CFP: Nude Shakespeare: Canonicity, Corporality, Performance

“Off, off, you lendings!” (King Lear, 3.4.102). It’s 1968–the “Summer of Love” has set the cultural scene—and in cinemas around the world, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet are getting naked in front of shocked and delighted viewers. Shakespeareans tend to treat the nude scene in this film as an oddity, but this collection takes the instance as a starting point for an alternative performance tradition that includes Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version of Much Ado About Nothing, an all-nude 2007 production of Macbeth at the Clark Street Playhouse in Washington, DC, and numerous instances of nudity or semi-nudity in Shakespeare-inspired films. Nude Shakespeare seeks to examine the ideological implications of the unclothed or partially clothed body in film and on the stage. How does nudity function dramatically or ideologically? How or why does it affect theatre-goers’ experience of the play? Does it function as a needless distraction from the action of the drama? Are clothes necessary in order for the identities of the characters to be maintained, as one critic suggested in a review of the all-nude production of Macbeth?

Please submit 250 word abstracts with a brief biographical sketch by December 1, 2026 to W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. at wrampone@scsu.edu and celia.caputi@fsu.edu