department of English and Drama,
University of Toronto Mississauga. Professor Syme is the author of Theatre and Testimony in
Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (2012) and Co-Editor of Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603: Material
Practices and Conditions of Playing (2009). He is currently working on “Paper Stages: Theatre in Print in Shakespeare’s
England” and “Bards in Business: London Theatre in the 1590s”.
Will Tosh is Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Globe Education. Dr Tosh co-ordinates the ongoing Indoor Performance
Practice Project at Shakespeare’s Globe, which examines playing in the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Alongside
his performance practice research, he writes on early modern male friendship, and his monograph focusing on the circle
of Anthony Bacon, Letters and Friendship in Early Modern England, will be published in 2016.
“Creating and Recreating Quills: Manuscripts as Evidence for the Editing of Shakespeare and Early
Modern Spanish Plays”
John Jowett (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom), Alejandro García Reidy (University of Syracuse, United States),
Jesus Tronch (Universitat de València)
Panel summary to be confirmed
“Re-Casting Shakespeare: Translations, Adaptations, and Performances Across the Arab World”
Katherine Hennessey (University of Warwick/Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom), Margaret Litvin
(Boston University, United States), Graham Holderness (University of Hertfordshire, United
Kingdom), Rafik Darragi (University of Tunis, Tunisia), David C. Moberly (University of
Minnesota, United States), Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem (Cairo University, Egypt),
Paulo Lemos Horta (New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
This panel brings together leading scholars on the subject of Shakespeare in the Arab World
to interrogate the significance, the challenges, and the creative innovations of recent
translations, adaptations, and performances of Shakespearean works, from North Africa to
the Arabian Peninsula. Each of the panel's two sections will have its own particular focus:
one on the text, and one on performance. Taken together, the presentations on this double
panel will provide an enlightening cross-section of recent trends in Shakespearean
performance and interpretation across the Middle East and North Africa, and a lively
perspective on the myriad ways in which Shakespeare is currently being re-cast, re-set, and
re-created in the Arab World.

“Aestheticizing Violence: Two North African Adaptations of Othello” (Rafik
Darragi)
Following globalization and the development of the mass media and new
technologies, violence is more and more calling attention to itself as such. Given
that Othello supports a wide range of interesting, challenging issues, such as
racism, integration, identity and violence, my paper will focus on the
elaborate aestheticizing process which characterizes two North African adaptations
of this Shakespearean play: Otayl wal-khayl wal-ba'ru'd, (Oteyl, Horses and
Gunpowder) (1975-76) by the Moroccan Abdelkrim Berrchid, and Othello or The
One Day Star (2007) by the Tunisian, Mohamed Driss. This process is
probably meant to desensitize the public to the violent act.

“Desdemona in a Bedouin Tent: A Digital Hybrid Performance from Oman”
(Katherine Hennessey)
A Dark Night, written and directed by Omani playwright Ahmad al-Izki, brings Desdemona and Iago into
dialogue with characters from the pre-Islamic Arab epic of 'Antara Ibn Shadad, linking the sixteenth century
Venice of Shakespeare’s Othello to pre-Islamic Arabia. It is a clever textual juxtaposition, not least because
Antara, like Othello, is of African heritage and therefore held in disdain by his Arab peers, including his
prospective father-in-law. This presentation explores how Shakespeare’s characters are transformed by the new
context of al-Izki’s play, and the complicated chains of interpretation and interpolation that link a "re-creation"
such as this one to Shakespeare's text. Since A Dark Night was performed live and simultaneously filmed for
dissemination via the Gulfstage website hosted by Digital Theatre, the presentation examines the hybrid nature
of al-Izki’s production not merely in terms of content but also in terms of highly contemporary questions of
web-based distribution and intended audience.

“Arab Shakespeare in the East End: The Premiere of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s New Shakespeare Adaptation”
(Graham Holderness)
This paper will describe and evaluate the collaborative University of Hertfordshire/Queen Mary University of
London research project Sulayman Al-Bassam's Shakespeare: Securing Public Engagement with Muslim
Communities by Adapting Shakespeare in London's East End and Elsewhere. Al-Bassam is one of the Arab world's
most celebrated playwrights and directors of theatre; his thought-provoking adaptations of Shakespeare have
been performed in sixteen different countries, in Arabic and English, to both critical and popular acclaim. This
project will enable Al-Bassam to create and produce a new Shakespeare adaptation, generated with the support
of an academic context, and disseminated via engagement with local communities in East London,
Hertfordshire, and Bedfordshire. This production will be an historic premiere, which will undoubtedly generate
international impact. It will also be of significant interest to London's Arab and Muslim communities, particularly
those who live in East London. The paper will inform the World Shakespeare Congress of the research findings
generated by the project, and indicate trajectories for future work in Arab
Shakespeare.

“The ‘Sleeper’ and Christopher Sly: Shakespeare and the Early Modern Circulation
of Nights Tales” (Paulo Lemos Horta)
From the nineteenth century to the present, scholars and writers have perceived
strong resonances between the 1001 Nights and early modern European literature,
even insisting that “The Sleeper and the Waker” is “the same story” as that which
attracted Shakespeare in the frame of The Taming of the Shrew. Both tales involve
rulers seeking to persuade “dreaming men” that they are the veritable rulers. Yet
to date there is no plausible chain of transmission. And there is reason to be
skeptical of the ease with which such analogues have been postulated from the
vantage point of Weltliteratur. This paper is the outcome of my discovery of a
variant tale of “the dreaming man” that proves closer to Shakespeare’s frame of
Christopher Sly, and more likely to have mediated the influence of the Nights on
Shrew.

“Kamāl's Dahsha: An Upper Egyptian Lear” (Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem)
Mesmerised by the cruelty of his two eldest daughters after he willingly
relinquishes his money and power to them in return for their false love protests, AlBasil Ḥamad Al-Basha, a senile Upper Egyptian tycoon, loses his sanity. This is how
‘Abdul Raḥīm Kamāl, a renowned Egyptian scriptwriter, depicts Shakespeare's Lear
in his Upper Egyptian T.V. series, Dahsha ("Mesmerism", 2014), the series which
this paper tackles. Bearing in mind the new cultural and temporal context of the
series, the presentation seeks to highlight the reasons behind readapting Lear at
that particular juncture of time in Egypt and what that new adaptation adds to the
Egyptian audience. It also attempts to show the technicalities used in this new
adaptation, including additions, omissions, and intended focusing/negligence with
regards to Shakespeare's original text. In addition, it explores the similarities and
differences between the Bard's play and Kamāl's script together with the points of strength and weakness in
Kamāl's adaptation.

“When Resistance is Classical: Ashtar Theatre Reworks Richard II” (Margaret Litvin)
The commission to stage Richard II for the 2012 Globe to Globe festival offered Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre
two unique opportunities: hiring Irish director Conall Morisson, and taking the Palestinian message to the world
in a new way. “When you have a king who does battle in Ireland and then goes on pilgrimage to Palestine, we
knew we had to collaborate with Conall!”, Ashtar head Iman Aoun later joked. Drawing on personal interviews
with the text adapter, directors, and actors, as well as direct analysis of a performance and some press and
social media coverage, this paper examines Ashtar’s canny handling of the Globe to Globe commission. Rather
than localize the play through Palestinian signs or dialect, Ashtar’s strategy was to produce a high-quality,
pointedly literary, “straight” production of Shakespeare’s play. Hearkening back to the Arab 1960s, this
approach sent a subtextual nationalist message: Ashtar can produce world-class “real” Shakespeare, not “folk”
or “local” retellings.

“The First Arab Woman to Translate Shakespeare: Soheir al-Qalamawi, 1001 Nights, and Taming of the
Shrew” (David C. Moberly)
Soheir al-Qalamawi's 1968 translation of Taming of the Shrew marked the first time any of Shakespeare's works
had been translated into Arabic by a woman, and a remarkable woman at that. Al-Qalamawi was the first
female student at King Fuad University in Cairo, the first to earn a doctoral degree at the school, and, in 1956, its
first woman professor. Her many works are marked by subtle and not so subtle tinges of feminist dissent
combined with a deep knowledge of Arab literature, and her Taming of the Shrew is no exception. This
presentation will articulate the specific ways in which al-Qalamawi's translation contextualizes and alters the
play, arguing that, in the end, re-casting the traditionally male role of "Shakespeare
translator" into an Arab woman's “part” paved the way for a reconfiguration of the
place of Shrew in the Arab World.
Rafik Darragi is a literary critic and novelist. Professor of English at the University of Tunis
until 1998, he is currently head of the theatre company TANIT’Art, Secretary-General of the
Association of Tunisian Writers in Europe, and a member of the International Shakespeare
Association Executive Committee. He is author of Les Confessions de Shakespeare (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007).
Katherine Hennessey is a Research Fellow with Global Shakespeare, jointly appointed at
the University of Warwick and Queen Mary University of London. From 2009 to mid-2014
she lived in Sana’a; her current projects include a documentary film on contemporary
Yemeni theatre and a book about theatre and film on the Arabian Peninsula. For more, see
www.warwick.ac.uk/khennessey.
Graham Holderness has published over 40 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of
chapters and articles of criticism, theory, and theology. One of the founders of British
cultural materialism, Holderness is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number
of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory. He has published pioneering studies in
Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by
Sulayman Al Bassam (Methuen Drama, 2014). He is also an award-winning poet, novelist,
and dramatist.
Paulo Lemos Horta is Assistant Professor at NYUAD, having joined from SFU, where he
designed the World Literature program. He is Co-Editor of Everyman’s Library Arabian
Nights and of forthcoming volumes on cosmopolitanism, world literature, and the 1001
Nights. He has published articles on the Nights translators and postcolonial literature.
Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem is an Assistant Lecturer in the English Department, the Faculty of Arts, Cairo
University, Egypt. For a thesis entitled “‘Belated’ Shakespearean Mosaics: Shakespeare Malikan, Mutabilitie, and
Shakespeare in Love", she attained her M.A. degree in drama and comparative literature in 2013. The thesis was
published as a book by Lambert Academic Publishing in 2014. She also contributed to The Cambridge World
Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Actresses, published in 2015. She is currently based in Germany.
Margaret Litvin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature and Director of Middle East and North
Africa Studies at Boston University (United States). A specialist in modern Arab/ic literature and theatre, she is the
author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011) and articles and reviews in
Shakespeare Yearbook, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, PAJ, Critical Survey, Journal of Arabic
Literature, and PMLA.
David C. Moberly is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Minnesota, completing a dissertation entitled “The
Taming of the Tigress: Gender, Shakespeare, and the Arab World.” His work has appeared in the journal Romantic
Textualities, with a forthcoming piece in Ashgate’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen.
“Shakespeare and Darwin”
Andreas Höfele (Munich University, Germany), Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States),
Randall Martin (University of New Brunswick, Canada), Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University, United States),
Rebecca Stott (University of East Anglia, United Kingdom)
This panel will investigate historical and contemporary connections between Shakespeare
and evolutionary theory.

“Respeciating Shakespeare” (Scott Maisano)
Can apes act? In the early modern theater, the word “ape” became synonymous
with “actor.” Shakespeare, like so many of his contemporaries, exploited the
dramatic potential in staging humans as simians and simians as humans. He used
one baboon in performance: the Bavian in Two Noble Kinsmen. This paper looks at
four different adaptations across four different media starring four different
species of nonhuman apes: Romeo and Juliet: A Monkey’s Tale (documentary
film/macaques); The Okavango Macbeth (opera/human actors as baboons); The
Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (novel/chimpanzee); and finally, saluting the
“Creating/Re-creating Shakespeare” theme of the 2016 World Shakespeare
Congress, a scene from my own play, Enter Nurse, or, Love’s Labour’s Wonne
(comedic drama/capuchin monkey). What happens (to them, to us, to
Shakespeare, to Darwin) when our “evolutionary cousins” are cast in the roles of
dramatic characters? How does Shakespeare help us re-think the implications of
our current understanding of evolutionary and cognitive theories?

‘“We that come into being are many’: Biological Ancestries and Evolutionary
Pathways in Shakespeare” (Randall Martin)
After enjoying Shakespeare earlier in life, Darwin later came to feel he was
“intolerably dull.” George Levine has argued this was because Darwin felt the
poetic imagination fell short in recognizing the inexhaustible and counterintuitive
transmutations of nature. But Darwin’s decentering of literary capability from a
natural science perspective was preceded by observations about animal and
human hybridity and shared organic life in Montaigne and Plutarch, whose ideas
Shakespeare represented from at least Hamlet onwards. This paper will explore
one such idea—evolutionary common ancestry—though the dramatic trope of human reversions to amphibious
and watery non-human life, in Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and The Tempest. Through these
moments, Shakespeare anticipates the Darwinian principle of natural adaptation that works for its own, rather
than primarily human, benefit.

“The Natural-Historical Gaze: Shakespeare, Darwin, and the Ethos of Observation” (Laurie Shannon)
In The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe, historian Brian Ogilvie argues that natural
history in Shakespeare's time concerned itself with accounts of creatures and plants that were mainly additive,
with little effort directed at systematizing. The physical object of understanding was left intact and integral,
following ancient arguments against vivisection which claimed that evidence derived from its operations was
distorted. In Shakespeare's Cymbeline, the wicked Queen proposes a regime of experimental science and/as
torture “on such creatures as / We count not worth the hanging.” This passage and the play's response to it
were much cited in nineteenth century debates about vivisection in which Darwin played a part. This paper will
ask about the ethos of natural historical forms of science (as opposed to experimentation and technoscience)
and consider its longevity—since Darwin's theory of natural selection is arguably more like natural history than
experimentalism—as a mode of inquiry and theorization. To what extent does a different attitude about the
object and the need for it to remain unviolated inform natural historical forms of knowledge? In what way can
Shakespeare and Darwin, in other words, be viewed as related within what Darwin termed “a community of
descent”?
Andreas Höfele (Chair) is Professor of Early Modern and Shakespearian literature and theatre history, as well as of
nineteenth- and twentieth century literature, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München. He is a member of the ISA
Executive Committee and advisor to the boards of the ISC and Shakespeare Survey. He is also a prolific novelist and
short-story writer.
Rebecca Stott (Respondent) is a novelist, non-fiction writer, broadcaster, and academic
who works across several different disciplines including history, art history, literature, and
history of science. She is Professor of Literature and Creative writing and Director of the
Creative and Critical Writing PhD at the University of East Anglia. Her books include Darwin
and the Barnacle (2003) and Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (2013).
Randall Martin is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. His books include
Henry VI Part Three (ed. 2001), Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England
(2008), Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama (co-ed. with Katherine Scheil, 2011) and
Shakespeare and Ecology (2015).
Scott Maisano, Associate Professor at UMass Boston, is co-editor with Joseph Campana of
Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham University Press, 2016). He is co-authoring a book on
Shakespeare and primatology with Holly Dugan and writing a Shakespearean comedy
entitled Enter Nurse, or, Love’s Labour’s Wonne.
Laurie Shannon is Professor and Chair of English at Northwestern University. She is author
of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts and The
Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. She has served as an SAA
trustee and Chair of the MLA Executive Committee of the Division on Shakespeare.
“The Merchant of Venice: Old and New Re-Creations in the 500th Year of the
Ghetto of Venice”
Shaul Bassi (Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy), Thomas Cartelli (Muhlenberg College,
United States), Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame London, United Kingdom)
The Merchant of Venice is the Shakespearean text that has had the most abrasive encounter with twentieth century
history. Marking the quincentennial of its imaginary setting, this panel explores the play's genealogy, its afterlife, and its
global resonances from three different geopolitical perspectives: Italy, Eastern Europe, and the United States.

“The Shylock Project: Re-creating Shakespeare in the Ghetto of Venice (1516-2016)” (Shaul Bassi)
The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death coincides with another landmark anniversary: the 500 years since
the foundation of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, a place that provided the world with the concept of the
“ghetto”, as well as the historical backdrop to Shakespeare’s most controversial play, The Merchant of Venice.
Both the place and the play are fundamentally ambivalent documents of European civilization, in having been
both instruments of intolerance and catalysts for cultural exchange. The paper analyzes a project aimed at
producing the first ever promenade staging of the play in the Ghetto in 2016, a process started in 2015 with a
workshop of international scholars and actors gathered in Venice to make this re-creation a truly site-specific
event. My critical focus is on the way the text can contribute to a reconceptualization of the Ghetto, arguably
the most misunderstood site in Venice, and how the location can potentially illuminate the Shakespearean play.

“‘Tainted Wether of the Flock’: The Repurposing of Fiorentino’s Doting Godfather in Shakespeare’s Merchant
of Venice” (Thomas Cartelli)
In line with the Congress focus on creating and re-creating Shakespeare, I demonstrate how a more expansive
approach to source-study may serve as a critical resource for reckoning with the implications of what
Shakespeare chose to add, subtract, intensify, transform, or displace in the process of “creating” The Merchant
of Venice. I also suggest that the latter-day practice of substituting our own for Shakespeare’s lost or unknown
intentions, both on the level of criticism and production, may have an unexamined precedent in Shakespeare’s
own practice of adaptation.

“‘Mingled Yarn’: Perspectives on The Merchant of Venice in East European
Contexts" (Boika Sokolova)
The Merchant of Venice is a shape-shifting play whose stage history further
enhances the complexity latent in its generic mix. While the tragedy of a Jewish
character remains a dominant interpretative choice in performance, in its ensuing
history the play has imbibed other pressures as well. It has been used as a vehicle
for exploring different kinds of otherness, economic and ethnic conflict. The
current paper will consider the way The Merchant of Venice has “reacted” to a
major historical overturn that affected vast populations across Eastern Europe—the
post-communist transition. It looks at the state of Bulgarian productions of the
period, and at Zdravko Mitkov’s rendition on the stage of the National Theatre
“Ivan Vazov” in Sofia, in 1992. Examples of post-communist productions from
other countries are then considered in an attempt to begin mapping the ways the
play has accrued contemporary meanings in the course of this latest historical
cycle.
Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His
publications include Visions of Venice in Shakespeare (with Laura Tosi, 2011), Experiences of
Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (with Annalisa Oboe, 2011), and
Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare: Place, “Race”, and Politics (forthcoming in
2015).
Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is author of Marlowe,
Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience and of Repositioning Shakespeare:
National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations; co-author (with Katherine Rowe) of New
Wave Shakespeare on Screen; and Editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare’s
Richard III.
Boika Sokolova teaches at the University of Notre Dame Global Gateway in London. Her publications include
Shakespeare’s Romances as Interrogative Texts (1992), Painting Shakespeare Red (as co-author, 2001), and The
Merchant of Venice, an e-book (2008). She has co-edited Shakespeare in the New Europe, (1994) and Shakespeare
Bulletin (29, 2011).
Roundtables
“Shakespeare and the Passions”
Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom), Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University, United States), Ross
Knecht (Emory University, United States), Richard Meek (University of Hull, United Kingdom), Brid Philips (University of
Western Australia, Australia), Robert S. White (University of Western Australia, Australia), Indira Ghose (University of
Fribourg, Switzerland)
The history of emotions has increasingly provided a focus of interest in recent scholarship. This roundtable aims to
explore how the study of Shakespeare has been transformed by this field of research. Leading scholars who have helped
define the field, as well as emerging scholars working in similar areas, will together discuss how a historical
understanding of the passions and cognition may enrich our appreciation of Shakespeare’s place in the lived past, as
well as his role in the living present. All scholars participating in this discussion are interested in how emotions are
shaped by culture, and how these change and develop over time. Their work has explored, for example, the ways
Renaissance men and women regarded experiences of reading as closely bound up with the passions; how early modern
passions were shaped by rhetorical training in the schoolroom; and why emotional experience was thought to inflect
social rank. They are keen to take stock of recent developments in the field and to explore in particular why scholarship
has moved away from an exclusive focus on the humoral paradigm. They would like to open the discussion to members
of the audience, and are hopeful that a fruitful debate of wide interest will follow.
Katharine Craik’s work centres on the ways in which Shakespeare moved—and still
moves—our minds, bodies, and souls. Her books Reading Sensations in Early Modern
England (Palgrave, 2007) and Shakespearean Sensations: The Experience of Theatre in Early
Modern England (CUP, 2013), a co-edited volume with Tanya Pollard, explore links between
literary experience and emotional experience. Her current project is an exploration of the
Renaissance sublime.
Lynn Enterline's research revolves around the connections among rhetoric, emotion,
gender, and sexuality in Renaissance literature and classical antecedents. Her publications
include The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing
(Stanford University Press, 1995) and The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Her most recent book, Shakespeare's Schoolroom:
Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (University of Pennsylania Press, 2012) investigates how Tudor
grammar school training in ancient rhetoric shaped Shakespeare’s passions.
Ross Knecht is Assistant Professor at Emory University. His work focuses on Shakespeare
and early modern literature, with additional interest in the discourse of the passions and
the history of pedagogy. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature and English
Literary History.
Richard Meek is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Hull. He is
interested in the history of emotion, especially representations of sympathy and empathy
in early modern literature. His current research project is a monograph on this topic,
provisionally entitled The Relativity of Sorrows. Richard’s publications include Narrating the
Visual in Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2009) and a collection of essays, co-edited with Erin
Sullivan, entitled The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries (MUP, 2015).
Brid Philips is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Australia and with the Australian Research Council
Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100-1800). Philips works on colour as a particular perceptual
and aesthetic lens and tool for the presentation, elicitation, and regulation of early modern emotion.
Robert White is a Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
(Europe, 1100-1800). He is Winthrop Professor of English at the University of Western Australia. Among his recent
publications are Pacifism in English Poetry: Minstrels of Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and John Keats: A Literary Life
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, which has been reissued in paperback), Avant-Garde Hamlet (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2015),
and (as Co-Editor) Shakespeare and Emotions (2015). Shakespeare's Cinema of Love (MUP) will appear in 2016.
Indira Ghose is Professor of English at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and a Partner Investigator at the
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100-1800). Her interest lies in
the management of the passions in the early modern regime of manners.
“Shakespeare and Translation”
Kazuko Matsuoka (Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan), Ananda Lal (Jadavpur University, India), Ching-Hsi Perng
(National Taiwan University), Rui Carvalho Homem (University of Oporto, Portugal), Dirk Delabastita (Chair; University of
Namur, Belgium)
The aim of this roundtable is not to “bring together” Shakespeare and translation but to highlight the intrinsic links
connecting them from the beginning. There never was, or can be, a Shakespeare outside a
world of linguistic, cultural and political change and difference, whether such interactions
are framed in dialogical or more confrontational terms. Perhaps there is no form of reading
that deals more intensely and more comprehensively than translation with the historical
specificity and distance of the originals.
These vital links can be traced back to Elizabethan London, which was home to a
multilingual society, and where Shakespeare was not only a keen user of translated sources
but also got a good deal of dramatic mileage out of multilingualism and translation-based
plot sequences. The interdependence between Shakespeare and translation took on a new
dimension as first Shakespeare’s reputation and then his texts began to spread abroad,
playing key parts in the development of new linguistic, literary and theatrical canons the
world over, whether in the establishment of “national” standards or in the opposing of
them, whether in the interests of Empire or in post-colonial movements. The spectacular
rise of the modern media from silent film to YouTube or theatrical subtitling and the
increasingly global circulation of money, people, texts and cultural models have added new
possibilities and challenges to Shakespearean translation and inter-lingual adaptation.
Against the backdrop of such general issues, and responding to the interests and concerns
of the audience (who will be invited to join the debate) the panel will also address how
Shakespearean translation plays out in specific cultural and linguistic situations. Rather
than searching for the one and only “correct” translation method, the discussion will
display a variety of translational approaches to match a variety of needs and functions.
Dirk Delabastita teaches English and literary theory at the University of Namur. His books include There’s a Double
Tongue. An Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay (1993), European Shakespeares (ed. with
Lieven D’hulst, 1993), Shakespeare and European Politics (ed. with Jozef de Vos and Paul Franssen, 2008), and
Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2013/2015, ed. with Ton Hoenselaars). He coedits the translation studies journal Target (with Sandra Halverson) and has recently launched a book series on
Shakespeare in European Culture (with Keith Gregor).
Rui Carvalho Homem is Professor of English at the Department of Anglo-American Studies of the University of Porto. He
has published widely on Early Modern English drama, Irish studies, translation, and word-and-image studies. He is also a
literary translator, and has published versions of Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard
III), Marlowe (Hero and Leander), Seamus Heaney, and Philip Larkin. Recent books include Poetry and Translation in
Northern Ireland (2009) and (as Editor) Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts (2012). He is the President of ESRA,
the European Shakespeare Research Association.
Ananda Lal is Professor of English at Jadavpur University, and theatre critic for The Telegraph, Kolkata, India. His books
include Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts (1995), Rabindranath Tagore: Three Plays (1987 and 2001), Shakespeare on the
Calcutta Stage (2001, co-edited), the Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (2004), Twist in the Folktale (2004), and
Theatres of India (2009). His work on Shakespeare further includes the dramaturgy for Tim Supple’s Midsummer Night’s
Dream and the direction of productions of Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.
Kazuko Matsuoka is a translator and theatre critic, and Professor Emeritus of Tokyo
Medical and Dental University. She has translated thirty plays of Shakespeare so far,
including Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Twelfth Night, all of which have been
staged by such directors as Yukio Ninagawa, David Leveaux, and John Caird. Her books
include Shakespeare for All Seasons and Dialogue on Shakespeare, and she wrote the entry
on Yukio Ninagawa in Fifty Key Theatre Directors, published by Routledge.
Ching-Hsi Perng is Professor Emeritus at National Taiwan University and Chair Professor of
Cross-cultural studies at Fu Jen University. His list of Chinese translations includes Hamlet,
Merchant, Measure, and Lear as well as works by Beckett, Brecht, Garcia Lorca and Synge.
His other publications include Perusing Shakespeare: A Collection of Essays (2004), In
Search of the Historical Scene: Perspectives on Theater Historiography (2008), Dialogue with
Monologue: A Study in Shakespearean Soliloquy (2009), and Shakespeare in Culture (CoEditor, 2012). He is the founder of the NTU Shakespeare Forum and Taiwan ShakeScene,
the predecessor of Taiwan Shakespeare Association.
“Shakespeare and Biography”
Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, United Kingdom), Margreta de Grazia
(University of Pennsylvania, United States), Katherine Scheil (University of Minnesota,
United States), James Shapiro (Columbia University, United States), Stanley Wells
(Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, United Kingdom)