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Shakespeare: From Rowe to Shapiro Symposium
By Karen | 24 November 2009
Shakespeare: From Rowe to Shapiro Symposium
Saturday, 28 November, 2009
Globe Education
‘Some little account of the man himself may not be thought improper’
Nicholas Rowe, 1709
A one day symposium on the function and critical value of Shakespeare biographies to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first biography of William Shakespeare by Nicholas Rowe.
Stanley Wells & Paul Edmondson – The Plurality of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson will argue that we should celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Sonnets by committing an act of critical literary murder by killing off ‘The Dark Lady’ and ‘The Young Man’ in order to set the Sonnets free.
Michael Caines – Can you trust Nicholas Rowe?
Over the past 300 years, Shakespeare biographers have distinguished themselves from one another, or claimed intellectual kinship, by the way they have treated the first Shakespeare biography, Nicholas Rowe’s. Is this a repository of information to be treated with great caution, and raided only for the occasional dubious anecdote? Or is it, as René Weis has argued, a largely reliable source that there is no good reason to doubt?
Brian Cummings – Anti-Biography
Andrew Dickson – Starring Shakespeare As Himself: snapshots of the author on stage, page and screen
Alongside straightforward biographies of Shakespeare, it’s easy to neglect the rich, sometimes bizarre, tradition of fictional treatments in which the poet makes an appearance – from poems by Kipling to Anthony Burgess’s plans for a musical based on his novel Nothing Like the Sun. This talk plots an alternative course through Shakespeare’s life, from inquisitive boyhood to incipient senility, using seven key texts, and suggests that the boundaries between fact and fiction aren’t always as solid as we might like to believe.
Helen Hackett – Was Queen Elizabeth I Shakespeare’s muse?
Theories about young William at Kenilworth in 1575. This paper will chart the surprising history of the theory that Shakespeare gained his first dramatic inspiration from seeing Elizabeth I at the Earl of Leicester’s Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth in 1575, when young William was 11 years old. The theory has dubious origins in a misreading of a work of fiction, yet has attracted support from scholars across two centuries. Is Oberon’s vision of the ‘fair vestal throned by the West’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a reminiscence of this formative experience? Or do such readings just feed our persistent fantasy of a magical encounter between the Queen and the playwright?
Graham Holderness – Fact and Tradition in Shakespearean Biography
Graham Holderness looks at the ubiquity and persistence, in Rowe and in early biographical traditions, of material linking Shakespeare’s life with animals, and with various crafts, trades and activities concerning livestock, including butchery, tanning, poaching deer and holding horses at the theatre door. Holderness suggests some new ways of distinguishing between ‘fact’ and ‘tradition’ in the construction of literary biography.
Andrew Murphy – Chronology Meets Biography: Edward Dowden’s Shakespeare
With the work of the New Shakspere Society the late nineteenth century witnessed a considerable revival of interest in the chronological ordering of Shakespeare’s plays. Edward Dowden, while being properly sceptical of the wilder excesses of some of this work, was heavily influenced by many of the findings advanced by the New Shakspereans. His seminal study Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and His Art (1875) and his later, condensed, Shakespeare Primer (1877) seek to read the playwright biographically by studying the works chronologically. This paper will chart the emergence and ongoing implications of Dowden’s project.
Rene Weis – From John Hall to Nicholas Rowe
This paper will look again at Shakespeare’s afterlife in seventeenth century Stratford. There are potentially rich seams here that biographers, with the exception of Rowe, have ignored at their peril. Elizabeth Hall may yet hold the key to new information about Shakespeare.
Richard Wilson – Welsh Roots: The Bard and the Brits
‘We have the man Shakespeare with us’: Lady Mary Herbert’s reported boast to her son William, third Earl of Pembroke, roots the dramatist firmly within the Welsh cultural politics that might have shaped his professional career. But it also grounds the radical correction they make to traditional criticism: that throughout his work Shakespeare identifies Wales not with the uprooted or dispossessed, dominated and despised by ‘English’ colonialism, but with the dominators and possessors, as itself the root of colonial power. From a post-devolution Welsh perspective, according to Terence Hawkes, a Shakespeare play is itself ‘the ailment’ it ‘helps us to diagnose,’ so culpably is the text to be associated with the Anglo-Saxon imperium that culminates in the Pax Americana. But Shakespeare’s resistance to his Welsh patrons suggests the opposite possibility: that the plays themselves offer the best deconstruction of the ‘British’ World Order that they have been made to represent.
James Shapiro - When Shakespeare Turned Autobiographical
James Shapiro will trace a direct line from Malone to the present moment and argue that Shakespeare biographies went badly off course in 1780, when Malone turned Shakespeare into an autobiographical writer.
10am to 6pm
Nancy Knowles Lecture Theatre
Tickets
£60 (£50 FoSG/concs,£20 students)
Tickets can be obtained from the Globe Online Box Office
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