45th Annual Meeting

1. Accident and the Archives

How do archival accidents influence our textual and literary histories? Can we read meaning in the received arrangement of pre-modern compilations, commonplace books, and finding aids? What chance encounters (and new points of friction) are effected by warped scans on EEBO and erasures of blank pages from digital facsimiles? Papers might focus on confrontations between bibliography and material texts, technological glitches and oddities, or the conflicted temporalities of objects assembled over time.

2. Afterlives of Medieval Drama

This seminar invites papers on any aspect of the afterlives of medieval English drama: props, staging, notions of time and action, structures of feeling, the strategic uses of medieval drama to make political statements. Extreme violence and the complex interplay of comic and tragic were staples of medieval biblical drama, not classical sources. Where do we draw the line between medieval and Renaissance/early modern drama, and why? What are the advantages and disadvantages of periodization itself?

3. All’s Well That Ends Well: New Approaches

Recent debate about the authorship of All’s Well That Ends Well has brought renewed attention to the complexities of the play, from its undated inception to its performance possibilities. The play’s generic assignment, its attitude toward gender and sexuality, its theological orientation, its textual cruxes, its uncertain attribution, and its striking variations in popularity and performance are all ripe for reconsideration. This seminar invites new thoughts on the play from any perspective.

4. Asia in the Making of Europe

Over fifty years after Donald Lach’s monumental Asia in the Making of Europe, this seminar seeks to reassess how Europe’s encounters with the East influenced Western culture. Papers might consider works featuring Asian characters and settings; European or Asian representations of the encounter; intra- European rivalries; the appropriation of Asian knowledges into European cultures or vice versa; tactics of accommodation or adaptation; cross-cultural exchanges and networks; shared histories and mythologies.

5. Beyond Shakespeare’s Genres

This seminar invites participants whose interest in dramatic genre challenges or ranges beyond the classic tripartite division of the First Folio. Studies might attend to the defining influence on Shakespeare of early modern genres unnamed there; social and political conditions that made some genres popular; genres devised by later editors and critics; the models Shakespeare’s canon provided the novel and its subgenres; more radical reimaginings of Shakespearean genres in new media, film, and fan fiction.

6. Bloody Talk, Talking Blood

This seminar focuses on blood on the early modern stage. Studying “bloody talk” or “talking blood,” papers might analyze the words, gestures, and other non-verbal cues used to express and inflict bodily violence, notably gendered bodily violence, and how this violence was performed and conceptualized in past centuries. Also welcome are presentist approaches about staging such plays now: what is acceptable to show on stage, what is not, how lines are drawn, and what happens when they are transgressed.

7. Cognition in the Early Modern Period, Part One

Cognition in the Early Modern Period, Part Two

What are the concepts and terms with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries spoke about and understood mental life? How do early modern ideas about cognition relate to classical or medieval ones? How does Shakespeare handle these in his depictions of perceiving, thinking, and feeling? What does the medium of theater add to such depictions? Papers might engage topics such as memory or madness, or else explore notions such as intuition or skill, giving attention to history, philosophy, or form.

8. Commonplacing Shakespeare, Past and Present

This seminar invites contributions on the way Shakespeare’s work emerges out of a culture of commonplacing and is in turn taken up and distributed as quotation. Possible topics include the early modern commonplace; how plays became a resource for sententious (and parodic) quotation, especially through print; the vexed relationship between quotation and literary value; the influence of technologies of communication on the circulation of commonplaces; viral Shakespeare on contemporary social networks.

9. Cosmological Bodies

The relationships between and among cosmological bodies—atomic, biological, meteorological, planetary—were sources of awe and debate in early modern texts. This seminar invites thematic, theoretical, or speculative treatments of literal or metaphoric cosmological bodies in motion; of the influence of these bodies upon each other by way of sympathies and contagion; of wonders and marvels; of Shakespeare’s appropriation of Aristotelian, Lucretian, and other paradigms; of emerging cosmologies in the period.

10. Disability and Subjectivity in Shakespeare

This seminar pursues ways Disability Studies can help us explore new understandings of Shakespearean subjectivity. What do Shakespeare’s representations of affliction, disability, or dependence tell us about the nature of human experience? How do engagements with Shakespeare’s work by readers with disabilities, and theatrical productions which feature disability, speak back to his representations of personhood? How might non-disabled scholars incorporate these insights into their work?

11. Diversifying the Field of Shakespeare Performance

Our diverse histories of engaging with Shakespeare call for reconsideration of the means by which we read cultures, identity, and types of performance. This seminar invites papers that attend to a specific production, festival, genre, or style of performance, from amateur to celebrity, whether multilingual or in translation, musical adaptations as well as original practices. Especially welcome is work on “diversity” more broadly. What methodologies hold the most promise to diversify Shakespeare studies today?

12. Early Modern Performance beyond Drama

This seminar aims to recover traces of performance practices in early modern texts, from festival books to medical treatises. Diverse approaches are welcome, from aesthetics and semiotics to cognition and cultural studies. How can textual study account for performances outside the theater—the countless embodied, everyday acts that transmit social knowledge? Does the early modern era offer a distinct set of practices that might challenge or invigorate broader theories of performance?

13. Early Modern Technologies of Space and Place

How did literary, cartographic, and mechanical technologies alter the means by which landscapes and seascapes, roads and rivers, counties and colonies were measured, codified, crossed, “practiced” (de Certeau), and “produced” (Lefebvre) in early modern England? This seminar welcomes work on transportation, surveying manuals, estate plans, maps, globes, portolans, astrolabes, chronometers, sextants, and almanac calendars, as well as on theatrical devices and machinery and the use of stage space.

14. Early Modern Trans*Historicity

This seminar explores the intersections between trans* studies and early modern studies, with special attention to trans*historicity and trans*temporality. Papers might analyze representations of gender-variant bodies, characters, cultural types, or historical figures; address the use of contemporary terms and concepts for early modern phenomena; or attend to the methodological and theoretical alliances and/or tensions between early modern feminist, queer, and trans* studies.

15. Finding Fletcher

This seminar invites papers exploring the drama of John Fletcher. Participants might consider: particularly Fletcherian themes or concerns; collaborations with Beaumont, Massinger, Shakespeare, others; Fletcher’s role in the emergence of tragicomedy; his position succeeding Shakespeare as King’s Men’s playwright; Fletcher’s dramatic responses to plays of his contemporaries; his influence on his contemporaries or on the drama of the next several decades; performing, editing, or teaching Fletcher.

16. Forgotten Histories

This seminar examines early modern history plays not widely considered in the critical conversation, including those authored by lesser-known talents and written or performed after the genre’s vogue had passed. What do they reveal about the literary or political landscape, the material culture of theater, the printing house? How do they illuminate our sense of the genre? What possibilities do they present for performance or teaching? Papers with new insights on more prominent history plays are also welcome.

17. Global Othello

This seminar addresses productions of Othello created outside Anglophonia: stage, operatic, cinematic, and televisual performance; translations, adaptations, and appropriations; Othello’s reception in non-Anglophone contexts; international theatrical tours and intercultural performances; Othello in global digital culture. How do local interventions contribute to Othello’s privileged place in the “global Shakespeare” canon? What continuities and contrasts can be found? What national and transnational concerns?

18. Hamlet: Shifting Perspectives

The complex history of the reception of Hamlet on stage and on the page, and across different cultures and art forms, shows the extent to which engagement with this play has shaped Shakespeare studies and its neighboring disciplines. This seminar therefore invites contributions from across different fields of enquiry— text, performance, critical and historicist approaches, other media—with a specific focus on how current work on Hamlet is changing established critical and creative paradigms.

19. Home Ecologies

What happens when we reorient our study of “ecologies” from sweeping landscapes (terrestrial or oceanic) to the more localized material environment of the home? This seminar maintains an ecological emphasis on material bodies and objects but includes how physical environments, living and non-living, inform our understanding of exchange in and around the home in early modern texts. Papers are welcome on symbolic or material forms of exchange and diverse definitions of the “home” or “household.”

20. Law and Poetics in Shakespeare

This seminar explores connections between early modern law and poetics in Shakespeare. How do the aesthetic experiences of literature relate to law? Papers might examine how the arrangement of a line, the shape of a scene, or the structure of an act stage legal practices (pleading, judgment), concepts (equity, citizenship, sovereignty), and feelings (guilt, shame, pity). Papers that theorize the relationship between historicism and formalism, book history, rhetoric, and performance are welcome.

21. Lost Plays and Their Contexts

This seminar aims to develop models and techniques for thinking about lost plays and other lost early modern works. Papers might consider texts from the Lost Plays Database and lost pamphlets from the Stationers’ Register; changing ideas of how playscripts relate to plays; the place of lost texts in genealogies and corpora of surviving texts; applications of our understanding of plays as collaborative and provisional to non- dramatic works; the role of digital and non-digital resources.

22. Lyric Reading

This seminar juxtaposes Renaissance scenes of lyric reading with theories of reading that might help us interpret them. What do early modern poems expect of their readers, and what do those readers expect of their poems? How might these scenes of reading help us reconsider the changing status of reading and readers in contemporary criticism? What room is there in our theories for readerly misprision? Discussion will begin with a bibliography of case studies and theoretical models.

23. John Marston: New Directions

Marston is one of the most problematic and neglected of Shakespeare’s contemporaries; even the boundaries of his canon are uncertain. This seminar invites papers on any aspect of his works: the attribution and authorship of his plays; the collaborative writing; the plays in performance, especially with the boys’ troupes; his relations with other writers, especially Shakespeare; intellectual influences and friendship groups; his significance for the modern reader and playgoer.

24. Material Texts and Digital Interfaces

This seminar considers the relationship between materiality and digital presence. What can a material approach to digital tools teach us? What can be gained by exploring the physical attributes of a textual object through a digital interface? What happens when we think of digital facsimiles as objects in their own right, rather than as providers of transparent access to texts? How do the material conditions of creating a digital project shape its use?

25. Meta-Shakespeare

This seminar focuses on “meta-ness” in the poetry and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. How and why did early modern authors consistently, even compulsively, introduce elements of self-reflexivity into their works? Possible topics include poems about poetry; plays within plays; prologues and epilogues; depictions of poets, playwrights, actors, and/or audiences; references to the playing space; invocations of manuscript and/or print culture; paratextuality; staging the book.

26. Metropolitan Shakespeare

This seminar invites participants to explore the urban engagements of plays and performances with the aim of rethinking the “theater of a city” with Shakespeare at the center. How might Shakespeare’s plays and performances have given meaning to the expanding metropolis? Or have provided a self-reflexive medium through which city residents participated in new modes of urban experience and belonging? Theoretical, historical, text-based, and performance-based approaches are welcome.

27. Mystery in Early Modern Drama

Shakespeare’s plays explore, test, and modify ideas about mystery, from practical craft mystery, through the arcana imperii, to the unknowable mysteries of the divine. This seminar invites contributions that evaluate early modern dramatists’ engagement with mystery, including invisibility, secrecy, stage effects, magic, the supernatural, craft knowledge, religion. How do dramatists create mystery? Are certain literary forms particularly amenable to the mysterious? When is mystery subjected to satire?

28. Negative Affects in Shakespeare

Many of the most characteristic Shakespearean affects are negative in valence: hatred, despair, aversion, jealousy, envy, grief, and heartbreak. But what characterizes them as negative? Their outcome? Their objects? These content questions lead to critical questions. Must we repair such negativity? Can we attend to negativity as negativity and allow it to remain useless or harmful? Or must critical attention necessarily transvalue and redeem its objects? How might genre modulate negativity?

29. New Directions for Historicism

How might post-new-historicist scholarship differentiate itself from early “pre-theory” empiricist versions of history? How can we bring contemporary modes of theoretical inquiry to bear on the archival turn? How might materialist and textualist histories be productively entangled? Should we distinguish between history and literature? How do object-criticism, the new economic criticism, and ecocriticism complicate those distinctions? This seminar engages future directions for historicist theory and practice.

30. New Shakespearean Economies

Notions of “the economic” appeared in political theory, husbandry manuals, Utopian literature, account books, religious tracts. This seminar invites papers on overlooked aspects of period economic discourse: how were buying, selling, borrowing, lending, and negotiating conceptualized, lived, and represented on the Renaissance stage? Especially welcome are readings of plays that are not typically associated with money, and work that applies later economic theory to early modern texts in fresh ways.

31. Performance and the Paper Stage, 1640-1695

This seminar explores restrictions on and innovations in dramatic production and publication, 1640-1695. With drama banned (1642-1660) and only two London playhouses licensed (1660-1700), performance continued at fairs, inns, and homes, and print publication exploded. Work is welcome on alternative stages and illegal theaters; drolls, ballads, civic pageantry, court performances; touring companies; censorship; performance enacted on the page through paratext, typography, layout; theatrical annotation.

32. Queer Meter

This seminar welcomes papers about the period’s queer ways of “measuring” language. What non-normative dimensions of language do meter and versification invite and uncover? How might queer theory and gender studies allow us to return afresh to “feminine” rhyme, Sapphic verse, the Marlovian line, and other of the period’s metrical kinks? How might book history and media studies allow us to reimagine what counts as verse in the first place, and how is it queered through editing and adaptation?

33. Queer Theology in Shakespeare Studies

This seminar examines the intersection of sexuality and theology in Shakespeare’s work. Beyond prohibition and repression, how can religious language and logic challenge normative views of love, gender, marriage, friendship, homoeroticism, and subjectivity? How do Shakespeare’s plays illuminate the contradictions and perversities of religious ideals and institutions? What can Shakespearean texts tell us about the erotic dimension of confessional identity, faith, grace, and spiritual obligation?

34. Race and the Materiality of Early Modern Performance

The early modern production of races has been located in the historical contexts of the Atlantic slave trade, racial capitalism, legal racism, and the Linnaean revolution in natural science. This seminar asks whether these supposedly nonperformative realms share materials and practices with text, theater, and other forms of culture. Papers are welcome on how attention to early modern performance—in its broadest sense— shifts the geography, temporality, and social history of race.

35. Regulating Early Modern Womens Bodies

This seminar investigates the ways that early modern English texts and culture imagine regulating feminine bodies through virtuous exempla, cautionary tales, education and conduct books, medical diagnosis and advice, literary plots or tropes, fashion, or physical disciplines such as needlework, dance, or music lessons. How are prescriptive limitations and rebellious evasions mutually constitutive? How can we understand failed self-regulation? Diverse methodologies, theories, and texts are welcome.

36. Renaissance Afterlives Revisited

Fictional and scholarly representations of the Renaissance respond and contribute to contemporary political and aesthetic debates, raising crucial questions about how the past has been fashioned and how it is appropriated. This seminar invites papers that examine modern representations of or allusions to the Renaissance, its works, or its people. Especially welcome is work on productions that produce the Renaissance in untraditional ways and on the academic and cultural significance of such re- imaginings.

37. Shakespeare and Black America

This seminar seeks to shed light on the vital role of Shakespeare in Black America. It aims to recover the understudied history of performance beyond the professional stage in racially marked spaces such as homes, colleges, schools, libraries, reading clubs, churches, concert halls, and amateur theaters. It also welcomes inquiries into the present moment, the transnational reach of Shakespeare and Black politics, and the significance of digital technologies and pedagogies for Black communities.

38. Shakespeare and Counterfeiting

This seminar examines the role of forged and spurious forms, both literal and metaphorical, in early modern literature, considering counterfeiting as cultural practice, literary motif, and theoretical framework. Papers are welcome on positive and negative concepts of counterfeiting in the time and afterlives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including artistic creation or imitation; value and authenticity; theatrical practice; pirated editions; authorship and canon formation; scholarly fabrication.

39. Shakespeare and Film Form

Shakespearean film scholarship tends to privilege “literary” interpretation over technical attention to the medium. This seminar, inspired by Eisenstein’s Film Form, invites participants to engage directly with cinematographic language. Papers might explore the tensions between the autonomy of the aesthetic prevalent in the new formalism and the more progressive methodology known as “activist formalism.” What new directions for Shakespearean film scholarship might be prompted by a return to form?

40. Shakespeare and Geek Culture

As a first step into the new field of Shakespeare geek studies, this seminar accommodates a broad range of critical approaches. Papers might consider such topics as the apparent geekiness of academia; Shakespeare’s links to other areas of geek culture (in fantasy and sci-fi fandom, for instance); the historical roots of geek culture; and the possibility that Shakespeare has, in some ways, always been associated with elements we might see as geeky: the arcane, the fantastic, or the marginal.

41. Shakespeare and Medical Humanities

Amid renewed interest in incorporating the humanities into medical education and practice, Shakespeare is a source for what it means to be “fully human.” How can medical or bioethical issues in Shakespeare open up these issues for contemporary practitioners? How does work in medical humanities help us understand and explore early modern texts? This seminar welcomes work on scholarship, pedagogy, curriculum, institutional connections, community engagement, the role of scholarship in public humanities.

42. Shakespeare and Middleton

This seminar considers Middleton and Shakespeare as collaborators on Timon of Athens; Shakespeare’s influence on Middleton in terms of plot, characterization, and theme; Middleton’s influence on Shakespeare before and after Timon; and Middleton as possible adapter of Macbeth and Measure for Measure (and, perhaps, other plays). Papers are welcome on the present state of (and debates about) studies in attribution, the Shakespeare and Middleton canons, and new directions for future research.

43. Shakespeare and the Creaturely World

This seminar invites participants to write about nonhuman creatures and creaturely interactions in Shakespeare’s texts and Shakespeare’s time. Contributions are welcome on a world that saw both humans and animals as creatures; particular creatures; the theological dimension of the creaturely; material objects made from and by creatures; the natural world from a creaturely perspective; classifications of creatures; interactions between and among human and nonhuman creatures in texts.

44. Shakespeare in the Anthropocene

The 1610 “Orbis Spike,” a dip in global carbon dioxide coinciding with the commingling of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, locates Shakespeare in an epoch of human influence upon geology. What does it mean to experience Shakespeare in this context? How do his genres express themes associated with anthropocenic existence? How do his plays shape or enable a post-human awareness of this interconnection? How do his eco-aesthetics react to and potentially alter our uncertain geopolitical scene?

45. Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance

What is the status of memory as a way of understanding the performance of Shakespeare? What is the relationship between performance studies, trauma studies, and cognitive studies? How does technology—from crowdsourcing to distance collaboration to online videos— shape our relationship to performance and its records? This seminar welcomes papers on material culture, theater archives, digital humanities, Shakespeare festivals, anniversary commemorations, reconstructed theaters, original performance practices.

46. Shakespeare, the Book, and the Longue Durée

With the diminished sway of New Historicism, scholars have increasingly turned from a synchronic idea of “context” to the broader, stranger chronologies in which literary works take shape. This seminar considers the particular relationship of book history to diachrony, polychronicity, deep time, and anachronism in literary study. What are the implications for our theoretical, literary- critical, periodizing, and digital practices of thinking about books as multi- or trans- historical objects?

47. Shakespearean Distortions of Early Modern Drama

This seminar invites papers that examine how overreliance on Shakespeare distorts understanding of early modern drama: how truisms from the Shakespeare industry shape received wisdom; how Shakespeare’s stature structures thinking about periodization, audience, print and the author function, and relationships between drama and culture; aspects of drama that have been obscured by focus on Shakespeare. Also welcome are reconsiderations of Shakespeare’s work from the perspective of a broader theater culture.

48. Shakespearean Migrants, Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees

This seminar considers early modern texts in relation to both early modern and present-day migrations: the impact of Protestant refugees and provincial migrants arriving in Renaissance London; historical contexts for the Syrian refugee crisis and Mexican / U.S. border crossings; the cultural, economic, or environmental impacts of human migrations; onstage use of foreign languages; how recent performances and translations provide new contexts for thinking about Shakespeare, migration, and exile.

49. The Soundscapes of Renaissance Prose

This seminar examines cross-fertilizations between sixteenth-century drama and prose in the work of Baldwin, Nashe, Lyly, Greene, others. The aim is to enrich our understanding of the soundscapes of Renaissance literary culture. Potential topics include friendship and collaboration; allusion and adaptation; borrowing; literary quarrels on and off the stage; satire and pastiche; marketing; print and performance. Also welcome are contributions that open up any aspect of the orality and literacy debate.

50. Terrestrial Shakespeare

How did Shakespeare represent the earth? This seminar encourages dialogue between approaches to the early modern globe that have focused on geography, race, empire, and economy, and those that have adopted an ecological and materialist attention to the earth and oceans. What kinds of histories are stored in land, rock, and water? What epistemic possibilities circulate in drama’s terrestrial lexicon? How might a focus on the earth transform a “global” understanding of the Renaissance?

51. Testing Knowledge on Shakespeare’s Stage

This seminar welcomes papers that challenge or deepen the commonplace that Shakespeare’s plays explore an epistemological skepticism. Do neo- Aristotelian, Thomistic, or emerging scientific epistemologies illuminate the plays? Do the Academic skeptics or early modern philosophers (Bacon, Descartes) add to our understanding of Shakespeare? Is drama particularly suited to skepticism or liable to be misinterpreted as skeptical? What new approaches can be brought to bear on Shakespeare and Montaigne/Pyrrhonism?

52. Theatrical Historiography

This seminar focuses on Shakespeare performance between the Restoration and the twentieth century, with contributions welcome from scholars (Shakespeareans, theater historians, musicologists) and practitioners (directors, actors, musicians, dancers). Papers might problematize binary reductions of Shakespeare to an artist either remotely past or perpetually present; engage directly with performance; or reflect upon research-led creative practice by means of multimedia documentation or performances.

53. Time Reckoning in Early Modern England

How can knowledge of the material practices of time-reckoning in the early modern period illuminate the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? Topics might include studies of clocks, hourglasses, almanacs, sundials, and astrolabes; the time-reckoning attributes of the church, court, or theater; cultural beliefs and controversies—medical, scientific, political—that informed the calendar; or the time-measuring functions of English textual forms, such as diaries, metrical poetry, or plays.

54. Traces of Reading in Shakespeare’s Britain

The field of early modern reading history has expanded rapidly in its texts, methods, and technologies. This seminar welcomes both traditional work on print or manuscript marginalia and new digital approaches to reading history. Papers might address reading histories and the reception of Shakespeare; representations of reading; methodological studies of marginalia as digital objects and the copy census as methodology; the future of access to commonplace books, miscellanies, and annotated book-copies.

55. Typography and the Material Text

This seminar invites papers considering the silent commotion of typography as it generates the early modern Shakespearean playtext. What does a close looking practice, uniting bibliography with close reading, look like? Topics might include orthography; punctuation; white space; non-alphabetic and decorative features; metrical line printing; relationships between various forms of print and manuscript, ink and paper; new technologies for reading; contemporary editions and media; textual variants; cruxes.

56. Women, Performance, and the Dramatic Canon

What are the consequences of early modern women’s theatricality for the dramatic canon, early modern dramaturgy or performance practices, present-day Shakespearean performance, or theater history? Papers might explore the evidence base for female performance; theoretical or methodological approaches to performance, transnationality, feminism, and gender; connections to Continental practice. Fresh interpretations of Shakespeare plays in light of women’s theatricality (broadly defined) are also welcome.

57. Adapting Shakespeare: Contemporary Theory and Practice

This workshop seeks to attract practitioners, scholars, dramaturgs, playwrights (or any combination of those identities) for a collaborative exploration of the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare for live performance in the twenty-first century. Participants will consider the ways in which “adaptive traits”—microscopic, medium-sized, and radical interventions—may allow a Shakespearean text to flourish in new habitats, vis-à-vis particular audiences, locations, and/or historical moments.

58. Alternatives to the Term Paper

This pedagogically oriented workshop focuses on three types of classroom assignment that reflect methodologies central to the study of early modern drama: editing, performance, and contextualization through hypertext. Emphasizing the contingency and instability of drama, these approaches encourage students to engage with Shakespeare actively and with authority. Participants will build a website to develop a practical and theoretical bibliography, share successful assignments, and develop new ones.

59. Audience Engagement on the Shakespearean Stage

Audience interplay is a key element of Shakespearean performance today and a growing historical and theoretical topic for scholars. This hands-on workshop examines the nature and effects of such interplay, articulating and testing assumptions about early modern stages and audiences that inform such practices. Participants will explore possibilities for audience address in particular scenes, learn about varieties of engagement, and consider their significance for early modern actors and audiences.

60. A Digital Textbook for DH Shakespeare

Participants in this workshop will collaborate on a free, online, open-access textbook for use by those looking to make digital methods a central focus of Shakespeare and early modern literature courses. Work might include reviewing related textbooks; brainstorming about the structure, content, and aesthetic features of this textbook; drafting content for chapters; developing reading and writing assignments. The workshop welcomes those who are comfortable with digital tools and those who are new to DH.

61. Playwrights in Parts

This workshop extends research into actors’ parts in Shakespeare’s plays to the rest of early modern drama. Were playwrights with acting experience better able to manipulate parts and cues? Are there qualities of parts playing that Shakespeare did not use? Or that belong to particular playwrights or companies? Participants will be encouraged to re- divide extant plays into their parts and to test out their findings in workshop rehearsals, generating and reflecting on discoveries through practice.

62. Shakespeare by the Numbers

This workshop introduces scholars to a range of Shakespearean datasets, to techniques and best practices for interpreting data, and to digital tools to facilitate interpretation. Participants will evaluate these datasets’ suitability for answering particular kinds of research questions and write brief position papers on future research possibilities, what kinds of data ought to be collected, and ideal visualization tools. Also welcome are scholars with existing projects and datasets.