41st Annual Meeting

1. Anti-Social Shakespeare/Early Modern Anti-Social

The anti-social is the object of the most fundamental taboo there is, and the obligation to be social the most fundamental obligation. But what might there be beyond the social? Is it possible to be both human and anti-social? This seminar invites work that puts pressure on the felt inevitability of the social. Topics might include: skepticism; misanthropy; anti-natalism; asceticism; incest, virginity, masturbation; radical thing-orientation. All work exploring the early modern anti-social, however understood, in Shakespeare or elsewhere, is welcome.

2. Aristotle, Jonson, Shakespeare

What new perspectives on Jonson or Shakespeare arise from recent work on Aristotle’s Poetics (including translations by Halliwell, Heath, Janko, Sachs, or Whalley)? Do reconstructions of Aristotle on comedy apply to these playwrights? Is Shakespeare’s concern for “some necessary question” allied with Jonson’s that “necessity ask a conclusion” in his plays, and does either take his bearings from Aristotle’s seminal thinking on the role of probability and necessity? The seminar welcomes reassessments of the practicing dramatists and the arch theorist.

3. Class and Emotion in Shakespeare

This seminar explores whether emotion is colored in Shakespeare’s plays and poems by social difference. Why does Ophelia suffer from love melancholy whereas the jailer’s daughter suffers from mopishness? Do kings and commoners feel love, anger, joy and shame in the same ways? Are faith and doubt determined by class allegiance? How did people of different social origins encounter Shakespeare’s works? Papers will consider, from a variety of perspectives, how the habitus of class shapes cognitive and somatic experience.

4. Collaborative Shakespeare

This seminar welcomes papers that address the status of collaborative writing in Shakespeare’s time and its relation to contemporary concepts of authorship; historical attitudes to collaborative Shakespeare; the instruments developed to establish Shakespeare’s collaborative practice; the consequences of collaborative writing for editorial practice and the presentation of texts; the perception of Shakespeare as a collaborative writer in fictional texts about the author’s life; and the stage history of Shakespearean collaborative plays.

5. Contemporary Actors as Evidence

This seminar invites papers that use new or preexisting actors’ interviews, memoirs, and essays, not as sources of interpretive insight into the roles and plays, but as evidence of contemporary histrionic aesthetics and attitudes about character and dramatic action. What assumptions about character and action prevail even as scholars are problematizing character? What mainstream assumptions do actors bring to their work outside of the mainstream, whether post-modern or “Original Practices?”

6. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and Early Modern Drama

Criticism on Mariam has moved from a focus on biography, gender and voice to an engage- ment with geography, race and intertextuality. To mark the 400th anniversary of the play’s publication, this seminar welcomes fresh perspectives on Cary’s drama. How does the play connect with work by other dramatists? In what ways might it be read inside theories of manuscript circulation and book production? Do recent performances allow for a re-evaluation of the text? Does Mariam remain important for feminist critics?

7. Future Directions in Performance Studies

The past decade has positioned Shake- speare within the theoretically heterodox discourse of performance studies. Critics have explored Shakespearean performance as cultural practice and intercultural exchange; approached productions through the lenses of post-colonial, gender, and queer theory; and assessed how new technologies have revolutionized the way we view performance. Where will the next decade take us? What areas should be explored? What new questions should be asked? Papers on any topic related to future directions in Shakespearean performance studies are welcome.

8. Gender and Sexuality in Adaptations of Shakespeare

This seminar places Shakespearean adaptation in dialogue with critical and theoretical discussions of gender and sexuality. Using a broad, multi-media definition of adaptation, we shall discuss how the process of adaptation represents, engages with, and critiques historical and/or contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality. Possible topics include: film and theatrical adaptation; online and Web 2.0 Shakespeares; feminist, queer and transgendered Shakespeares; fiction, fanfiction and the graphic novel; visual arts; Shakespeare for girls, boys and the classroom; Shakespeare in critical theory.

9. Geography and Literature

Early modern geography had many different modes, from atlases to mathematical handbooks to travellers’ narratives and beyond. What can these materials and their concerns do for us as literary scholars? This seminar invites work that considers the intersections of early modern literature and geography: applications of literary analysis to geographical texts; reflections on methodology, strategies, and outcomes; or considerations of how geography—as a body of knowledge, a practice, a set of questions—may afford useful perspectives on literary texts.

10. Greek Texts and the Early Modern Stage

This seminar will explore the impact of Greek texts on Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists. Greek texts began to circulate in this period in translations, adaptations, and original versions. Connected with Protestantism, heretical philosophy, and the origins of literary forms, they sparked fascination and controversy, yet their resonances remain largely unexcavated. Papers might explore Shakespeare’s Plutarch, Galen’s humors, antitheatricalists’ Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics and genre theory, Jonson’s Aristophanes, Chapman’s Homer, staging Heliodoran romance, and English translations, printings, and performances of Greek plays.

11. Health, Well-Being, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body

This seminar investigates health and happiness in Shakespeare through the complex relations among bodies and systems, rhetoric and objects, and character and genre. Participants might discuss health in Shakespeare’s plays and poems alongside measures of “well-being” such as prosperity, employment, youthfulness, strength, peace of mind, friendships, or physical comfort; the role of imagination in Shakespearean health; and the effects on health of reading, watching, or viewing Shakespeare, both in its own right or as a proxy for the humanities.

12. Historical Perspectives on Shakespeare and Education

Shakespeare has long been a mainstay in high schools, colleges, and universities. But the ways he has been taught have changed dramatically. Or have they? How might research on Shakespeare in education, on influential figures, texts, course records, and other hard evidence complicate standard professional narratives? This seminar is not interested in current approaches to Shakespeare in classrooms. Instead, it welcomes papers that examine any aspect of the history of Shakespeare and education and the development of institutional Shakespeare studies.

13. Knowing Language in Shakespeare’s Poems

This seminar on experimental language in Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems considers the relation between poetic speech and the codes or systems that enter the poetry from various practices and disciplines (economics, grammar, horticulture, law, medicine, natural science, rhetoric, theology, etc). How do different languages compete for space in these texts? What interpretive opportunities does technical language make available? How do practices like commonplacing or imitation influence the poems? How are Shakespeare’s lyrics in conversation with the work of drama?

14. Literature as Protest

This seminar posits protest as a subject of literary representation. When does Shakespeare in either poetry or drama employ literary expression to represent protest or give contour to social unrest? Does Shakespearean drama or poetry engage itself in protest? How has early modern literature been deployed over time, for or against social protest? Also, how might the tension of plot or of the poetic turn, through figure, inform our cultural relationship to protest? Theoretical approaches and non-dramatic attentions are welcome.

15. Lost Plays in Early Modern England

There are at least 550 early modern plays for which there survives some evidence, but not a full playscript. Papers in this seminar might attend to specific lost plays, considering repertory practices, playhouses and playing companies, audiences and playwrights. Alternatively, participants may engage with issues pertaining to “clumping” vs. “splitting” of titles; what it means to speculate “responsibly” about lost plays; the nature of scholarly collaboration in researching lost plays; the role of digital resources in theater history.

16. Lucretian Pleasure and Shakespearean Study

Pleasure and poetry, inextricably linked in the early modern period, become increasingly associated with Lucretius’s De rerun natura. How does Lucretian influence, direct or transversal, transform depictions of desire, sexuality, poetics, and the passions in Shakespeare and other writers? The seminar invites papers that interrogate figurations of pleasure in Shakespearean texts and contexts. It aims to open a dialogue between models of pleasure derived from psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-structuralism, and the ancient defense and critique of pleasure in Lucretius’s poem.

17. Managing Shakespeare and the Early Modern Theater Business

Early modern theatrical performances began with someone organizing players, properties, and space. Narratives of theater history often contain assumptions about management that deserve closer examination, including how and when the “manager” emerged as a recognizable professional category. This seminar invites participants to reevaluate the lives of acting company leaders and playhouse owners, the organization of courtly and civic production, the cultivation of patrons and social networks, patent and contract economics, repertorial competition, audience manipulation, or any other aspect of management.

18. Nomadic Subjects and Objects

Taking as its point of departure contemporary theories of “the nomadic subject,” this seminar invites papers that explore subjects and objects (including commodities, texts, language, scientific ideas, and social practices) that circulated between early modern England and other parts of the globe. The seminar encourages a variety of critical approaches, from historical accounts of individual travelers, to studies of mercantile theory and practice, to book historical analysis or translation studies of specific texts such as foreign language ethnographies or memoirs.

19. On Beyond Rabbits and Ducks: Re-engaging Henry V

This seminar invites re-evaluations of Henry V, including the polarizing tendencies in the criticism: Christian rabbit or Machiavellian duck? How are we reading this play today? What new directions are we pursuing in our critical and theoretical attempts to understand this play and its relation to nation? to political violence? and to topicality? How do we understand the nature of the divergent Q and F texts? And what place does Henry V hold in our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic career.

20. Patrons, Professional Drama, and Print Culture

This seminar builds on studies of patronage in early modern theater by focusing on connections between theater patrons, the patronage system, and the early modern print industry. Suggested topics include: direct interventions by theater patrons in publishing play texts; investigations into patron-publisher networks; representations of patrons in plays, epistles, etc.; views expressed by patrons toward printers and print culture; post-Renaissance depictions of the intersection between patrons and print.

21. Pedagogy and the Performance of Learning in Shakespeare’s England

This seminar focuses on the use, staging, and performance of pedagogy in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What is the relationship amongst literary and non-literary texts and the representation of teaching, learning, and literacy on the early modern stage? How is the gendered and classed aspect of learning either affirmed or challenged? In particular, participants are invited to consider learning in light of the technologies of reading and writing, including the use of material objects as theatrical props.

22. “Popular” Discourses of Race in Comic Representations

Whereas finding a late emergence of racial distinctions has depended upon elite discourses (e.g., geohumoralism), this seminar invites explorations of “popular” early modern understandings of racial difference in stereotypical comic representations of Moors, Jews, Turks, “Gypsies,” etc. How did laughter at “strangers” address serious concerns, whether about religion, protonation, global exchange, or gender/sex? What notions of difference did the comic promote in such plays as Jew of Malta, Anthony and Cleopatra, Renegado, Island Princess, or English Moor? On what bases?

23. Quoting Shakespeare

What role has quotation played in Shakespeare’s reception? How has selective quotation, from seventeenth-century commonplacing to twenty-first-century advertising, shaped Shakespeare’s image? Is there any connection between Shakespeare’s proverbial borrowings and the fragments admired as his ‘beauties’ or ‘wisdom’? What is it about Shakespeare’s language that invites extraction? Topics might include allusion and intertextuality; creative misquotation in popular culture; critical and pedagogical quotation practices; and digital technology’s potential both for changing, and understanding, the way Shakespeare quotations work in the world.

24. Race/Religion and Gender: Medieval Continuities

In recent debates on the medieval emergence of the concept of race, some argue that Jewish and Muslim identity is constructed in somatic, hierarchical, and hereditary terms. Medieval questions of religious alterity frequently engage gender, also imagined in terms of corporality and subordination. A range of medieval discourses—medical, religious, literary and ethnographic—address these intersections. Participants in this seminar will challenge periodization in considering how medieval discourses help shape representations of religion, race and gender in early modern drama.

25. Representing Women and Politics in Jacobean England

Were women’s political activities in Jacobean England associated with carnivalesque disruptions of social order or simply marginalized? Or, during a time of increasing public discontent with James’s policies, did official images of royal father and husband spawn rival representations of female power? Welcoming a range of approaches to texts from The Winter’s Tale to Arbella Stuart’s letters, this seminar invites papers on representations of women’s actual and/or fictional political engagements in Jacobean works by women and by men.

26. Re-reading Shakespeare, Re-reading in Shakespeare

It is said that one never reads Shakespeare for the first time. Since we approach Shakespeare inevitably through re-reading, this seminar invites considerations of all aspects of re-reading, whether in or of Shakespeare’s (and contemporaries’) texts. Papers might address moments of re-reading in the works, examine Shakespeare’s “re-reading” in his repeated use of the same sources, forge connections between book history and literary criticism, or theorize Shakespearean reading practices, whether material or cognitive, early modern or contemporary, recursive or revisionary.

27. Sexuality and Sovereignty in Early Modern Drama

What light does early modern drama shed on the intersection between sexuality and the “political theology” perspective of Agamben and Schmitt? How do political communities founded on sovereign power call forth, shape, energize or manage sexuality? Does sovereign power itself have a distinctive sexuality? And must we accept political theology as a master theory and simply apply it to sexuality or does a foundational commitment to sexuality require a reworking of the theoretical assumptions of political theology?

28. Shakespeare and Business Culture

This seminar considers Shakespearean intersections with “business” as a subculture with its own ethos and implicit epistemologies. Participants might discuss Shakespeare from perspectives of early modern business culture—e.g., businesses of theater, printing and publishing, trade and colonialism; representations of businesspeople like merchants and artisans; or practices like accounting. Instead, participants might examine Shakespeare within recent business culture—e.g., the business/branding of “Shakespeare” in books, theater, film, etc.; Shakespeare’s role within corporatized universities; Shakespearean insights employed within contemporary business.

29. Shakespeare and Confession

Even after auricular confession was no longer a required sacrament in Protestant England, Shakespeare and his contemporaries continued to represent confessional acts in their drama and poetry. This seminar will investigate the broad range of literary treatments of confession in the early modern period. Paper topics might include: staging confession; gender, sexuality, and confes- sion; the relationship between confession and life writing; the influence of confessional speech on complaint, lamentation, and lyric; and confessional acts and their effects on jurisprudence.

30. Shakespeare and Consciousness

Recognizing that consciousness is of renewed interest in psychology, philosophy, and brain science, this seminar considers what a more nuanced understanding of consciousness might bring to Shakespeare studies. Can a consideration of consciousness, ancient or modern, help us to re-imagine the relationship between the immanence of text and performance and the cognitive assemblage of such stimuli? Papers should investigate connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and our phenomenological encounters with Shakespeare’s works.

31. Shakespeare and Distributive Justice

According to Aristotle, distributive justice pertains to the fair allocation of a community’s wealth and honors. How did notions of distributive justice inflect Shakespeare’s and other early modern dramatists representations of material inequality? Questions considered might include: the meaning of distributive justice in a late feudal/mercantile economy, the relation between charity and the claims of justice, how distributive justice might challenge or reinforce principles of decorum, the relevance of clowning, and the kinds of plots that speak to distributive justice.

32. Shakespeare and Hospitality

How do routines of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and providing shelter animate the traffic patterns and socio-symbolic worlds of Shakespeare’s plays? How does hospitality contribute to notions of political theology, ethics, and economy? Where are its boundary-lines drawn, especially in terms of gender, community, nationality, and race? What are its environmental resonances? How do productions of the plays, and the playhouses themselves, take up and scenographically engage hospitality? How do Shakespeare’s works make themselves hospitable—or inhospitable—to interpretation and performance?

33. Shakespeare and Memory

How does Shakespeare, and the early modern period more generally, engage with memory? How might Shakespeare’s plays, Renaissance drama, or the memory culture of early modern England encourage us to respond to constructs of memory offered by theorists in the modern period, such as Freud, Bakhtin, Marx, Bergson, Ricoeur, or de Certeau? Through close reading, historicised discussion of the Renaissance debate of memory and exploitation of theoretical materials, this seminar concentrates upon showcasing the multifariousness of memory in Shakespearean texts.

34. Shakespeare and Metamorphosis

Shakespeare and his contemporaries mined Ovid’s Metamorphoses for its stories of transformation. This seminar invites a broad range of questions and explorations concerning the relationship of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to ideas of metamorphosis, figures of transformation, and the slippage between human and nonhuman worlds. How do Ovidian moments work within Shakespeare’s plays and poems? What do transformations out of human form tell us about agency and limitation? Do people really change? And if so, into what?

35. Shakespeare and the Making of Knowledge

How do Shakespeare and early modern theater inhabit and create arenas of knowledge and non-knowledge? Possible issues: (1) Theater or Shakespearean plays or poems as venues for introducing and organizing disciplines of knowledge. (2) How knowledge is affirmed, verified, organized, and transmitted. (3) What constitutes logical proof. (4) Ignorance, stupidity, and obfuscation. (5) Philosophical theories of epistemology: empiricism, skepticism, idealism, etc. (6) Historical epistemology: what Shakespeare’s culture can and cannot know. (7) How Shakespeare displays his own knowledge and ignorance.

36. Shakespeare and the New Source Study

Do new interpretive frameworks and historical information alter how we understand the relationship between Shakespeare and his sources? Do the reframing of a global early modern period, the examination of heterogeneity within European cultures, the turn to religion, historical formalism, intertheatricality, or developments in literary or performance theories, for instance, prompt us to reconsider the politics of terms like source, origin, and adaptation? Is Shakespearean source study a special case? This seminar invites papers that do and/or theorize source study.

37. Shakespeare and/in Manuscript

Where do we find Shakespeare in manuscript? Miscellanies, promptbooks, accounts, marginalia, and other manuscript sources offer evidence of the varied and contingent responses to Shakespeare’s work. How can manuscripts be of use to theater and cultural historians, literary scholars, and textual editors? This seminar encourages participants to consider the wide range of Shakespearean manuscripts, to showcase a variety of critical approaches to these primary texts, and to explore some of the new (and often digital) ways to access these sources.

38. Shakespeare, Phenomenology, and Periodization

This seminar invites phenomenological approaches (broadly defined) to Shakespeare’s contested role as an icon for the emergence of the “early modern” out of the “medieval.” Papers might consider historical phenomenology, embodied cognition, time and anachronism, political theology, or the “theological turn” in phenomenology. How do these diverse modes of phenomenological inquiry inform one another? How might they help us to rethink Shakespeare’s relation to problems of periodization, including his role in secularization narratives and genealogies of modernity?

39. Shakespearean Adaptation and the World’s Religions

This seminar brings together adaptation studies and the religious turn. How have adaptations produced within and for Moslem, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and indigenous African communities, among others, challenged or transformed Shakespeare’s representations of religion? Possible topics include religion’s relationship to race, gender, nation, or diaspora; transpositions of religious conflict; translations of Shakespeare’s religious language; and secular, “humanist,” and atheistic adaptations. We also invite reflection on concepts (hybridity, universality, pluralization) that might link historical religious and contemporary global Shakespeares.

40. Shakespearean Exceptionalism: The Case of the Sonnets

This seminar explores the relationship of Shakespeare’s sonnets either to other sonnet sequences; other early modern literary or cultural texts; their treatment in relationship to the rest of Shakespeare’s work; or one another—that is, one or more sonnets in relationship to the rest. Are the sonnets more or less peculiar than we’ve been led to believe? How do beliefs about Shakespearean exceptionalism shape the way the sonnets are represented or taught?

41. Shakespeare’s Earth System Science

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Aiming to expand our understanding of the early modern worldview that charged earthquakes and tempests with preternatural significance, this seminar considers the material composition of the sublunary system and its literary representations. Appropriating terms from NASA, we will attend to “the processes within and interactions among the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and geosphere”—what comprised early modern physics and meteorology. New historicist, ecocritical, field-specific (anemological to volcanological), and other approaches are welcome.

42. Shakespeare’s Irish Contexts

This seminar seeks to enrich our understanding of Irish contexts for Shakespeare’s works and to construct a new canon of texts that shed light on Anglo-Irish relations in early modern literature more broadly. We invite papers that complement and complicate perspectives offered in Shakespeare and Spenser by addressing a wide range of texts, from proclamations and statutes to diaries and letters, as well as works by later writers such as Jonson and Milton. Papers related to pedagogy are especially welcome.

43. Shakespeare’s Social Networks: Players, Patrons, and Playwrights

Coleridge’s image of Shakespeare seated alone on the summit “of the poetic mountain” has been displaced in recent years by a more contingent historical picture. Scholars now focus on the playwright’s local, practical, places of association and this seminar sets out to explore the literary implications of that approach. Its emphasis is on personal connections. Co-authorship, audience, and individual actors will be important, but the depiction of social networks in Shakespeare’s drama will also be relevant to this debate.

44. Shakespeare’s Theater Games

Shakespeare’s company were “players”, their venue the “playhouse”, “playing” their trade. Can their work be analyzed as “play”? What models of play are relevant? Do the conditions of late medieval and early modern drama support such a picture? Is dramatic play comparable to play in other early modern artists, venues or circumstances? How do early modern plays deploy “play”, games and game-like sequences? How may performance practices— historical, contemporary, reconstructed— respond to a ludic view of early drama?

45. Skill

This seminar asks how skill was inculcated, appraised, displayed, and evaluated in the early modern theater. Topics include methods of training of boy actors; gesture and skill; the terms of art used in describing theatrical skill; inset skill displays such as music, dancing, and fencing; clowning; and verbal dexterity and other means of demonstrating writerly skill. Papers on theories of skill and embodiment are welcome, as are case studies of particular skill sets and inset skill displays.

46. Social Media Shakespeare

The exponential growth of social media platforms has enabled multifaceted engagements with Shakespeare’s texts. They serve as a living archive of materials but also foster vernacular creativity. But to what extent is Shakespeare on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and apps, impacting on the cultural currency of Shakespeare? What kind of Shakespeares are being produced through such intermedial interventions? We invite papers that explore the diverse presence of networked Shakespeare in our mediascape, and reflect on the implications of this “virtual” presence.

47. Staging Allegory

While theories of allegory tend to dwell on modalities of language, accounts of Renaissance theatricality often neglect allegory. This seminar addresses the critical lacuna that results. Topics may include: allegory and anti-theatricality; allegorical dramas; allegorical irruptions in non-allegorical plays; religion and allegory on the post-Reformation stage; character, personification, and the (non)human on the stage; stage properties and allegorical objects; allegory and emblem; tensions between visuality and textuality; economy and allegory; gender, sexuality, and the staging of allegory.

48. The Church

This seminar considers the role of the church in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Taking up the significance of various holy places—churches, chapels, cathedrals, temples, tombs, sanctuaries—to the literature of the period and to early modern people, papers might consider the following: the church as a structure and the ways the fabric of the church shaped and was shaped by its users; religious activities (quotidian services, baptisms, marriages, coronations, funerals) and/or secular activities (social gatherings, business transactions, misuse).

49. The Singing Body in Shakespeare

Within the predominantly oral but increasingly visual culture of early modern England, songs were inseparable from the sensing bodies of performer, listener, and spectator alike. How does the physiology of the singing body and the acoustic, visual, and affective impact of song performance inform our reading of Shakespeare’s songs and singers? What are the methodological implications of considering Shakespeare’s songs not only as lyric texts and musical settings, but also as instances of embodied and gendered performance?

50. The Tempest

What does The Tempest mean to the 21st century? Shakespeare’s play has become a touchstone for discussing race, gender, power, language, and the New World. In January 2012, as part of a state-wide initiative against ethnic studies, the Tucson school district even banned The Tempest from its curriculum. This seminar invites papers that reframe the play and question such entrenched positions. What brave new worlds can critics explore in these contested times? Interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches particularly welcome.

51. Theater Boundaries

This seminar invites participants to explore the specifics of audience/stage relations in early modern plays (not just Shakespeare): including, but not confined to, characters’ awareness of their genre, language and style (“nay, God be wi’ you an’ you talk in blank verse”: AYLI); theater history (responses of known audience members); literal interpretations (Nashe’s “wise justice” in Pierce Pennilesse); soliloquy; character versus actor; plays based on real events or on other plays; representations of the professions; audience awareness and attitude.

52. Theorizing Repetition: Text, Performance, and Historiography

How does repetition—understood variously as mirroring, duplication, recurrence, renewal, transmission—productively articulate or complicate existing historiographies, epistemologies, and theoretical models? Taking repetition as a site of intersection between text- and performance-based modes of analysis, this seminar invites ambitious, argument-driven case studies and metacritical accounts. Papers might address theatrical imitation, rehearsal, or adaptation; genre formation; literary or discursive citation; recursive temporalities or spatialities; commodity culture; social protocol, religious ritual, or modes of reproduction. All periods, places, and media welcome.

53. Translating Shakespeare beyond Absolutes

The power and contributions of translation have rapidly increased in a world no longer approaching Shakespeare as a source of indisputable truths, but as a dense yet pervious core of matters to converse with in every possible language, culture and medium. This seminar will address the state and impact of Shakespeare translations from as many “post-” perspectives as may be imagined: the post-bardolatrous; the post-national, post-colonial and post-racial; the post-historic and post-human; the post-print and the post-dramatic—even the post-posts.

54. Performing Shakespeare in Europe

The seminar addresses distinctiveness and diversity of staging Shakespeare in Europe. It invites papers on continental, national and local patterns of European Shakespeare production. Are there similarities in translation and staging that define European Shakespeare performance? Can we identify analogies among European nations in the Romantic period? How to describe differences between productions of Shakespeare in Eastern versus Western Europe during the Cold War? And finally, what distinguishes European Shakespeare in an increasingly globalized world?

55. White People in Shakespeare

Including race and postcolonial studies, what are some of the historical, critical, and theoretical methods that can facilitate or advance discussions of whiteness in/and Shakespeare? Is there a relationship in Shakespeare between whiteness as a universal principle and as a site/citation of particularity? Is there a specificity to whiteness that identifies some Shakespearean characters/moments and not others? What are the institutional implications and possibilities for bringing sustained attention to whiteness in/and Shakespeare?

56. Writing Lives in Early Modern England

Early modern England witnessed remarkable innovations in both biography and autobiography. This seminar examines these life-writings through their myriad forms, both generic and material, to explore what the early modern period understood by the concept of a “life”, and what it meant to “write” a life. Participants are encouraged to attend to the remarkable range of genres—from martyrology to spiritual examination—and of physical forms—from printed lives to manuscript account-books, miscellanies, and notebooks—that early modern lives took.

57. Wrong Shakespeare

Is Shakespeare ever not “good for you”? This seminar will focus on contexts in which Shakespeare is or has been used as a force for moral good, such as the curriculum, adaptation and performance studies, and social programs (in prisons and other locales). Who decides the right/wrong way to teach, perform, edit, read, and appropriate Shakespeare? And how are the borders of “wrong” Shakespeare policed? What’s at stake in arguing that Shakespeare is “good” or “not good” for you?

58. Close Reading without Readings

This workshop invites participants (1) to give meticulous attention to the minute particulars of particular passages from Shakespeare; (2) to analyze those passages without insisting on limiting—or even attempting to limit—their range of consideration to elements that might be useful in formulating an interpretation of—a reading of—the play in question; and (3) to consider the possible value of such analysis to an understanding of why the culture values Shakespeare so highly.

59. Dancing in Shakespeare: A Practical Introduction

Shakespeare’s plays contain numerous references to dance, some of which are used to create puns, others to illuminate a particular character or dramatic situation. Through a combination of physical participation, video examples, examination of primary sources, and discussion, this workshop will introduce participants to a number of dances that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, including the measures, brawl, coranto, canary, galliard and cinquepace. Participants will also gain first-hand experience in reconstructing a dance from historical sources.

60. Editing Shakespeare for the Web

The purpose of this workshop is to imagine, analyze, and perhaps call for specific developments in the electronic editing of Shakespeare texts. How could and how should the edition of the future look? What kinds of things will we expect it to do? What potential pitfalls should the editor consider? Participants will address these questions both in practice and in discussion.

61. “Performing Archives”: The Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Participants will work with material and documentary remnants of scenes from three Stratford Festival productions: Romeo and Juliet (1968), The Merchant of Venice (1984), and The Tempest (2010). Archival resources for study will include prompt books, design bibles, photographs, blocking diagrams, musical scores, archival videotapes, films, and various written records. Our aim is to study what survives in one major theater archive, discover what we may reconstruct of past productions, and discuss what are the best practices in doing so.