WESTWARD HO!

by THOMAS DEKKER and JOHN WEBSTER

at the award-winning

WHITE BEAR THEATRE CLUB

as part of its LOST CLASSICS programme

This is the first revival of the 1604 play.

PRESENTED BY PAPER AND STRING

DIRECTED BY ANDREA KANTOR

1st – 20th APRIL 2008

TUESDAY TO SATURDAY AT 7.30PM, SUNDAY AT 5.00PM

TICKETS £12 / £10 (concessions)

BOX OFFICE 020 7793 9193

www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk (TICKETWEB-no booking fee)

WHITE BEAR PUB

138 KENNINGTON PARK ROAD

LONDON SE11 4DJ

Beowulf to Shakespeare: Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

[this via SHAKSPER]
Call for Papers MAPACA 2008
Conference October 30-November 2, 2008
Niagra Falls, Ontario

The wealth of material found in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance continues to attract modern audiences with new works in fiction, film, and other areas, whether through adaptation or incorporation of themes and characters. This is a call for papers or panels dealing with any aspect of medieval or renaissance representation in popular culture. Topics for this area include, but are not limited to the following:

-Modern portrayals of any aspect of Arthurian legends or Shakespeare

-Modern versions or adaptations of any other Medieval or Renaissance writer

-Modern investigations of historical figures such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Richards, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scotts

-Teaching medieval and renaissance texts to modern students

-Medieval or Renaissance links to fantasy fiction, gaming, comics, video games, etc.

-The Middle Ages or Renaissance on the Internet

-Renaissance fairs

Presentations can be in the form of individual papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, or other formats, and presenters are urged to consider choosing an alternative format if it would better suit their topic.

Submit a 250 proposal including av requests by June 15, 2008 to

Diana Vecchio
dmvecchio@widener.edu

or via snail mail to the address below:

Diana M. Vecchio, M.A.
Senior Lecturer of College Writing
Widener University
One University Place
Chester, PA 19013
610/499-4536

The Death of the Book

Next Tuesday, April 1, the Columbia Early Modern Seminar is delighted to welcome Juliet Fleming (Cambridge/NYU), author of *Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England* (2001). Prof. Fleming will be speaking on "Negative Capability and the Death of the Book." The Seminar meets from 6.30 to 8pm in 411 Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University: all are welcome.

Details: Alan Stewart, ags2105@columbia.edu

Text and Image in Early Modern Society

CALL FOR PAPERS

A postgraduate conference organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies to be held at the University of Sussex, 9-11 September 2008

Plenary Speakers: Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex), Tom Healy (Birkbeck, University of London), Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle)

New extended deadline for Abstracts:
15th April 2008

Subjects: Theatre and Performance, The Bible, the Inns of Court and law, Music, Art, Printing, popular culture, court and elite culture, food and music, woman writers, politics, gender and sexuality, race and colonialism, others, rhetoric, writing lives, architecture, religion, graffiti and libels, pamphlets and broadsheets, polemic, fables, almanacs, poetry, the epic, satire, the body, erotica, witchcraft and ghosts, philosophical discourse, monsters.

Abstracts will be accepted on diverse topics and do not necessarily have to examine both ‘Text’ and ‘Image’

Costs: £35 conference fee (exclusive of accommodation)
Postgraduate Bursaries available

Abstracts of 200-300 words should be sent electronically to textandimage2008@googlemail.com

Intellectual Royalism

12 April 2008, Chetham’s Library, Manchester

Coffee

10-11

Jerome de Groot (Manchester)

Introductory remarks/ Royalist Translation

Philip Major (Birkbeck)

‘A credible omen of a more glorious event’: Sir Charles Cotterell’s translation of La Calprenède’s Cassandre

Coffee

11.15-12.15

Sean Herrera-Thomas (Redwoods, CA)

‘By thee fish die; by thee dead friends revive’: Intellectual Marriage in Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler

Jo Smith (Sheffield)

The Hermeneutics of Cosmetics: Censorship and the Body Politic in A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty (1656)

12.15-1.15

Lunch

1.15-2

Matthew Yeo (Manchester/ Chetham’s), workshop on Royalism at Chetham’s

2-3.30

Session 3

Iain McClure (Birkbeck)

John Greaves, Pyramidographia and the royalism of Ancient Egypt

Jason McElligott (Oxford)

‘A Declaration and Protestation of the Governor and Inhabitants of Virginia’: Polemic, Censorship and Trans-Atlantic Royalism

Marcus Nevitt (Sheffield)

Rationalist Poetics and Anti-Intellectualism: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant's Gondibert

Details: Dr Jerome de Groot
Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk

The Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book

The Program in Early Modern Studies at Rutgers

Invite you to a public lecture by:

Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
"Literary Drama: William Shakespeare vs. The Anonymous Thomas Tomkis"

Thursday, March 27

5:00PM

Alexander Library, Pane Room

Over the past two decades, the question of the "literary" status of
drama has remained a central preoccupation of book-historical work in
early modern studies. Were the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and their contemporaries considered merely subliterary "riff-
raff" as Thomas Bodley termed them in a letter advising his librarian
to exclude playbooks from the nascent Bodleian Library? Or did these
"plays" become "works" over the course of the early modern period? If
so, how was this transformation effected? In seeking to answer these
questions, we have left largely unexamined a logically prior
question: What exactly do we mean by "literary" drama, and how does
what we mean by that term relate to what early modern meant by it? To
begin to answer this question, this paper tells the story of two very
different publishers, Simon Waterson and his son John, who ran a shop
at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Churchyard for nearly seventy
years; and of two very different plays, Thomas Tomkis's Lingua (1607)
and Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634),
that issued from the Crown bookshop. Examining the careers of these
two stationers, their playbooks, and especially the collapse of the
Waterson shop following the death of the father and the accession of
the son, will help to illuminate the fractured and often self-
contradictory nature of "the literary" in seventeenth-century England.

AFTER ARUNDEL: RELIGIOUS WRITING IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Call for Papers

Oxford, 16th-18th April 2009

An international conference organised by the Faculty of English, University
of Oxford, in association with the Bodleian Library, marking the 600th
anniversary of the publication of Arundel's Constitutions.

* Mapping Chronologies
* The dynamics of Orthodox Reform
* Humanism & Intellectual History
* Literary Self-Consciousness & Literary History
* Discerning the Discourse: Language & Spirituality
* Heresy & its Textual Afterlife

Plenary speakers: Sarah Beckwith, Jeremy Catto, Anne Hudson, David Lawton
and Miri Rubin.

Please send 500 word abstracts by 31st May 2008 to Vincent Gillespie
, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford OX2
6QA.

EARLY MODERN READING: BOOKS, COMMUNITIES, CONVERSATIONS

[this via the LRS]
Newcastle University, 10-12 April 2008

Keynote Speakers:
Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge)
Cathy Shrank (Sheffield)
Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge)

The history of reading has experienced an explosive growth in recent
years. Scholars of early modern England have been at the forefront of
research in this area, and studies of the reading practices of a number
of notable figures, inlcuding Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson and
Sir William Drake, have appeared over the last fifteen years. Historians
have gleaned from notebooks and marginalia a model of information or
turns of phrase and applied to the life or writings of the reader or
their patron. Such work has offerned many important insights, but it has
perhaps also narrowed our understanding of the practice of reading and
its social and political import. It does not give us a model that is
flexible enough to explain the relationship between reading and the
development of 'literary' form, nor does it recognise the diverse
practical, political and social interests which reading may have served.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to extend and complicate our
understanding of early modern readers and reading practice, including
the conversations - or indeed quarrels - which follow particular texts;
the act of reading itself as dialogic; readings that 'go against the
grain'; the sense of literary writings as acts of reading; reading as
information gathering and the organization of knowledge; and textual
exchange as a form of association, or negotiation, between individuals,
communities, and cultures.

To view the programme or to register for the conference, please visit
the website:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/niassh/EarlyModernResearchGroup/conference.htm. For
further questions, contact Fred Schurink (fred.schurink@ncl.ac.uk) or
Jennifer Richards (jennifer.richards@ncl.ac.uk).

‘Facing Trauma’

London Seminar for Early Modern Visual Culture
Monday 17 March 2008 at 6 p.m.
Dr Allison Levy (UCL) will speak on ‘Facing Trauma’

The seminar will take place at UCL.
History of Art Department University College London 39-41
London WC1H 0PD
Seminar Room 3 (room 124, first floor)

THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY

The Northern Renaissance Seminar
Call for Papers
One-day Conference, Saturday 8th November 2008
Northumbria University at Newcastle

In collaboration with Lancaster University and the Northern Renaissance Seminar series, Northumbria University is pleased to invite abstracts for a one-day conference on 8th November 2008. Papers should be between 20-30 minutes.

The theme of the conference is 'The Country and The City'. A wealth of scholarship exists on this area, from (at least) Raymond Williams' seminal 1973 work, to collections such as The Country and the City Revisited (1995), and including contemporary investigations of landscapes and geographies, applications of eco-criticism, and urban (and suburban) studies.

Accordingly, contributors are encouraged to interpret this theme in broad terms, attending to 'the country' and 'the city' independently, or in conjunction. Papers might therefore consider addressing the following questions, though not exclusively:

* How were 'the country' and 'the city' constructed and defined in early modern Europe?

* How did these constructions reflect or impact upon issues of social conflict, geographical mobility, politics, religious and 'ethnic' difference, otherness, and criminality?

* How did early modern cities condition the production and consumption of cultural texts?

* How did 'the country' and 'the city' interact or conflict, materially and culturally?

* How might we re-think the politics and poetics, and the realities and representations of: the suburbs, the 'pastoral', enclosure, landscapes, and the 'country house'?

Please email abstracts of 200 words for 20-30 minute papers to Dr Adam Hansen (adam.hansen@unn.ac.uk) by 30th May 2008.

Anglo-Spanish Relations

Wednesday 12th March, 5 – 7pm

Barbara Fuchs
(University of Pennsylvania)

'Beyond the Missing Cardenio: Anglo-Spanish Relations in Early Modern Drama'

UCL, Malet Place Engineering 1.02

Details: Dr Alexander Samson, a.samson@ucl.ac.uk

Region, Religion and Early Modern Literature

[this from the LRS ...]

Call for Papers
Institute of English Studies, University of London
2 April 2009
Keynote Speakers: Tom Healy, Willy Maley

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of interest in religious texts and communities among scholars of early modern literature. While this is in part a reaction to global politics – religious politics have been in the media spotlight for the best part of the decade – the intensity of the interest also derives from more local concerns, from a professional dissatisfaction with the failure of earlier generations of historicist critics to illuminate fully the relationship between religion and literature in the early modern period.

This one-day conference aims to build on this renewed interest in early modern religion, to explore the significance of ‘regional’ religious and/or textual communities in early modern Britain and Ireland. Papers are sought which address the conference themes, although contributions will be particularly welcome which focus on any of the following: the development of sectarian identities and/or religious intolerance; the relationship between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’; the network of discourses surrounding religion, ethnicity and culture which emerge in the early modern period and/or their links with contemporary issues; the regional context of both canonical writers and lesser-known texts and communities; the political/intellectual implications of critical/historical methodology.

250-300 word proposals should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr David Coleman, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University (david.coleman@ntu.ac.uk), by 26 September 2008.

2008 Phyllis Rackin Lecture

Presented by Kim F. Hall
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies, Barnard
College
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
5:00 pm
Van Pelt Library, Sixth Floor
University of Pennsylvania

We are delighted to welcome Kim F. Hall, who will give a lecture entitled “Sweet
Princes and Dainty Kates: Sugar and Status in
Shakespeare.” This paper
examines the imaginative and material circulation of sugar and “banquetting
stuff” in Shakespeare's plays to suggest how the shift in sugar production from
the Mediterranean to the Atlantic world alters the English sense of sugar
consumption and produces a conceptual flux in which sugar becomes the gendered
ground of class distinction and social mobility.

Professor Hall has published widely on the development of Anglo-American race
thinking, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, slavery,
material culture, and Black Feminism. In particular, attention to the African
Diaspora has been key to Professor Hall’s scholarship. She argues that one
cannot truly understand the history of the modern world—or our future—without
understanding the energies unleashed by the African diaspora and the
perspectives on race, labor, globalization, human rights and migration
developed through Africana or Black Studies. Professor Hall’s first book Things
of Darkness (1996) was the first critical work to use black feminist theory to
understand early modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts
(2006) gives students access to original materials from the seventeenth century
on race, marriage and the household, the military, travel and emotions along
with the text of Shakespeare’s Othello. Her current book project, tentatively
entitled Sweet Taste of Empire, examines women, labor and race in the
Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century.
The Annual Phyllis Rackin Lecture celebrates the legacy of Professor Phyllis
Rackin, whose pioneering work has insistently asked after the place of women in
early modern literature and society, and whose presence at Penn has helped to
shape and expand the role of women in the academy. Professor Rackin is the
author of numerous articles and books on women, gender, and sexuality in the
early modern period, most recently Shakespeare and Women (Oxford, 2005).

The Phyllis Rackin Lecture is sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program and Alice
Paul Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Department of English; and the
College of Arts and Sciences.