Lectures

Combat, Commerce and Heritage: Shakespeare on the British Stage since the World War II

As Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright note in Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century (2000), “British theatre is set on a seam of Shakespeare, like a land that sits over a massive mineral deposit […] Shakespeare is our greatest national asset…” (16). This lecture will consider the business of In order to secure the context for developments in British staging of Shakespeare the lecture will open with a brief survey of the theatre culture surrounding Shakespeare in the decades just before the Second World War, and through to 1950: George Bernard Shaw’s polemical rejection of Victorian bardolatry, Lilian Baylis’s role in making the Old Vic Theatre the ‘home’ of Shakespeare in London, the influence of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the significance of actors such as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in generating a sense of national pride expressed through the performance of Shakespeare’s works. It will analyse the development of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the evolution of the company’s identity, recent crises and key performances from the 1960s to the present.

Shakespeare, Disney and The Tempest

This lecture will analyse the transformations of The Tempest in Disney’s Tron: Legacy (2010), a movie whose main plot and characters draw substantially from Shakespeare’s play. Similarly to Prospero, Kevin Flynn, a virtual world designer, is in exile in the Grid, the computer generated cosmos he created, and treasures a rich library which features books by Jules Verne, Fiódor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy among others. Shakespeare, however, seems to be conspicuously absent from this library, and his presence can only be felt in the plot of the movie.

In this lecture, I will argue that whereas Shakespeare’s absence from Flynn’s library could be seen as a sign of the Bard having lost his literary authority (Gary Taylor, 1998), his influence on popular culture has paradoxically grown, since his work has been used as a template for the plot of Tron: Legacy. This poses a series of questions I will address in my analysis, such as whether Shakespeare is more recognizable without his language after having been transformed into a resilient, pervasive pattern inextricably linked to popular culture. I will conclude addressing the need to reconsider the current afterlife of Shakespeare in contemporary sci-fi culture.

European Models of Society and Culture in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Tommaso Campanella’s La città del Sole (1602) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627)

An autarchic republic envisioned by a statesman admiring Plato and an evangelical society based on early Christian communities coexist in Thomas More’s Utopia. While dissecting England and criticizing European colonialism fuelled by discoveries of new worlds, he imagines an island with towns designed according to Renaissance urban planning. Tommaso Campanella’s La città del Sole merges classical and mediaeval thought, magic and occultism, Neo-Platonism and Scholasticism in order to concoct a republic based on communist principles and governed by wise and learned people. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is the archetype of scientific utopia, but also one of the few utopian projects to be realized: a few decades after its publication the Royal Society adopted its organisational model of scientific work. Speculating on the most efficient forms of government and on the role of religion and science in society, More, Campanella and Bacon shape early modern thought in Europe and anticipate future political theories.

Transaction, mortification: body and city in Ben Jonson

In this lecture I will be looking at Jonsonian comedy (drawing mostly on Volpone and Epicoene) to explore the interconnections between Jonson's ethical/political universe, his construction of an authorial persona and his representations of the body. I will be arguing that a consideration of these interconnections affords us a clearer understanding of the development of Jonson’s stance as satirist and as comic dramatist – or, in other terms, of the perplexities that arise at the intersection of comedy and the satiric mode.

My argument is informed by two sets of contextual concerns:

1. the awareness of historical change that characterises Jacobean comedy, in particular as regards the patterns of social and economic behaviour that mark the rise of commercial capitalism in the space of the early modern city;

2. a heightened alertness to the multifarious forms taken by the ‘absolute centrality of the body to Renaissance culture’ that Jonathan Sawday emphasised in his study of anatomy and dissection as master tropes for an early modern epistemology and for its ensuing forms of representation (cf Sawday 1995).

“This is my play’s last scene”:John Donne’s Poetry in Wit by Margaret Edson

Margaret Edson’s play depicts a grippingly intense introspective quest towards enhanced self-awareness that the protagonist undertakes when faced with a terminal illness. This central development of the play revolves around a number of themes, the principal one being the questionable value of knowledge in relation to ultimately important issues like one’s attitude to death. While Wit displays a variety of levels on which Donne’s early modern poetry may function in today’s cultural awareness, in this lecture I will focus on Edson’s chief dramatic technique – the semantically productive fusion of poetry and drama. Tracing the play’s basic metaphor, “life is theatre,” I will inspect the links of power, authority, dependence and conflict in teacher-student and doctor-patient relationships as they are illuminated by excerpts from Donne’s poetry incorporated in the play’s text. The employed technique will be presented as a tool that helps to highlight the illuminating power of memory and remembrance. Finally, I will discuss the play’s ambiguous ending in connection with the idea of using Donne’s poems in a text that is open to both religious and secular interpretations.

A world of things: material objects in early modern drama

The lecture will give a brief introduction to Material Cultural Studies, claiming that the analysis of material objects can offer new insights into early modern culture and the ways in which social identities were affected by the increasing influx of a ‘new world of things’ from other European countries, Asia and the ‘New World’. Particular emphasis will be paid to the role material objects played on the early modern stage. The discussion of select plays will address the relationship between objects and the characters on stage, the material and the textual, the world of the audience and the world on stage.

First Folio Readers’ Marks—Monumentalizing Shakespeare and Empowering the Self

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s early modern readers appropriated the printed text of Shakespeare in an often self-conscious manner. Their marks reveal their tastes, interests, their historical or philological leanings, their passion for theatre, but also the way they fashioned thiselves through reading Shakespeare. Drawing its examples mainly from Folger Library copies of the First Folio, this lecture will concentrate on one often unnoticed aspect of their reading—it will look at how these individuals used Shakespeare’s text to talk about thiselves and to make sense of their lives. The Shakespeare folios—and particularly the First Folio—create their own sense of prestige through their format and the manner in which their paratextual material has been configured. To write in such a book is for many readers not only a source of prestige but also an ipowering and often ostentatious act, which can be interpreted as a conscious or subconscious message to other potential readers and which may also add further cachet to the book.

Authorship, Status and Money: Fictions of Shakespeare and Oxford

This lecture will focus on fictions about Shakespeare’s life that take an anti-Stratfordian perspective on the authorship issue. More in particular, it will focus on those that, like the recent film Anonymous, claim the authorship for the Earl of Oxford. In such fictions, Shakespeare is usually represented as an illiterate and ill-behaved second-rate actor, whereas Oxford is a noble, tragic figure. Thus, such fictions perpetuate a reactionary class-bound discourse of authorship, in which someone of humble birth can never become a great author. Nevertheless, in some recent examples of the genre, notably Amy Freed’s play The Beard of Avon, such scenarios have come to be questioned from within.

In this lecture, students will first be provided with a short survey of anti-Stratfordianism. After that, a select number of fictions will be discussed with the help of textual fragments and (if feasible) film fragments.

Recommended reading: James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? London: Faber and Faber, 2010.

Small is beautiful?” Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a Linguistic Corpus

Since the 1980s corpus linguistics has seen consistent growth in popularity and increasingly widespread application to the point where it now seems to possess an aura of scientific authority and virtual infallibility. Massive increases in computing resources have encouraged us to believe that huge data banks and refined statistical tools can reveal all that is significant about language. Perhaps it is time to take stock of the situation and reflect on what corpora can, and cannot offer.

Taking all 154 sonnets of the 1609 edition as a source it is possible to construct a limited, clearly-defined corpus of the English Language as used in poetry in the years around 1600. This will allow both statistical and qualitative investigation and, at the same time, reminds us of the often-forgotten historical element in corpus-based language research. The lecture proposes a two-fold approach. Firstly, the methodology of corpus construction will be described and analysed critically to enable reflection on the value of this area of linguistics and its potential pitfalls. Secondly, there will be a brief description of the sample collected, the process of data analysis and any findings obtained, hoping to offer insight into the sonnets themselves, examining such questions as how much legal or commercial language they contain, what their expected audience might have been and how wide and varied Shakespeare’s lexis really was. From these two strands it is hoped that we will reach a better appreciation of Shakespeare’s poetic style and, at the same time, a more accurate understanding of some of the features of the language of his day.

New Languages”: Pragmatism, Rhetoric and War in Early Modern Theatre

The lecture discusses the links between rhetoric and pragmatic attitudes in the Second Historical Tetralogy and Jacobean drama, represented by Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and John Ford’s The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). From the ancient (Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian), contemporary (Puttenham, Sidney, Francis Bacon) and modern (Nietzsche, de Man) reflections of the relationship between rhetoric and truth it proceeds to the use of rhetoric as a war strategy in the second historical tetralogy (Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V). In these plays, rhetoric is no longer a mere tool of propaganda but a strategic power of “new languages” which becomes more efficient than military force. As John Calderwood has shown, by using Falstaff, Prince Hal not only uses the lie, but incorporates it into a seemingly constructive political programme (“redeeming time when men least think [he] will” 1.2.240). In Falstaff’s context the use of deceitful rhetoric (“fallen language”) may be said to reveal the “sources of illusion in the recesses of personal life, in the distorted imagination” (L. C. Knights). These pragmatic dimensions of rhetoric are further explored in Antony and Cleopatra, which develops the theme of manipulation by means of illusions on individual and social, intimate and imperialist, political and theatrical levels. The emphasis on the social and ethical impact of the “new languages” is also evident in Coriolanus, where war rhetoric and propaganda are closely connected with the rhetoric of “contagion” and “disease,” expanded to the whole society as well as to theatre (Daryll Chalk). Finally, the multileveled connection between rhetoric and deceit will be explored in the Caroline drama represented by John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck. Further resonances of this theme are traced in Romantic literature, namely in Mary Shelley’s Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: A Romance (1830) reflecting on the Wars of the Roses. 

Utopia III (1998) by Pina Martins: Rewriting Utopia for the 20th century

In the introductory chapter to Dark Horizons: Science Fictions and the Dystopian Imagination (2003), Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan put forward the idea that “([i]n the twentieth century, the dark side of Utopia (…) took its place in the narrative catalogue of the West and developed in several forms throughout the rest of the century” (Baccolini & Moylan 2003: 1). According to the authors we are still witnessing an unquestionable prevalence of a rather pessimistic world vision which is at the basis of the critical dystopia, the most common literary form of contemporary utopianism.

In my lecture I will try to show that in the margins of Anglo-American utopianism there are a few authors who are trying to restore optimism, imagination and playfulness, i.e., the very foundations of the literary genre created by Thomas More at the onset of the 16th century. I will particularly focus on Utopia III, published in 1998 by Pina Martins, and will try to evince the way the Portuguese academic and writer tried to rewrite Utopia for our times.

Portia and the Suffragists: Gender Conflict in The Merchant of Venice

This lecture takes as its departure point a performance of The Merchant of Venice in which an Jewish Suffragist played the role of Portia, in order to go beyond established readings of the play. The lecture will examine a post-Armistice production of Shakespeare by British servicemen in non-English speaking countries, which uncharacteristically had women in the female roles. This production of The Merchant of Venice, which took place in Cologne in 1920, shows how professional actresses from the London stage contributed to building the cultural history of Shakespeare abroad. While reading Portia as a New Woman, this lecture will suggest that recent discourses on the importance of race have neglected the complex discussions of gender trouble that infuse The Merchant of Venice.

Memory of Tragedy and the Early Modern Commerce

Ancient tragedy looms large in the educational curriculum of European universities and shapes the intellectual life of the time. In England University Wits are all people with sound university education who are to a large degree responsible for shaping the cultural life of the time. After the reform of school system schoolboys had also the opportunity to read the classics. Tragedy is present in the theatrical life of the Tudor era and well into the Jacobean times. However, that presence is in no way a straight continuity of the ancient tradition. First, Seneca’s tragedies gave a specific twist to the Greek tragedy, second, the English playwrights took the tragedy to an even more twisted  complicated shape.

The aim of the lecture is to take a short overview of the ancient ideas about tragedy and trace its evolution in England from Senecan translations and imitations, through Marlowe’s tragic ‘cases, Shakespearean modifications, Ben Jonson’s misconceptions, to Jacobean satirical and moralistic tragicomedy, in order to demonstrate a growing preoccupation with economic, social, and ideological issues of the time.

Shakespeare & Hitler

In my lecture I focus on the way in which “Shakespeare” has been part of society’s way to talk about Hitler & Nazism, both in stage and screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and poems or in plays and movies about the German tyrant. In my historical survey of appropriations – including stage productions of Shakespeare since the 1930s as well as a multitude of present day movies on YouTube – I will try to analyse this phenomenon of mutual cultural reliance. May one detect a degree of consistency or a certain logic between the various manifestations of twinning? What may be said about the national origin of the various appropriations, their genre, and their motivation?

Shakespearean Enclaves

The forest, an island, a heath, the wilderness seem to be used on the Shakespearean stage as spaces of transition where things become suspended before they can be brought back to some kind of solution again. The lecture will read some of these spaces as heterotopias in which oppositions normally regulating the given world (for a certain time, at least) do not apply, thus functioning as spatio-temporal slots of ‘setting the world right’ again.

Shakespeare in the Avignon Festival: Breaking Down the Walls

The Avignon Arts Festival was created by Jean Vilar with a production of Richard II in 1947, as a way to restore national cohesion in the aftermath of WWII. Vilar's idea of a theatre for all people led him to develop theatrical activities outside Paris, making him a major actor of the decentralisation, and to break with Italian style theatre, particularly with the convention of the fourth wall. Vilar staged Richard II in the Honour Court of the medieval Popes's Palace, today listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and the nevralgic centre of the festival. The choice of this venue, which was meant to revive the Greek and Elizabethan traditions of open-air theatre addressing large and diversified audiences nevertheless challenged and still challenges theatrical performances, which are either magnified or totally annihilated by the monumental upstage wall charged with history. Vilar claimed that Shakespeare's drama, a constant in the festival since 1947, helped him to negotiate with the wall.

The lecture purposes to question the different modes of interaction between corpus and venue: to what extent does the genius loci inform Shakespearean performances? And how does Shakespeare's adaptogenic drama reveal itself appropriate to invent new theatrical forms, far from what Vilar denounced as "Shakespeare's garanteed income"?