Dr. Justin Clemens from the University of Melbourne will be speaking on ‘Symptoms of the New Science in Paradise Lost’ on Wednesday, 30 July, at 1.00 in MR1 in Queen’s Building, University of Exeter. All are cordially invited to attend.
SCAENA Conference 2008 (Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Performance and Adaptation) will take place next week, 18-20 July, at Anglia Ruskin University. Full details and programme are available on the conference website.
Keynote papers will be given by Catherine Belsey, Judith Buchanan, Peter Holland, Ann Thompson and Stanley Wells.
Pascale Aebischer (English, Exeter) will give a paper entitled: ‘”John Webster: Do we have a chance to interview him later on?”: Mike Figgis’ Hotel (2001) and the Preposterous Aesthetic of the Contemporary Jacobean Film’
Michael Mangan (Drama, Exeter) will be speaking on ‘Poaching from the poacher: Shakespeare, adaptation and pedagogy’.
The Department of English at the University of Exeter has advertised a 22-month Teaching Fellowship in the field of Renaissance Literature, to replace two members of staff in their successive periods of Leverhulme-funded research leave. The closing date for applications is 17 July. See the full job advertisement here.
Islands of Thought
Cardiff University, 10th October 2008
Cardiff University’s Renaissance Seminar is holding a postgraduate one-day conference to discuss island thought as a textual, historical, physical and metaphorical construct. The conference seeks to form some bridges or trade routes between different postgraduate research areas to better understand our own islands of thought on early-modern times. The plenary speakers will include Dr Richard Sugg (Durham University) and Dr Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University).
Postgraduate students - from any discipline - are encouraged to give 20-minute papers, and abstracts of about 300 words can be sent to islandsofthought@cf.ac.uk before JULY 31st.
Topics exploring the early-modern era might include, but are not restricted to:
- Island identities and the British Isles
- Institutions as islands
- Visualising communities
- Islands in political and national discourse
- Welsh islands, or Wales as an island
- Ireland
- Legal islands
- Schools of thought, sects and denominations
- Mapping bodies, minds and the globe
- Exile
- Metaphoric, metaphysical and textual islands
- Holy islands, island chains and treasure islands
- Lost, imaginary and phantom islands
Richard III reigns in the southwest this summer. Not only will the Renaissance Reading Group be discussing the play next week — Exeter’s Northcott Theatre will be performing Richard III in the grounds of Rougemont Castle, 17 July-9 August. Shakespeare in the wooded moat of the ruined fortress has become an established and well-loved tradition. This year’s production will be worth attending, if only for the resonant passage in which Richard recalls his visit to the very spot:
When last I was at Exeter,
The mayor in courtesy show’d me the castle,
And call’d it Rougemont: at which name I started,
Because a bard of Ireland told me once
I should not live long after I saw Richmond….
The next best thing to seeing Hamlet done at Elsinore. Cymbeline at Milford Haven. Or The Merry Wives of Windsor at, um, Windsor….
The production will have its premiere at the Ludlow Festival, before moving on to Rougemont. Curiously enough, Richard III also contains several references to Ludlow, where Edward, Prince of Wales is resident before his fatal transfer to the Tower of London.
‘Towards Ludlow then, for we’ll not stay behind!’
The next meeting of the Exeter Renaissance Reading Group will take place on Thursday 26th June, in the Queen’s Building SCR (1-2pm). Following popular demand, the group will be discussing Shakespeare’s Richard III. All are welcome to attend.
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer….
The programme for the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference - aka Britgrad 2008 - is now online. The conference will take place 19-21 June at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-on-Avon.
Speakers at the conference include Briony Frost (Exeter), whose paper is entitled “‘To th’monument’: Shakespeare’s Stage and James I - a player king?”, and Jem Bellamy (Exeter), speaking on “The Printer and the Princess: The First Editions of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and the Spanish Match.”
An interdisciplinary symposium to be held at the University of Bristol on 5-7 December 2008
Directors
Dr Tatiana String, Department of History of Art, Tel: +44 (0)117 954 6066
Dr Marcus Bull, Department of Historical Studies, Tel.+44 (0)117 928 8879
Objectives
This three-day symposium to be held at the University of Bristol will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the ways in which the Tudor period, its monarchs (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I), its artistic expressions, and its cultural heroes (for example, Holbein, Shakespeare, and Byrd) have been appropriated by later generations. Its focus is thus ‘Tudorism’, which may be defined as the modern reception of the history, literature, art, architecture, design and music of the Tudor age. The modern cultural imagination has often derived a substantial, sometimes even predominant, portion of its ideas and images of the past from the sixteenth century, inspiring architects, artists, designers, musicians and writers. Tudorism is a topic with enormous potential for fertile inter- and cross-disciplinary exchange, and the symposium will be the first forum for the study of this remarkable phenomenon, its express purpose being to set the agenda for future research. The timing of the event anticipates the quincentenary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne in April 1509. There will undoubtedly be numerous types of commemorations of the anniversary across the UK, but this timely symposium will concentrate on the long-term impact of this monarch and his family.
The BBC reports from the Church of Holy Trinity, Stratford, that plans are once again afoot to move Shakespeare’s grave … or rather … not to move it.
What makes the Shakespeare’s-Grave-Staying-Right-Where-It-Is story interesting, of course, is the possible impact on planning decisions of the curse inscribed on the playwright’s slab:
Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones
Was Shakespeare the author of his own epitaph? Is there a link between these words and the anxieties over exhumation and the mistreatment of corpses found in so many of his plays?
Shakespearean biographies and editions often skirt the question of authorship by asserting that the epitaph is conventional and formulaic — something that any local versifier could have composed. Yet no one seems to have been able to produce a remotely similar tomb inscription in support of the claim that Shakespeare’s is conventional.
Perhaps, then, it is time for the first Cuppe of Newes Challenge. Can anyone supply an English tomb inscription from 50 years either side of Shakespeare’s death which resembles the one in Holy Trinity Stratford? Can anyone find an inscription which:
1) makes no reference to the soul of the deceased but dwells entirely on the fate of his physical remains;
2) contains the threat of a curse, not against vandals or church-robbers, but against a church official (the sexton) in pursuit of his normal duties?
Either of the above would be interesting. Both together will result in some sort of prize. Answers in the comments section below!
The next meeting of Exeter’s Renaissance Reading Group will be held on Thursday, 5th June at 1pm in the Queen’s Building SCR.
Following on from the last meeting, the Group will be discussing cantos 3 and 4 of Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche. Copies will shortly be available from outside Karen Edwards’ office in Queen’s (the text is also accessible through EEBO).
UPDATE: Not only will copies (actual, photocopied, stapled copies) of Cantos 3 and 4 be available outside Karen’s office. So, too, will copies of Cantos 1 and 2 for those who wish to do a little catching up with Beaumont.
