Following the announcement by Shakespeare’s Globe of their plans to construct an Indoor Jacobean Theatre on the London Bankside, the London Shakespeare Centre invites you to a one day symposium on recent research in to the London theatres and their cultural, architectural and political contexts.

Panels include papers on repertory, audience, costume and lighting in the indoor theatres, on Inigo Jones at the Queen’s House and Somerset House, and discussion of the Globe’s Indoor Jacobean Theatre Project.

Booking is now open (£25 waged/£15 unwaged), please click on the following link

For any queries please email: London Shakespeare Centre.

DRAFT PROGRAMME
10:00 Registration and Coffee
10:30 Welcome and introduction to IJT project
10:45 Panel 1 – Indoor Playing
12:30 Panel 2 – The Queens House
13:00 Lunch
13:45 Panel 3 – Geopolitics of Playing
15:05 Panel 4 – Engineering spectacle: Inigo Jones’ past and present performance at Somerset House
15:50 Coffee break
16:20 Keynote
17:20 Panel 5 – The Indoor Jacobean Theatre Project
18:20 Closing remarks

Found at London Shakespeare Centre’s Events Page

20 January 2012

09.00 – 09.45 Registration and coffee
09.45 – 10.00 Welcome

10.00 – 11.00 Panel 1: Death and Ritual
Maggie Vinter (John Hopkins University), ‘How to do things while dying: Volpone and the ars moriendi’
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester), ‘The Performance of Bad Death: The Strange Tale of the Shoemaker of Breslau’

11.00 – 11.15 Coffee Break

11.15 – 12.15 Panel 2: Music
Liam Haydon (University of Manchester), ‘Performing Perfection: Milton and the Music of the Spheres’
Dolly MacKinnon (University of Queensland), ‘If ever beene where bels have knell’d to Church’: The performance of parish bells in early modern England

12.15 – 12.30 Break

12.30 – 1.30 Keynote Lecture
Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham),
‘Within the Castle Walls: Historical Sites as Performance at Kenilworth and Ludlow’

1.30 – 2.30 Lunch

2.30 – 3.30 Panel 3: Space
Catherine Clifford (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), ‘From Wood to Stone: Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting House, and the Performance of Architecture in Court Drama, 1581-1621’
John Peacock (University of Southampton), ‘Architectural Performance: Inigo Jones and Bernini’

3.30 – 3.45 Break

3.45 – 4.45 Panel 4: Theatre and Ritual
Alison Findlay (University of Lancaster), ‘The State of Ceremony in Macbeth’
Brian Schneider (University of Manchester), ‘Extra –dramatic’ performance in early modern Prologues, Epilogues and Inductions

4.45 – 5.00 Coffee Break

5.00 – 6.00 Keynote Lecture
Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford),
‘Bitter, Black and Tragical’: Tragic Peformance on the Shakespearean Stage
6.00 – 6.30 Drinks.

Registration: £10
Speakers and guests are invited to join us for dinner at a local restaurant; to book a place please let us know when registering (dinner not included in the registration fee).

The Society for Renaissance Studies has granted us bursaries to help postgraduate students with the costs of travel and accommodation. If you want to be considered for one of the bursaries, please let us know.

To book a place at this event please contact Michael Durrant and Naya Tsentourou by 7 January 2012.

The event will be taking place at the Seminar Room of the historic building of the John Rylands Library at Deansgate. Due to limited space, please register early to avoid disappointment.

We hope to see you there! For more details see:
historicizingperformance.wordpress.com

Autumn Term 2011
31 October
Dr Emma Barker (Open University) ‘Il n’y a point de tableau plus charmant que celui de la famille: Constructing domesticity in eighteenth-century France’

14 November
Dr Sabine Chaouche (Oxford Brooks) ‘The Business of the Comédie-Française in eighteenth-century France’.

28 November
Prof Leonhard Horowski (Berlin), ‘Le Duc de Noailles est le premier homme du monde. Dynastic thinking and the logistics of faction-building at the Court of Versailles’

12 December (Torrington Room, Room 104)
Anne Byrne (Birkbeck), ‘Three deathbeds and a funeral: the death rites of Louis XV’

Spring Term 2012
23 January
Charles Gregory, ‘The conspiracies against Cardinal Richelieu, 1636-1642′

6 February
Dr Stephen Brogan (IHR), ‘Marc Bloch and the royal touch revisited’

20 February
Dr Christelle Rabier (LSE), ‘A European Revolution of medical demand? The French case, 1600-1750′ (Provisional title)

5 March
Carmen Fraccia, title tbc

19 March
Prof Rafe Blaufarb, ‘The Politics of Noble Fiscal Privilege’

Speakers: Gerry Abalone (Tate), Adriano Aymonino (independent scholar), Susannah Brooke (Queens’ College, Cambridge), Rodrigo Cañete (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Kevin Childs (British School at Rome), Dario Donetti (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Francesco Freddolini (Getty Research Institute), Friederike Drinkuth (Stately Palaces and Gardens Mecklenburg), Meriel May Geolot (independent scholar), Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis), Marika T. Knowles (Yale University),Tobias Locker (Technische Universität, Berlin), Catherine McCormack (UCL)

Art Against the Wall is the third symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern department. The symposium will provide an occasion for established and emerging scholars to present and discuss their research together.

This one-day symposium will explore the relationship between walls and art in early modern visual culture. During the period 1550-1850 the interplay between work and wall became increasingly complex as art objects began to pull away from the walls which had previously defined them. The enduring association between artistic skill and craft production meant that many art works were often still regarded as elements in overarching decorative schemes; paintings installed in eighteenth-century English domestic interiors, for example, continue to be described as part of the ornamentation, even as the furniture, of a room. Conversely, walls now had the power to redefine art works, giving them a new meaning through a new context; thus, in late sixteenth-century debates on the status of the religious image, walls – which map the division between sacred and secular space – take on crucial importance. Yet the wall could also become art, as the numerous examples of trompe l’oeil wall illustration to be found in seventeenth-century architecture and garden design suggest. Taking as its point of departure Derrida’s insight that there can be no clear separation of ergon (work) from parergon (not-the-work, ‘wall’), the symposium will attempt to investigate the rich questions raised by the phenomenon of art against the wall.

You can download a programme here (pdf). Abstracts are available here (pdf).

Ticket/entry details: £15 (£10 students) Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art , Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Art against the Wall’ symposium. For credit card bookings call 020 7848 2785 (9.30 – 18.00, weekdays only). For further information, send an email to Research Forum Events.

Organised by: Thomas Balfe and Jocelyn Anderson (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

The event is free but booking is essential – click here to register.

Please arrive at the Octagon at 6pm for Cocktails and live Jazz Band.

The lecture will take place in ArtsTwo at 7:15pm.

‘Family Life Makes Tories of us All’: Love and Power at Home in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery, Professor of Early Modern History

To see the state in miniature one need only go home. Husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. The years after 1688 saw the acceptance of new ideas about political authority and social manners, but the household hierarchy endured regardless. ‘Family life’, it was observed in 1779, ‘makes Tories of us all… see if any Whig wishes to see the beautiful Utopian expansion of power within his own walls’.

Nevertheless, the content and meaning of domestic life was transformed over the eighteenth century. New ideals of politeness revolutionized domestic manners and interactions amongst the modestly propertied, while the vogue for sensibility in novels and paintings inflated expectations about affection and happiness at home. What then was the balance of love and power in eighteenth-century marriage and family life? And how did dependents live with the contradictions? ‘Do you not admire these lovers of liberty!’ snapped Elizabeth Montagu in 1765 ‘I am not sure that Cato did not kick his wife.’

Amanda Vickery is the author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England and The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene)
which won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman/History Today prize. She is the editor of Women, Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (The Making of Modern Freedom) and Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (Studies in British Art). In 2011, she judged the BBC Samuel Johnson prize. Her next project for BBC2 is a documentary on the readers of Jane Austen to be broadcast this autumn.

Centre for Studies of Home
The home has become an important focus of research, spanning work on the domestic sphere, including everyday life, architecture, interior design and material cultures, to the significance of home beyond the domestic, including broader ideas about dwelling, belonging, privacy and security.

Launched in February 2011, the Centre for Studies of Home is a partnership between The Geffrye Museum of the Home and Queen Mary, University of London and is directed by Alison Blunt (Professor of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London) and Eleanor John (Head of Collections and Exhibitions, Geffrye). The centre aims to create an internationally important hub of research, knowledge transfer and dissemination activities on past and present homes.

As well as its annual lecture – this year to be given by Amanda Vickery as a joint event with her inaugural lecture – the centre also convenes a seminar series on ‘Histories of Home’ at the Institute of Historical Research, postgraduate study days, and a range of workshops. Research projects affiliated with the centre include an AHRC project on ‘Living with the past at home: domestic prehabitation and inheritance’ (Catherine Nash, Principal Investigator).

Please visit: www.studiesofhome@qmul.ac.uk or email Studies of Home for further information about the centre’s activities and to join its research register.

[PS: See Bulletin, No. 18 (pp. 46-50) for a Birkbeck Early Modern Society review of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England]

Lucy Worsley (Historic Royal Palaces) and Laura Massey (Rare Books Seller, Peter Harrington Books). There are no paper titles since the session will be an informal talk about the range of possible careers that expertise in early modern studies can lead to. For more on the BBC series fronted by Lucy see: If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home.

Presented by UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges

Download (PDF, 668.93KB)

Benjamin Franklin’s support was the key to Thomas Paine’s success in America. The radical’s incendiary pamphlet Common Sense helped unify the American colonists and galvanise support for the War of Independence. During the war, Paine’s 13 Crisis Papers were similarly influential and gave America enduring phrases like ‘These are the Times that Try Mens Souls….’ This talk by researcher Paul Myles will include rare 18th century images of Paine, Lewes, and London.

Tickets: £5/£3.50 Friends and concessions
Booking: To book call +44(0)207 839 2006 or email. Or alternatively send a cheque made payable to ‘Friends of Benjamin Franklin House’ to 36 Craven Street, London WC2N 5NF.

A GEORGIAN TWELFTH NIGHT
Thursday 6th January 2011, 6-9pm

All too often in the twenty-first century early January is marked only by gloom and short-lived resolutions and Twelfth Night passes by uncelebrated. In Samuel Johnson’s day it was often the greatest occasion of the winter season.

This year there will be an evocation of a 1750s Twelfth Night at Dr Johnson’s House. Come and enjoy a glass of wine punch and a pie, listen to the fashionable music of the day, attend a read-through of the latest work by David Garrick and more. Costumes optional.

Tickets £15/£12 concessions (to include a glass of punch – cash bar thereafter).
Proceeds go to supporting educational work with local children at Dr Johnson’s House.
Places are limited and tickets must be booked in advance. You can now book tickets online (available up to 23 December), alternatively, send a cheque made payable to ‘Dr Johnson’s House Trust Ltd’ to the address at the foot of this email. Please include your contact details – we will let you know your cheque has arrived safely.

Please note: Dr Johnson’s House will be closed for the Christmas period from Friday 24 December 2010, reopening on Wednesday 4 January 2011.

The Globe’s Winter Wassail will run from 1-3 January 2011. It will feature the Gabrieli Consort & Players – many of whom are regular musicians and singers at Globe productions. Gabrieli will present a choral programme of seasonal pieces for all the family, inspired by words from Shakespeare, Hardy and Chaucer. Evoking medieval, Elizabethan and Victorian eras, Globe favourite Peter Hamilton Dyer is the guide who will present this magnificent music and poetry. Winter Wassail will be presented in two half-hour acts, giving plenty of room for ‘Wassail’ mulled wine and hot food in the interval.

Tickets for the Winter Wassail are available here: Globe Tickets. But ‘Please note: this is an open-air production. Performances continue in all but the most extreme weather conditions. Please come prepared for rain, snow, sun and hot or cold temperatures’.

The Globe has also announced its 2011 season, ‘The Word is God’ which will will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible which was completed in 1611, and the enduring power of dramatic language.

Booking for the 2011 Season is not yet open.

Priority booking will open in January, exclusively for Friends of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Public booking will open in mid-February.

The 2011 Theatre Season includes:

A cover-to-cover reading of The Bible from the Globe stage over Easter weekend, opening the season

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (small-scale tour) at Shakespeare’s Globe before touring the UK and Europe

All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare

As You Like It by William Shakespeare (small-scale tour) at Shakespeare’s Globe before touring the UK and Europe

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Anne Boleyn by Howard Brenton – a revival of the 2010 hit

The Globe Mysteries – inspired and influenced by the traditional Mystery Plays

The God of Soho – a new play by Chris Hannan – world premiere

Performance dates, casting and other company information have not yet been announced. This page will be updated when more information becomes available, and on the Globe’s e-mail list.