Out Now: Early Modern German Shakespeare

10th February 2022

English itinerant players are known to have toured in northern continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the English players learnt German, and German players joined the companies as a result of which the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. It is well established that a number of German plays now extant have a direct connection to Shakespeare. Only four of them, however, are so close in plot, character constellation and at times even language to their English originals that they can legitimately be considered versions of Shakespeare’s plays (not unlike the ‘bad quartos’): Der Bestrafte Brudermord, in English Fratricide Punished (Hamlet); Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet); Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus); and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen, in English An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). The chief aim of our research project has been to produce editions of these four plays, now published in two volumes by Arden Shakespeare. Jointly, these editions not only give us unprecedented scholarly access to the most important early German Shakespeare adaptations, but they also throw much light on the Shakespearean originals of whose performance history the German adaptations preserve important and so far understudied traces.

For more information about the editorial project and team, please visit: https://www.unige.ch/emgs

Volme 2 of Early Modern German Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew: Tito Andronico and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen in Translation, edited by Lukas Erne, Florence Hazrat, and Maria Shmygol is out now in hardback with Arden Shakespeare.

The volume is also available in Open Access and can be downloaded for free here.

Volume 1 of Early Modern German Shakespeare: Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet: Der Bestrafte Brudermord and Romio und Julieta in Translation, edited by Lukas Erne and Kareen Seidler is now available in paperback.

Header image: British Library Egerton MS 1222, Album of Franz Hartmann (1597–1617), originally digitised for the British Library’s Discovering Literature: Shakespeare project and reproduced in accordance with its reuse policy.

Call for Papers: A Special Issue of ‘Multicultural Shakespeare’ Journal

4th February 2022

The guest editors of the special issue of Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance (2022), ‘Staging Utopias: Shakespeare in Performance’ invite submissions that consider Shakespeare and utopia in performance.

Abstracts of 300-400 words should be sent to the guest editors of the special issue: Delilah Bermudez Brataas (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Magdalena Cieślak (University of Lodz) and Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik (University of Lodz).

Deadline for abstracts : April 30, 2022
Deadline for submissions of 6,000-6,500 word articles: June 15, 2022

Further Particulars from the Guest Editors

Jill Dolan writes in Utopia in Performance (2010) that theatre potentially allows for utopian performatives, i.e. those moments in the performance that open up the audience to “a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking and intersubjectively tense” (4) and “allow fleeting contact with a utopia not stabilized by its own finished perfection […] but a utopia always in process, always only partially grasped, as it disappears before us around the corners of narrative and social experience”(6). A utopian performative in this context is a moment of empowerment that gestures towards a vision of a better reality and reveals an ethical dimension of the play that has a potential transformative, if not political impact. This volume takes this proposition further, to investigate the presence of the utopian impulse in Shakespeare’s works on stage. Whether that presence emerges as the influence of classical ideal spaces, the bourgeoning potential of the new world as a utopia, or the political ideologies inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), visions of utopia appear in Shakespeare’s plays, to be further elaborated on, negotiated and modified in performance that can amplify the utopian impulse in its own utopian performative, or, alternatively, engage it in a
dystopian fashion.

We are interested in submissions that:

• address “utopian performatives” in Shakespeare in performance
• consider how Shakespeare’s works contributed to the development of utopia as a genre and/or the impact of utopian literature and criticism on Shakespeare in performance
• analyse the way in which Shakespeare’s idealized presence an international social and cultural icon influence our contemporary understanding of utopian literature
• examine the ways in which the utopian impulse has been created, staged and/or critically engaged in theatrical productions across the centuries and continents.

By bringing together critical reflection on theatre as a utopian space and the ways in which it is actively used in Shakespeare in performance the volume should chart the territory that, with the notable exception of The Tempest, still remains relatively unexplored.

This information is also available in a PDF poster format.

Andrea Smith: Radio Productions of Shakespeare’s Plays

4th February 2022

BSA member Andrea Smith offers a fascinating glimpse into her doctoral research project on radio productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

For most people, getting their fix of Shakespeare during the pandemic has meant turning to online platforms and recordings of stage productions while our theatres have been closed for long periods over the last two years. But I’ve had a different lockdown project. Listening to the 150 or so performances of Shakespeare’s plays held in the archives of BBC radio. And it’s been an extraordinary listen.

The very first production, Twelfth Night, aired just six months after the BBC began, in May 1923. Back then, they didn’t have the facility to record their plays, so everything was live and nothing but memories remain. But it turns out there are a lot of those. Using newspaper reports and personal memoirs it’s possible to piece together a pretty good idea of what it sounded like. Until now, people have generally underestimated the aims and abilities of our early broadcasters in terms of drama. But the production had a specially adapted script, professional actors and music played on a harpsichord. This was no cobbled-together, am-dram production but a serious attempt at producing a two-hour Shakespeare play in audio only. In a full-page article about the broadcast, no less a person than Dame May Whitty described it as ‘exceedingly well done’, bringing a ‘sense of colour and atmosphere’ to listeners.

Between this point and the start of the BBC’s audio archive of these plays there were around 150 more productions, many of which are well documented by critics, producers and listeners, although not always that well by the BBC itself. Many scripts remain (there’s a great selection from the 1930s and 1940s at the Shakespeare Memorial Library in the Library of Birmingham), and there is the odd audio clip, but we don’t get a full archive production until 1944 and As You Like It.

There’s no obvious reason why this production was chosen as the first to be kept for posterity, except perhaps its stars: Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave. It’s also near full-text – just seven lines are cut. But it doesn’t really show the radio drama department’s capabilities at its best. While back in 1923 efforts were made to adapt the script to make it intelligible to those who didn’t know the plot, mainly through descriptive narration, the audience were largely left to work it out for themselves here. This is probably because the credited adaptor, Herbert Farjeon, was a Shakespeare purist. He’d had a long-standing row with the BBC about how they should present the playwright, and while the head of radio drama, Val Gielgud, had insisted that the plays should be edited in the cause of ‘practical entertainment value’, Farjeon believed that they needed to be largely uncut. In this production he got his way.

There was also a world of difference between Evans’ and Redgrave’s performances. Evans was very theatrical: you can imagine her standing at the front of a stage, declaiming her lines to a massive auditorium. Whereas Redgrave was very much giving a microphone performance: relatively quiet, intimate, subtle. Producers had already recognised that this style frequently worked best on radio, but it was decades before it would be consistently adopted, with many producers still choosing to cast theatre stars in their productions, some of whom seem to have struggled to adapt to the new medium.

The audio archive is patchy from the 1940s to the 1960s, although you can still hear Donald Wolfit’s King Lear (surprisingly affecting), Twelfth Night with Jimmy Edwards and Beryl Reid as Sir Toby and Maria (Edwards is wonderfully malevolent), and an extract of Judi Dench as the female protagonist in a schools’ production of Romeo and Juliet. But the best known production from this era is John Gielgud’s Hamlet from 1948. It was his third radio performance in the role (the previous one, in 1940, overran and was cut off before most of the characters had died!) and was later hailed by one critic as ‘The best Hamlet of our time’. Anyone familiar with Gielgud’s performances will recognise his speed of delivery, verbal dexterity and slightly mannered tone, but they may also enjoy his occasional spontaneity here, such as the stifled laugh when Esmé Percy, playing Osric, ad-libs on his exit. (Although this production was recorded there was virtually no facility for editing, which means productions of this era often feel as if they were live).

Of course, 1948 was also the year of Olivier’s film of the play. Maybe that’s why the BBC chose to present Hamlet that Christmas (for nearly four-and-a-half hours on Boxing Night, including two intervals, with a repeat on New Year’s Eve). But even if that wasn’t the motivation behind it, the recording is a great opportunity to compare two of the most famous actors of their generation in probably their most famous roles. I do enjoy Olivier’s film (I think it was the first Shakespeare I ever saw) but I must admit to equally delight in Gielgud’s radio performance. Both are very much products of their time, but none the worse for that.

As we head into the 1970s, the BBC’s archive is near-complete. One of the missing plays – 1971’s Macbeth with Joss Ackland and Googie Withers – came to light at the end of 2021 in a private recording held at the British Library. Sitting in one of their little booths, listening to it, was thrilling. I was probably the first person, other than the man who made the recording, who’d heard it in 50 years. It also includes ‘what may well be the missing scene’, according to The Listener, taken from William Davenant’s Restoration adaptation of the play in which Macbeth tells Seyton: ‘The enemy’s upon our borders. Scotland’s in danger’ and goes on to talk about the ‘indisposition’ of his wife. Why producer Raymond Raikes decided to insert it, I’m not really sure, although there is a bit of a history of producers slipping bits of other Early Modern plays into their productions. The 1988 Taming of the Shrew includes scenes from The Taming of A Shrew, for example. (In radio, producers are usually also directors and frequently adaptors when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays).

Eventually, in my largely chronological trawl through the archive, I arrived at the twenty-first century, and productions I already knew and loved. Pericles (2017) starring Paapa Essiedu as the title character and Willard White as a very charismatic Gower. The joyous 2015 As You Like It, with Pippa Nixon and Luke Norris as Rosalind and Orlando (Nixon is a very far cry from Evans’ performance 70 years earlier). And the wonderful serialised productions of Hamlet (2014) and Julius Caesar (2016), produced by Marc Beeby for Radio 4. Marc sadly died at the end of 2020 and is a great loss to the field. He was also responsible for a cracking Coriolanus (2019) and a wonderfully internalised Macbeth (2015), starring Neil Dudgeon. If you want to get inside Macbeth’s head, this is a great production to listen to.

Much of the BBC archive is available via Learning on Screen’s Box of Broadcasts website, although some of the earliest recordings are still only held by the ‘Beeb’ themselves. And if you don’t have access to BoB, then you’ll find quite a few of the recent plays available for free via the BBC website if you search for them. I’d recommend you seek them out (okay, I’m biased!). I can’t promise you’ll love them all (you won’t – whoever loved every theatre production they ever saw?) but I can promise you’ll find new interpretations you won’t have heard before and some great performances that you won’t find anywhere else.

Andrea Smith

Postgraduate Researcher (University of East Anglia); Lecturer (University of Suffolk)

To read more about Andrea’s research, please visit her departmental page. Andrea tweets @AndreaUEA

Header image: Leslie Howard, who starred in CBS’s radio Much Ado About Nothing in 1937 and the BBC’s radio Hamlet (1938). Image credit: Wikimedia.

New Episode of ‘Women and Shakespeare’ Podcast: Sarah Olive on Shakespeare in Education

15th December 2021

The BSA is delighted to have sponsored this new episode of Varsha Panjwani’s ‘Women and Shakespeare’ podcast, available here: www.womenandshakespeare.com

In this episode Varsha is joined by Sarah Olive (former editor of BSA’s Teaching Shakespeare magazine), who discusses the role of Shakespeare in Education. Follow the link and tune in to learn more!

In Memoriam: Antony Sher

4th December 2021

The BSA is saddened by the death of Sir Antony Sher, whose extraordinary passion for performing has energised the Shakespearean stage, exciting us and illuminating our understanding. Our thoughts are with his husband, Greg Doran and his wide family of friends and colleagues.

Remembering Antony Sher: A Tribute by Martin White

As he matured as a Shakespearean actor, Antony Sher fused the virtuoso theatrical style – for which he was first singled out by reviewers and audiences – with what John Peter, writing of Sher’s performance as Primo Levi, described as ‘acting of the purest and most unostentatious kind, unadorned by self-pity or visible virtuosity’ (Sunday Times, 29 January, 2006). It is these qualities that defined his acting: detailed nuances of gesture and vocal tone, physical and emotional energy matched by deep focus of concentration, the sense of an actor fully inhabiting the role, drawing on a well-spring of feeling, and the confident grasp of the blurred line between the humanity and grotesquerie of life.

Antony Sher came to London from South Africa in 1968 with one ambition:  to train as an actor. His first audition was for the Central School of Speech and Drama. His audition didn’t go well, and Central turned him down, as, more brutally, did the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, their rejection letter telling him that ‘Not only have you failed this audition, and not only are we unable to contemplate auditioning you again, but we strongly urge you to seek a different career’ (Beside Myself [BM] Antony’s autobiography, 89). Refusing to be deterred, Sher was eventually accepted by the Webber-Douglas Academy, where, because he was tone deaf, he was barred from classes in singing but relished the classes in make-up, mime, improvisation and Speaking Shakespeare, where the training instilled in him two basic principles from which he never deviated:

Gradually the elements that would come to shape and define him as a Shakespearian actor were emerging: a focus on form, feeling and energy in both spoken and physical performance; an awareness of how intelligence can feed emotion and vice-versa; the exhilaration of experimentation; an appreciation of the impact and importance of his heritage; and a desire to keep learning.

Webber-Douglas taught no rigid philosophy of acting. Indeed, one of the most lasting lessons Antony learned is that the only rule in acting is that there isn’t one: each part demands its own response.  Nevertheless, he remained adamant that he would still advise any young actor to go to drama school, to ‘go and get the training, learn all they teach you and carry on learning through your career, because you will if you’re lucky’.  For him, learning-on-the-job was sustained largely by his lengthy association with the RSC where:

From his earliest Shakespearean performances such as the Fool in King Lear (first at the Liverpool Everyman in 1972, then the RSC in 1982) and Richard III (RSC, 1984) he had been defined by his ability to bring to the stage an electrifying energy, a sense of unpredictability and danger. But for some, these performances, however brilliant, remained externalised, bravura displays rather than an expression of a character’s psyche, and while not wishing to lose that sense of the sheer joy of the physicality of acting, he increasingly sought ways to combine these detailed portrayals of the ‘outside’ of a character with humanity and compassion, drawing without self-censorship on the most intimate, often self-destructive experiences from his own life to find a ‘sense memory’ in which to root the performance.

In 1999, his performances for the RSC of Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) and Macbeth, both directed by Greg Doran, marked, for many who had followed Sher’s career, significant steps forward in his growing maturity as a major Shakespearean actor. Initially reluctant to play Leontes – believing it offered him no real challenge, being only another character who ‘just keeps running round the stage shouting and snarling at people’ – he changed his mind when the suggestion was made that he should double Leontes with the comic role of Autolycus. Sher himself tracked the reasons why he resolved before rehearsals-proper got under way to play only the King, but his decision to step aside from the more flamboyant, theatrical role of Autolycus and concentrate on the emotionally damaged Leontes might perhaps reflect an unconscious desire to focus all his energies on a part that he would have to excavate to its core. Robert Smallwood wrote of the performance:

In 2009 the National Theatre mounted an exhibition of Sher’s paintings and drawings, including a number of portraits of himself and other actors in various roles. As I write this, on the wall above my desk hangs a portrait of Antony as Domitian, the leading role that he played superbly in Massinger’s The Roman Actor at the RSC in 2012. He was an extremely accomplished artist, and painting and drawing played a very significant part in the development of his roles, before and during the rehearsal period. For example, in Year of the King (significantly sub-titled ‘An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook), he traced his work on Richard III (RSC, 1984) from the earliest negotiations with the RSC through to press night, showing how he used sketches and more complete drawings to find a route to the character and give visual form to his developing thoughts, not just for his own benefit but also to share with director and designer. The first sketches, done before he had signed a contract or even knew for certain he would be offered the role, included Laurence Olivier, but gradually featured himself, though still blended with these associations:

Generally, however, the theatre’s rehearsal process and the benefit and pleasure Sher derived from it was a significant factor in his preference for stage acting over screen. For him, the rehearsal period was a mix of careful deliberation and a willingness to respond to chance. And he had a remarkably open attitude to the views of others. One of my favourite examples is of a moment in rehearsing Richard III, when one of the young boys playing the princes in the Tower suggested Antony should change a move. It is possible another actor might have been amused, perhaps affronted by this apparent breach of protocol, but recognising that the boy was right, he happily took the note. Rehearsals may also require the actor to polish up neglected skills or master new ones, and again Sher relished these challenges. When he played Tamburlaine (RSC, 1992), for example, it was decided with the director, Terry Hands, that Antony would need to learn acrobatic skills to enable him to climb a rope to a point twenty feet above the stage, and then hang upside down while delivering the speech. Antony achieved it, but ‘never stopped dreading that bloody rope. Each night as the scene approached I felt I had an appointment with fear coming up’.

I want to conclude with Antony’s own summary of the demands Shakespeare makes of the actor:

And finally, a particular personal memory. I was in the rehearsal room at the Department of Drama at Bristol, with my third-year students, when the door opened and there were Antony and Greg (who had been a student of mine decades before) politely asking whether they might join us. They were in Bristol on business and found time to visit. For the next hour they chatted happily with the students, answering all questions but asking quite a lot of their own, and generously sharing their experience before slipping away to return to Stratford. A good time was had by all.

[Much of the above is drawn from Martin White’s essay on Antony Sher in The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 2012.]

CFP for the first CIRCE CONFERENCE (June 2022): Comparative Approaches to the Study of Early Modern Theatre on Screen

17th November 2021

BSA member Víctor Huertas Martín shares the following call for papers for the inaugural conference of the CIRCE project.

About CIRCE

Early Modern Theatre, developed mainly in Spain, France, Italy, England and Portugal, has been adapted to cinema, television and, more recently, to multimedia. Since their respective inceptions, these audiovisual media have contributed to the public dissemination of the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderón de La Barca, Gil Vicente, Molière, Racine and many others. To the film productions developed at different historical junctures, we may add the television adaptations which, with greater or lesser degrees of canonicity, boosted during the twentieth century the audiovisual reception of this theatrical legacy in Europe and beyond. They did so, as films did, not only adapting the plays in their own languages but also in foreign languages. More recently, as a consequence of the development of digital technologies and streaming channels, such as live theatre, new impetus to the dissemination of early modern theatre have succeeded in enthusing audiences worldwide.

Looking into the different conventions to adapt plays to the screen during specific time periods, we observe similarities and contrasts in contemporaneous adaptations. These similarities and contrasts allow us to think of ways of organizing these adaptations as part of a holistic European tradition, however complex and dislocated such tradition may seem. For example, Pilar Miró was inspired, while directing El Perro del Hortelano (1996), not only by the Russian cinematic precedent Sobaka na Sene (dir. Yan Frid, 1978), but also by the Shakespearean adaptations made by Kenneth Branagh in the 1990s. During the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, various European public broadcasters devoted time and artistic expertise to transferring important examples of their theatrical traditions and also of foreign plays to the television screens. This helped to create a series of conventions–emphasis on naturalistic recitation faithful to the original texts; textual delivery in close-up; simplicity of sets and use of small recording places; recording routines using two or three cameras; creation of atmospheres via chiaroscuro lighting to make the most of the scarcity of technical resources, etc.–which could be found in different countries when adapting the classics. Outstanding screen directors worked on plays by authors from different traditions. For example, Antonio Román directed Shakespeare and Lope de Vega for the big screen; Pedro Amalio López directed Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and Calderón for television and, currently, Don Kent combines the screen direction of Shakespeare and Molière.

Some of the most representative works of this theatrical legacy have not appeared in the form of canonical adaptations. Rather, they are to be found in more or less diffuse forms in audiovisual adaptations which also draw on other sources to rethink the myth to which they belong. This phenomenon affects characters such as Faust, whose Marlovian source is present, albeit recast with other versions of the legend, in Faust (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1926) or in A Lesson in Faust (dir. Jan Svankmayer, 1994). This also affects legends such as that of the Alcalde de Zalamea, two of whose versions are recast in La Leyenda del Alcalde de Zalamea (dir. Mario Camus, 1975). Less evidently, this phenomenon extends to figures such as that of Inés de Castro, whose presence is widely found in the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French theatrical traditions and which was transferred to the French and Portuguese screen with the films The Dead Queen (dir. Pierre Boutron, 2009) or Pedro ê Inés (dir. António Ferreira, 2018) and the television series Pedro ê Inés (dir. João Cayatte, 2005). These examples demonstrate that the audiovisual appropriation of this theatrical legacy is a complex phenomenon that requires sustained attention from scholars of different theatrical traditions.

Inaugural CIRCE virtual conference

During these FIRST CIRCE CONFERENCES, we will address this complex theatrical legacy together. We will establish links and deep relationships between plays from different traditions transferred to the screen. We will identify trends in the adaptation of early modern European theatre in different audiovisual media, paying attention to different aspects of adaptation. Likewise, we will try to construct holistic visions on the reception of European theatre on the screen.
To this end, we will examine a large corpus of audiovisual adaptations of early modern plays, paying attention to such angles as:

•       Transposition of plays from stage to screen
•       Ideological readings of these adaptations from multiple perspectives
•       Emergence of new forms of audiovisual adaptation of theatre in times of pandemic
•       Analysis of scripts as literary adaptations of theatrical texts
•       Work of directors, performers, musicians and other members of technical casts
•       Analysis of audiovisual conventions in early modern theatre adaptation
•       Translation-based, spatial, paratextual and intertextual approaches
•       Transnational approaches
•       Gender perspectives
•       Other

Keynote Speakers

ALBA CARMONA LÁZARO (Universitet i Bergen)

A pioneer in the study of new comedy in film adaptation, particularly in Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union, she is the author of, among others, Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: un siglo en la gran pantalla (2020) and Unos clásicos… ¡de cine! El teatro del Siglo de Oro en el lienzo de plata (1914-1975) (2021), preceded by the exhibition at Casa Museo Lope de Vega of Madrid.

RAMONA WRAY (Queen’s University Belfast)

Author of Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (2004), co-author of Great Shakespeareans: Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli (2015), editor of Elizabeth Cary Arden’s The Tragedy of Mariam Early Modern Drama (2012), she is also co-editor and contributor to a voluminous number of monographs related to Shakespeare on screen.

Scientific Committe
PASCALE AEBISCHER (University of Exeter) JOSEFA BADÍA HERRERA (Universitat de València) ELENA BANDÍN FUERTES (Universidad de León) SYLVAINE BRENNETOT (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) JOSÉ CAMOES (Centro de Estudos de Teatro/Universidade de Lisboa) RUI CARVALHO HOMEM (Universidade do Porto) JUAN FRANCISCO CERDÁ MARTÍNEZ (Universidad de Murcia) PASCALE DROUET (Université de Poitiers) SEBASTIANA FADDA (Centro de Estudos de Teatro/Universidade de Lisboa) PURIFICACIÓN GARCÍA MASCARELL (Universitat de València) ROSA GARCÍA PERIAGO (Universidad de Murcia) SARAH HATCHUEL (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) ESTHER LÁZARO SANZ (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) MIGUEL MARTÍNEZ LÓPEZ (Universitat de València) JOAN OLEZA SIMÓ (Universitat de València) PEDRO JAVIER PARDO GARCÍA (Universidad de Salamanca) JUANA INÉS RODRÍGUEZ GÓMEZ (Universitat de València) JESÚS TRONCH PÉREZ (Universitat de València) NATHALIE VIENNE-GUERRIN (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) RAMONA WRAY (Queen’s University Belfast) RETO WINCKLER (Normal University of China) JUAN CARLOS HIDALGO CIUDAD (Universidad de Sevilla)

Organising Committe
ANNA MARÍA BRÍGIDO COCHARÁN (Universitat de València) ELENA CASTELLANO ORTOLA (Universitat de València) LUIS CONEJERO MAGRO (Universidad de Extremadura) ANA FERNÁNDEZ CAPARRÓS (Universitat de València) MARÍA GAVIÑA COSTERO (Universitat de València) CARMINA GRIGORI SIGNES (Universitat de València) ROCÍO GUTIÉRREZ SUMILLERA (Universidad de Granada) ARTURO MORA-RIOJA (KEA – Københavns Erhvervsakademi) VÍCTOR HUERTAS MARTÍN (Universitat de València) SILVIA HUESO FIBLA (Universitat de València) LAURA MONRÓS GASPAR (Universitat de València) RAFAEL NEGRETE PORTILLO (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) NORA RODRÍGUEZ LORO (Universidad de Salamanca) DIEGO ERNESTO PARRA SÁNCHEZ (Universitat de València) NEL DIAGO (Universitat de València)

The conference will be held online on 1-3 June 2022 at the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Communication of the University of Valencia.

Submissions

Contributors should write to Silvia Hueso-Fibla enclosing:

1.      A 300-400-word abstract explaining their proposal. We recommend the following structure: hypothesis, objectives, methodology, structure, summary of expected conclusions, bibliography (not included in word count).

2.      An auto-biography (100-200 words).

The deadline for submitting proposals is 15 January 2022. Acceptances will be communicated on 15 February 2022. The deadline for payment of the registration fee is 31 March 2022.

A selection of proposals will be included in the volume that will be published with the results of the conference.

The fee to take part in the conference will be 50 euros (established academics) or 25 euros (doctoral students or postgraduate and undergraduate students).

We hope to be able to count on you for what we believe will be an unforgettable experience.

NOTE: Papers may be submitted in any of the languages corresponding to the five European theatre traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English.

A Special Issue of Shakespeare: Call for Submissions

14th November 2021

The call for submissions for a special issue of the BSA’s Shakespeare journal is now open. More information about the journal is available here.

A Special Issue of Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare in Action’

Edited by Eleanor Rycroft and Maria Shmygol

Both a noun and a verb, ‘action’ is the product as well as the process of doing. Action—as an idea and material fact—has particular relevance for theatre, and in early modern terms might be interchangeable with the play, or acting, or the manner of performance (OED, ‘action’, n. 10, 17, 19). All of the sinners in Jonson’s Poetaster come to “applaud our Action, daily” while Hamlet advises the players to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” This special issue on ‘Shakespeare in Action’ takes a similarly multivalent approach to this concept.

Shakespeare in performance is necessarily Shakespeare in action, and we are interested to receive abstracts which consider how Shakespeare’s plays have been imagined and interpreted for film, TV, and theatre, both in-person and virtually. Likewise, we welcome submissions that consider how different types of action impact how we engage with, adapt, translate, and edit Shakespeare’s plays.

We are also interested in how the idea of action interrelates with ableism and ableist assumptions about text and performance: how do certain types of performance practices exclude, marginalise, or silence disabled performers? How have theatre-makers attempted to mitigate such exclusions or erasure? In what ways have performers liberated Shakespeare’s plays from assumptions of nondisability?

Action is also inevitably social, connecting to activities such as legal action, strike action, and social activism. In what ways has Shakespeare been ‘actioned’ in the service of social justice, critique or political change? When and where has Shakespeare been mobilised for either social justice or conservatism? How do such iterations of his works rewrite or transform their potential range of meaning?

We encourage authors to engage with a broad definition of the concept of ‘action’, whether in performance (theatre, film, radio, digital), or in text (translation, adaptation, textual editing). Papers might therefore examine:

• Shakespeare on film or TV, in performance or theatre
• Shakespeare and ‘inaction’ during the COVID-19 pandemic and opportunities/practices created by digital theatre
• Text as action: editing practices as an act of reimagining and reinterpreting text
• Intersections between performance, text, and action/activism
• Public humanities projects and performance

In bringing together papers relating to the above areas of interest this special issue of Shakespeare hopes to address the following broad questions pertaining to action:

• How does staged or filmed action complicate or challenge our understanding of the plays on the page?
• How is the notion of onstage action altered or interrogated by new practices developed for online performance during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How do actions on the stage—gestures, movement, rituals, non-verbal sequences, sport, stillness—connect or disconnect with words and bodies?
• How can Shakespeare in performance interrogate long-held, inequitable and unfair assumptions about theatrical practice?
• How might actioning different versions of Shakespeare effect change or stasis?
• In what ways and to what ends might contemporary performances resist ‘suiting the action to the word’?
• How might performance practices and editorial practices be made more equitable and inclusive?

Submission of Abstracts

We invite abstracts of c.500 words in length, which should be accompanied by a title and a short bio of up to 250 words. Submissions should be emailed directly to both Eleanor Rycroft and Maria Shmygol by 11th March 2022 (please note: this is an extended deadline in solidarity with UCU strike action).

Submission of final papers of up to 7,500 words (including notes) is provisionally scheduled to take place on 30 September 2022. Please note that all paper submissions will undergo anonymous double peer-review in keeping with the journal’s normal practices.

We especially welcome submissions from disabled scholars, LGBTQ+ scholars, scholars of colour, and early career researchers, and would be happy to provide further details, offer guidance, or discuss ideas with potential contributors.