40th Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts
1. Annotating Shakespeare: Old Words, New Tools
How do digital technologies affect the ways we historicize Shakespeare’s words in annotations? What insights do they afford about the ways Shakespeare’s words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital annotation make? How does technology challenge scholarly practice? This seminar understands the terms “annotation” and “language” broadly. Approaches to the topic will be informed by participants’ individual interests in, for example, lexis, grammar(s), editing, textual transmission, coding, performance history, historiography, mediatization, pedagogy.
2. Chronologies in Theater History
Chronology is a vexed issue for theater historians, whose field relies on time lines, order, and coincidence. Dates seem set in stone, yet pressure reveals unstable foundations. Papers may assess established chronologies, external vs. internal evidence, recent studies in stylometrics, dates on documents, documents or play texts without dates, the assignment of dates in the absence of evidence, or the significance of chronology generally to the discipline of theater history. Jackhammers, as well as a chisel and mallet, are welcome.
3. Citizenship: From the Outside In
This seminar welcomes historicist research and theoretical speculation on citizen and non-citizen ways of being: citizenship and notions of philosophical subjectivity; freedom and liberty as ethical concepts; sovereign subjects, denizens, aliens, foreigners; women in livery companies, citizen wives, poor working women; aristocrats as freemen; citizens of imagined cities and polities; the political theology of citizenship. The aim is to approach citizenship from its outsides, without reaffirming the citizen as symbolic center. Who or what comes after the citizen in Shakespeare?
4. Drama and the New World: Beyond The Tempest?
This seminar examines the place of the Americas in English drama in the wake of the turn in early modern studies to “the East,” Islam, and “the multicultural Mediterranean.” It welcomes papers that explore the complex representations of New World peoples, places, and commodities in playhouse drama, civic pageants, and/or court masques, as well as papers that situate the Atlantic world in English cultural and imaginative life—in, for example, travel accounts, promotional tracts, religious writing, lyric, epic, balladry, romance.
5. Early modern Institutional Drama
Jaques’ schoolboy might creep “like snail/ Unwillingly to school” but, like many early modern dramatists, Shakespeare was less reluctant to engage with educational institutions. This seminar will explore drama at schools, universities, and Inns of Court. Papers are invited on—but not limited to—institutional performance contexts and playing practice, pedagogy and drama, adolescence, institutional interactions with the court (e.g. on progress visits), amateur (schoolboys) vs. professional (boys’ companies), staging scholarship in private and public theaters (e.g. Greene, Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare).
6. Early/Modern Queer Colonial Encounters
How do sexuality, gender, affect, the non-human, disability, and temporal estrangement motivate and transform “encounters” in early modern colonialism? How do Shakespearean adaptations, citations, and translations in postmodern culture carry or efface the traces of coloniality, and how to understand this as a queering (or a straightening of the queer)? What meta-encounters — theoretical, disciplinary, linguistic — shape and are shaped by the materiality of encounter? What can alternative temporalities contribute; what gets foreclosed in assertions of “the future that will be”?
7. Economic Criticisms: Old and New
What does “the new economic criticism” inherit from “old” methods? How might these models inform or enrich one another? This seminar considers relations, agreements, contrasts, and antagonisms between earlier work on literature and culture (R. H. Tawney, L. C. Knights, Louis B. Wright) and newer approaches (postcolonial, ecocritical, transnational). Amid recent trends away from “theory” and towards the re-valorization of “close reading” and “literary” matters, why do economic concerns still matter? Papers might include reviews, appreciations, critical genealogies, acts of economic criticism.
8. Emotion in Shakespeare
This seminar invites various theoretical and critical approaches to the increasingly complex study of emotion in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. Work is welcome in the history of the passions, the senses, the humoral body, Renaissance rhetorical and theatrical manuals, stoicism and other philosophies of emotion, or theories of subjectivity, the social and the human. Also of particular interest are the intertextual constructions of emotion in Renaissance literature or the emotional scripts that are translated from other contemporary or classical sources.
9. Feeling Medieval: The Affects of the Past in Early Modern England
This seminar invites papers exploring early modern conceptions of medieval feelings. How are passions that were associated with the Middle Ages invested with significance? Do they seem more legitimate as a consequence of historical continuity, or less authoritative because of their cultural belatedness? How does the “affective turn” in queer theory help us think about the social encodings of feelings? Do medieval affects imbue certain genres or traditions? Participants are encouraged to consider how early modern writers imagine “feeling medieval.”
10. Foreign Policy in the Age of Shakespeare
How political is Shakespearean drama, really? This seminar addresses an elusive topic by examining relationships between writing and larger-level events. What new can we learn by refocusing on political history and “foreign affairs” narrowly conceived: consolidating nation-states and violence in Europe, Asian encounters, American resources and European inflation, emergent empire? Studies of less predictable works—such as the comedies—are particularly welcome, as are well-grounded comparative analyses with works by other writers or with political documents such as State Papers.
11. Forms of Service in Early Modern England
This seminar welcomes papers, on Shake- speare and other authors, that address the intersection of literary form with categories of service, broadly understood. What formal innovations did service make available to early modern texts? Can we speak of generic strategies of service? How did print culture interact with service? How did early modern women writers adapt genres associated with service? Did authors’ service roles affect their representations of service? How might servant readers and auditors have understood various textual forms?
12. Is Shakespeare Our Only Contemporary?
Presentism has recently opened up new avenues of inquiry in Shakespeare studies. This seminar explores the promises and limitations of presentism, however, by asking participants to consider its purchase outside Shakespeare studies. Can we imagine Shakespeare’s contemporaries in presentist terms? Does presentism’s currently Shakespeare-centric focus preclude certain questions about temporality, about the relationship between past and present, and about variants of historicism? To what extent is presentism simply a Shakespearean-universalist wolf in sheep’s clothing?
13. Literature and History/Literature as History
The seminar invites papers that address the relationship of literature and history in an effort better to understand the historical turn literary studies have taken (and in places have retreated from) as well as to investigate what kinds of historical claims literary studies are now making. What counts as evidence for historical claims? Do critical arguments and historical ones use evidence the same way? What does literature serve as evidence of? What does it mean to understand a work historically?
14. Literature and Theater as Skeptical Labs
This seminar aims to expand our understanding of the renaissance in skepticism and of the function of the theater as a skeptical lab. Two challenges: first, to situate the skepticism of drama to the equally fervent skepticism of non-dramatic literature and, second, to work out working out the relation of literary skepticism, not only to the epistemological formalities of Cicero and Sextus, but to what might be called “vernacular skepticism,” those idioms of discredit that animate mockery, insult, and polemic.
15. “Love”? Affective Bonding and Kinship in Renaissance Drama
We normally say love differs fundamentally, as a structure of feeling, from use, with its associations of distance and manipulation. Yet Pierre Bourdieu argues that kin relationships are something people make, with which they do something. This seminar invites triangulation among these views and the subject matter of Renaissance drama. How, taken together, do they unpack issues of instrumentalities and ends in early modern family formation: filial/sibling/spousal/same-sex relations, courtship, dowries, cuckoldry, bigamy, legitimacy, inheritance, wardship, service, dynastics?
16. Matter, Perception, and Cognition in the Renaissance
This seminar takes as its point of departure the assumption that early modern matter theory influenced experiences of perception, cognition, and passion. In the most mundane acts—eating, seeing, thinking, and reading—the human body was understood to be involved in the transformation of physical matter. How did such transformations become important to the form and experience of literature? Papers might consider historical phenomenology, Galenism as a materialist psychology, atomism and mechanism, the staging of the body and its senses.
17. The Merry Wives of Windsor
Despite its earlier popularity, The Merry Wives of Windsor now occupies a relatively marginal position in the Shakespearean canon. This seminar is designed both to take a new look at the play and to explore the reasons for its devaluation. Participants may wish to compare the female protagonists in this play with those in Shakespeare’s other comedies, with the female protagonists in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and/or with accounts of the lives of real women in Shakespeare’s world.
18. Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern England
This seminar explores ways of discussing confessional conflict in post-Reformation England in terms of negotiation rather than dissent and escalation. Was it possible to sidestep religious controversies in textual and dramatic representations? How can we conceive of literature and drama as possible sites of de-escalation? Does dramatic practice in particular allow for a suspension of faith impossible in theological or polemical discourses? How do textual or dramatic works both reflect on and perform such an erasure, suspension, or displacement of confessional conflict?
19. No Respect: Re-theorizing Comic Theory for Shakespeare
Comedies were prime theatrical commodities, but they remain undervalued and under-theorized compared to tragedy. How did Shakespearean practice differ from the available theories of Aristotle, Horace, Scaliger? What are the uses and limitations of such modern theorists of comedy, laughter, and humor as Bergson, Bakhtin, Cixous? What aspects of Shakespearean comedy practice cry out for, or seem resistant to, new theoretical treatment? Topics might include comic types, generic hybrids, the comic body, magic, gender, the politics of laughter, the accidental.
20. The Nonhuman Renaissance
This seminar considers what lies beyond humanity in the age sometimes credited with “inventing” it for modernity. Instead of assuming Renaissance anthropocentrism, discussion will focus on perspectives from which nonhuman creatures or things (organic and inorganic) interact with humans in a larger ecology of culture, or in which human-ness itself is either decentered or made the object of critique. Participants are invited to explore the various forms of nonhuman being that inhabit the material and imaginary worlds of the Renaissance.
21. Non-Shakespearean Drama and Performance
Shakespeare’s contemporaries have begun to compete with him for dominance in theaters, films, editions, and the study of Renaissance drama. This seminar explores how studying non-Shakespearean productions affects Renaissance performance studies, cultural studies, and editorial practices. What impact do such performances have on our understanding of Renaissance dramaturgies—including Shakespeare’s? Papers are also welcome that consider issues of methodology and terminology that arise in these studies. The aim is to explore new critical directions beyond a focus solely on Shakespeare.
22. Oceanic Shakespeares
This seminar takes Shakespeare offshore, asking participants to stretch familiar scholarly boundaries by exploring the literary meanings of the early modern ocean. A wide variety of literary, historical, and theoretical approaches are welcome. Topics might include Shakespeare’s responses to the “transoceanic turn”; literary depictions of different oceans, especially the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; tropes of shipwreck, piracy, and homecoming; sailing ships as venues for cultural exchange; oceanic narratives and historical progression; and how an oceanic perspective might revise literary history.
23. Othello
With Othello we engage issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in the Renaissance; women, patriarchalism, and domestic violence; sexual identity, sexual practice, and pornography; social distinction, occupational mobility, and class resentment; state aggression, imperialism, and surveillance. This seminar welcomes papers on the play in its own time and since. Was it racist then? Can it be anything other than racist now? Why are its sexual politics overshadowed by its racial politics? What new questions should be asked of Othello?
24. The Past, Present, and Future of Shakespeare Studies
This seminar considers the past, present, and future of Shakespearean scholarship. Papers might focus on important trends in Shakespearean criticism, groundbreaking scholars or approaches, critical or theoretical genealogies, or underplayed or overplayed interven- tions. How has the field been shaped by close reading, feminism, new historicism, Marxism, postcolonialism, cognitive theory, theater history, performance studies, or cross-textual mediation? Speculation about what’s next or what’s missing is also welcome.
25. Performing Age in Early Modern Drama
Aged figures—children, youths, the elderly—have gained prominence in recent criticism and performance. What does age mean to Shakespeare and his contemporaries? To what extent is it determined by chronology, physi- ology, economics, law, sex, or status? This seminar explores multiple categories of aged identity with a particular focus on theatrical representations. Papers might consider the significance of age in early modern performance cultures; modes of signifying age on stage; the methodological challenges for investigating age in Shakespeare’s theater.
Property, crucial to people’s lives in early modern England, is also a battleground of contemporary political and social thought. This seminar asks how Shakespearean norms and narration shape how we understand what property is and why it matters. Papers may explore: legal definitions of “personhood”; citizenship; the relevance of Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and Macpherson; proprietary logics; property rights/human rights; property as contract; liberty and bondage; possession and ownership; labor as property; gender and sexuality as property; global properties.
27. Q1 Hamlet
Given recent developments in book history, theater and performance studies, and editing, how should we now understand Q1 Hamlet? What are the relationships among the Hamlets, the Ur-Hamlet, Der Bestrafte Brudermord? How does Q1 shape narratives about Shakespeare and the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men? What can we learn from the history of scholarly and theatrical approaches to the “problem of Q1”? How can Q1 inform readings of other “bad quartos” and editorial cruces? This seminar welcomes critical readings, cultural histories, technical analyses.
28. Radical Romans and Shakespeare’s Politics
This seminar reconsiders Shakespeare’s Roman plays in light of contemporary political theory, particularly the questions about justice, law, sovereignty, or empire that motivate the concepts of radical democracy initiated by Agamben, Schmitt, Laclau, Mouffe. How did Shakespeare’s Roman imagination re-conceptualize political and theological allegory? Is violence constitutive of the nation-state? Does Shakespeare’s radical Rome shed light on our own concepts of justice, democracy, empire? The seminar also welcomes papers on other playwrights who represent England’s investment in Roman political history.
29. Reading Shakespeare and the Bible
A great deal has been written in recent years on Shakespeare and religion, often in the interest of identifying Shakespeare’s own confessional affiliation. Setting biography aside, and turning to a larger context of belief, this seminar approaches the question of religion in terms of how the plays and poems incorporate biblical and theological language. Participants are invited to explore ways in which Shakespeare’s systems of allusion respond to the methods of biblical reading that emerged from religious controversies and reformations.
30. Reading Shakespeare through Clothes
This seminar welcomes papers on any aspect of Shakespeare and clothing. Participants are encouraged to draw on an infinite variety of sources, reading Shakespeare through clothing that is material and/or metaphorical. Papers may address references to dress and adornment in plots, ideas, language, and images; costume and theoretical issues of gender, identity, age, power, and class; current work in material culture, textual studies, and fashion studies; the important if underexplored role of theater and film costumes in Shakespeare performance history.
31. Rethinking Shakespeare’s Secularity
Secularization has been used to account for transitions from Middle Ages to modern and from medieval cultic mysteries to the London commercial stage—with Shakespeare playing a key role in both. In the face of the present “religious turn” in Shakespeare studies, can his central role be maintained? This seminar invites papers on the secularization thesis (and debate), medieval mystery plays, the Church, sacramental theater, political theology, the Pauline revival, Christian hermeneutics, and Shakespeare’s relation to the worldly and otherworldly.
32. Shakespeare and Hollyworld
This seminar invites consideration of an international range of Shakespearean productions, both cinematic and theatrical. The global film industry, still strongly based in Los Angeles, relies on the construction of sameness; what film and stage productions counter the homogenizing forces of “Hollyworld”? How do contemporary adaptations trouble our understanding of authorship? of reception? our perspectives on the world? Participants are asked to enter into critical dialogue with theatrical and cinematic histories and with legacies of identity, politics, and economics.
33. Shakespeare and Philosophy
The organizing principle of this seminar is that to engage Shakespeare philosophically is to engage the history of Shakespeare interpretation. Rather than “apply” theory to Shakespeare, the seminar aims to leverage Shakespeare’s work to look anew at philosophical modernity. The seminar is keen to ask: How does Shakespeare’s work shed new light on problems such as skepticism, self-consciousness, finitude, secular reason, autonomy, citizenship, biopolitics, terror, rights, or human dignity? How does Shakespeare complicate philosophy by making thought “dramatic”?
34. Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics
This seminar seeks to illuminate the underlying, often conflicting, value-systems that enable and define Shakespearean drama. Papers may examine Shakespeare in light of the Bible, Greek and Roman writers, Patristics, medieval traditions, contemporary homiletics, Catholic and Protestant teaching, legal and political imperatives. Participants may discuss classical and Christian texts and contexts and explore various ethical consonances and dissonances. The seminar stages an inquiry into the nature of virtue and vice on Shakespeare’s stage.
35. Shakespeare and the Modes of Satire
This seminar explores Shakespeare’s relationship to the range of poetic and dramatic satiric modes available to him: was he practitioner, detractor, or passive observer of the period’s formal and ideological experimentation? What was the nature of his engagement with Juvenalian cynicism, Horatian didacticism, allegorical morality tales, Roman New Comedy, Lucianic Menippeanism? Essays addressing the influence and purposes of the conspicuous satirists of the period (Jonson, Nashe, Middleton, Marston, Dekker) are welcome, as are those employing Bakhtinian methodologies.
36. Shakespeare and the Plastic Arts
Rather than focus on film or animation, this seminar invites papers that open new discussion of Shakespearean “afterlives” in the visual arts. Papers may consider any plastic media —paintings, sculpture, installations, mixed-media, prints, photography — that re-imagine Shakespearean themes, characters, visual aesthetics. How do artworks render scenes, characters, objects, tableaux vivants, the unseen, the bard himself? What special reciprocities knit Shakespeare-focused arts and critical scholarship together? What do exhibitions—by galleries, museums, curators — indicate about producers and consumers of Shakespeare-themed art?
37. Shakespeare and the Power of the Face
Inspired by James Elkins’ provocative thesis that a face “is the place where the coherent mind becomes an image,” this seminar focuses on the power of the face in Shakespeare and Shakespeare studies broadly defined. Possible topics may include but are not limited to: the role of the face in the plays and poetry from any theoretical perspective, cultural fascination with the face of the author, the power of the face (and facial expression) in performance.
“Shakespeare in Place” explores Shakespeare’s presence (through performance and as cultural concept) in place making and meaning. The seminar encourages a range of geographically and historically diverse case studies to explore different kinds of place-based relationships. These may include the proliferation of contemporary global circulations and the utility of Shakespeare to emergent cultural economies but, equally, examples from more remote historical periods and less often cited geographies are welcome so as to better chart a trajectory for Shakespeare “in place.”
39. Shakespeare in Public
This seminar aims to resume and reposi- tion suspended conversations about “political Shakespeare.” What ideological functions does Shakespeare retain in the twenty-first century? Has “cultural capital” outlasted its explanatory utility, especially given the dominance of mass culture and newer media platforms? Has mass education made Shakespeare public property? Many approaches and objects are invited: from theatrical performances and institutions to reading and interpretive practices; from older media to new; from the role of culture in the public sphere to “public culture.”
40. Shakespeare on the Campus Stage
What versions of Shakespeare are being performed at our colleges, and where do those productions’ defining impulses originate? What effects have political and economic upheavals had on student identity and priorities as manifested by their theatrical interests? Are campus productions more dramaturgically astute, more intellectually or formally adventurous than those staged by professionals or community players, and if not, why not? What is the place of the Shakespearean scholar in such activities; what might we have to learn from them?
41. Shakespearean Theater as Mass Entertainment
How did a “multitude,” a “throng,” a “swarm” of theatergoers affect the writing, acting, and reception of plays? How did arena theaters compare to other contemporary forms of mass entertainment (for example, preaching or bear-baiting)? If many commercial plays were also staged at court, what difference could mass audiences have made to those plays? Whatwerethetheoriesofmassentertainment then, and how do they relate to theories now? How dissimilar was the Shakespearean theater from modern mass entertainment?
42. Shakespeare’s Errors
A word largely lost from recent textual criticism is “error.” Papers are invited that consider its current application to Shakespeare. They might endorse or challenge the concept of “error” in relation to textual relativism, versions, authorial legitimation, authorial mistakes, transformations in early modern theater, transcription, print culture. They might present new work on textual cruxes, engaging with theoretical as well as practical issues. The seminar will debate what if anything can be characterized as “wrong” in the text of Shakespeare.
43. Shakespeare’s Life Story
Why Shakespeare biography, why now? What continues to impel the surprising revival of the genre? New knowledge or new sources? Newly recognized historical contexts or dynamics? New fictional or biographical models? New ways of imagining the life of the artist? New ways of legitimizing Shakespearean biography as a scholarly enterprise? A new appreciation of critical biography as a genre? A newly felt necessity to “publicize” Shakespeare? New pressures on academic publishing? Papers addressing these or other related questions are welcome.
44. Shakespeare’s Sentences
“The sentence” lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s language. A key feature of his poetry is the deployment of unexpected word orders, and this seminar invites formal linguistic work on Shakespearean and early modern syntax and morphology. The notion of sententiae simultaneously opens the seminar to the topics of rhetoric and formal classical influence. Papers are also welcome on punctuation, textual transmission, and editing—that is, orthographic aspects of the sentence fixed by compositors and scribes rather than by Shakespeare.
45. Shakespeare’s Theories of Translation
Do Shakespeare’s works offer theorized approaches to translation? But also: do our theories of translation derive from his works? Claims to Shakespeare’s “universality” are attached also to claims that his work is untranslatable. Do the works reflect upon the contradiction between universalism and untranslatability? Have theories of translation inherited from them this contradiction? The point is not to apply these theories to Shakespeare’s works, but to ask how translation is conceptualized in the plays and poems, and with what consequences.
46. Sprezzatura
This seminar invites papers investigating the early modern English discourses, practices, and gendering of sprezzatura. Papers may consider the illusion or realization of effortless mastery—written, verbal, or physical—in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Was sprezzatura the sole domain of the (male, noble) courtier or could women, commoners, and racial others achieve its effects? Could subordinate subjects raise their status by performing successful acts of sprezzatura in poetry, music, riding, fencing, athletic contests, dancing, translation, expressive silences?
47. Theater and Geography: Comparative Perspectives
How do the territories and trajectories of early modern English theater compare with those of European vernaculars? What aspects of geography shaped or threatened the places and networks of performance? This seminar explores theater’s intellectual geography by scrutinizing actors, stages, and texts within spatial environments and processes. Participants interested in drama, translation, book history, and mapping are welcome. Topics include cultural mobility; political conflict and diplomacy; ecology, ethnography, and epidemiology; and the recent emergence of the “spatial humanities.”
48. Thomas Heywood and the Theater
Acting, playwriting, translating, collaborating, revising others’ scripts, working with many companies and playhouses, describing social and political effects of theater in his Apology for Actors —Thomas Heywood had a varied and influential career. How did acting inform his drama and his relationships with actors? What do his dedications, prefaces, and prologues suggest about the printing and performance of his plays? What insights into gender and culture do his plays provide? This seminar investigates all aspects of Heywood’s life and afterlife.
49. Tropes of Turning, Conversion, and Translation in Early Modern Drama
This seminar will consider representations of “turnings” in early modern drama—whether religious, political, ethnic, geo-humoral, passional, cognitive, or linguistic. Do the social valences of turning vary according to context and discursive frame? When is “the turn” deplorable, and when laudable? What generic modes enable such tropes, and how do staging practices shape them? How can they enlarge the understanding of early modern conceptions of mind, body, and subjectivity? With what political, economic, and social projects do they intersect?
50. The “University Wits” and the Late-Elizabethan Culture of Writing
The “University Wits” (Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe) were first assembled by George Saintsbury in 1887 as harbingers of Shakespeare’s genius. This seminar invites work on this energetic group: their role in London’s diverse profession of writing, intersections between their dramatic output and Shakespeare’s, their formal and poetic innovations, their contribution to an emergent canon of vernacular literature at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Particularly welcome are ruminations upon the effects of Saintsbury’s long-lived agglomeration on early modern scholarship.
51. Visual Studies and Early Modern Drama
The field of visual studies analyzes images, image making, perception, and the consequences of vision itself. This seminar invites papers that explore the relationship between the visual and the verbal in early modern drama. How does language enter into the visual, and vice versa? How does the dynamic of visuality and textuality influence the conditions of spectatorship, staging and stage directions, and characterization? How do the workings of dramatic media interact with other art forms (such as dance, emblematics, masques)?
52. Voluntary Sector Shakespeare
This seminar invites papers exploring all aspects of non-professional and semi-professional live Shakespeare across time. Topics might include: the origins, uses, and demographics of amateur and summer-stock Shakespeare in North America; domestic performances of Shakespeare; Shakespeare and military theatricals; Shakespearean pageants; Shakespeare’s own representations of unpaid performance and their significance for real-life amateurs; the relations between voluntary Shakespeare and subsidized Shakespeare as forms of non-commercial theater; kinds of early modern recreational theater and their influence on professional dramatists.
53. Women as Creators and Consumers of Early Modern Plays
An investigation of women’s participation in dramatic and cultural history — as creators (devisors, writers, translators, actors, singers, dancers, and publishers) of plays and as consumers (audience members and also owners, readers, transcribers, and annotators of manuscript and printed copies). Papers may focus on British women such as Mary Sidney, Anne Maxwell, Anne Bracegirdle, or Elizabeth Puckering; on women whose names are presently unknown; and/or on women from the Continent or other parts of the early modern world.
54. iShakespeare: New Media in Research and Pedagogy
This workshop explores the invigorating possibilities and understandable concerns of Shakespearean forays into the digital domains of iPads, Twitter, Dipity, Digital Storytelling, Skype, and Vidyo. The workshop leaders will demonstrate their digital teaching partnership, which links the U.S., the U.K., and India; will offer practical advice on implementation; and will facilitate discussion of the philosophical, social, cognitive, and financial aspects of electronic Shakespearean research and pedagogy. They will welcome reports of other new-media initiatives, including for technologies new to 2012.
55. The Physicality of Shakespeare’s Language
Performing simple acting exercises, participants will examine the physical experience of reverberations and interactions among sound and meaning in speaking, interpreting, and teaching Shakespeare’s plays. Preparation will include readings, memorization of both roles in one brief two-person scene, and one set speech. Book discussion and etymological research will be shared in advance of the session. Open enrollment in the workshop is limited to ten people who have not taken part in workshops conducted by this leader at earlier SAA meetings.
56. Pitiful Goers-Between: Teaching Intertexually
This workshop is devoted to developing and sharing concrete methods for teaching Shakespeare’s work in dialogue with other texts, including but not limited to: sources, analogues, pamphlets, treatises, histories, sermons, theatrical records, paratextual matter , intratextual collaboration, theory , performance, and adaptation. All pairings and approaches are welcome, but each must involve texts that can be assigned to students and discussed in the classroom. Pairings need not be original, but must result in clear insights and be fully articulated for adoption.
57. Sovereignty
This key-word workshop interrogates the question of sovereignty as a fundamental axiom of political thought, referring to the supreme power inside any state and to the “independence” with which states confront one anoth- er outside their borders. Participants will read and discuss classical theories of sovereignty (Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel), as well as Schmitt, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida. The goal is a more rigorous understanding of sovereignty, brought to bear on Shakespeare and on urgent political dilemmas of our own era.