Late Shakespeare: Texts and Afterlives

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888).

We are pleased to announce that a two-day conference on "Late Shakespeare: Texts and Afterlives" will take place in Trinity College Dublin on December 5th & 6th interrogating things recent, late, and belated in the study of Shakespeare. The conference is kindly supported by the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. We are delighted to announce that the plenary speaker for this event is Professor Michael Hattaway.

Many of the later quarto texts of Shakespeare's plays boast that they are copies of plays 'latelie Acted'. This conference proposes to investigate things recent, late, and belated in the work of Shakespeare. On one level the conference promotes new writing in the field of Shakespeare studies with the papers themselves being lately written. The conference also encourages an investigation of what it means for a work to be late, what happens to a text once the writing is finished, and what implications there are for an author who is writing late in his career or even who is 'late' (i.e. who is published posthumously).

To that end, the conference organisers would welcome papers that include, but are not limited to, the following themes: The writing process; 'late' trends/events that influence a text or its production; late-authorship; the relationship between the author and the text after the writing is finished; textual ephemera, marginalia, or dedication; authorship and death; bardolatry; issues of time, decay, or time-keeping in texts; the afterlife of the text; representations of the afterlife in a text; lost, forgotten, or neglected texts; performance/textual history.

Papers should be no longer than 20mins in length. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit a 100 word abstract to Dr. Andrew J. Power & Mr. Rory V. Loughnane at lateshakespeare@gmail.com before November 3rd 2008. More information on the conference is available at http://lateshakespeare.blogspot.com/