Sidelights on Shakespeare Event

24th February 2015

Members in the Coventry area may be interested by this forthcoming talk from one of our trustees, Sarah Olive, as part of the Sidelights on Shakespeare series at Warwick University.

‘Certain o’er incertainty’: eliding Troilus and Cressida’s ambiguity in the Lewis episode ‘Generation of Vipers’.

Monday 9th March at 4pm in the Library at Warwick University.

R.A. Foakes argues that Troilus and Cressida opens up contradictory perspectives. The play might then appear an unusual choice for appropriation in Lewis, a detective drama drawing on the traditions of Golden Age crime fiction: particularly given the genre’s need for ultimate certainty to conquer initial ambiguity and for multiple possible meanings to give way to a single, fixed interpretation of ‘whodunit’. Yet, in appropriating the play, the episode stakes its identity as part of a richly allusive series. This article considers the history of Shakespearean appropriation in one long-running UK television franchise and the dilemmas facing its 2015 season.