Double Falsehood

Originally written by William Shakespeare & John Fletcher
Edited & adapted by Lewis Theobald (circa 1727)
Directed by Barrie Addenbrooke

In 1613 a play entitled “Cardenno” by William Shakespeare & John Fletcher was presented at the court of King James the First. It was next heard of as “The History of Cardenio” in an entry in the Stationery Register in 1653 again accredited to Shakespeare & Fletcher.

The play then disappears to resurface as “Double Falsehood” in 1727 as a premiere of a “lost play by William Shakespeare” presented by Lewis Theobald. The production was a success but subsequently it was felt that Theobald had over stated the extent of his discovery and that the piece was at best a collaboration and at worst a complete forgery by Theobald himself.

The play was lampooned, discredited and largely ignored in the 19th & 20th centuries. However in the 21st century most scholars agree that at least part of the text we have today belongs to the original Shakespeare & Fletcher work.

In 2010 The Arden Shakespeare pre-eminently valued editors of the Bard’s work published Double Falsehood, as part of their third series. This decision has bought the play back into the public consciousness and reawakened many of the debates as to its authorship.

KDC are proud & privileged to be presenting the 21st Century London premiere of this fascinating and controversial play.

THE SOURCE

Double Falsehood takes its plot from the Cardenio part of Miguel de Cervantes 1605 work The History of Don Quixote. Translated into English in 1612 by Thomas Shelton this work became an inspiration for many contemporary playwrights including Beaumont, Wilkins & Middleton.

At the Union Theatre in Southwark running between 17- 21 August 2010. Tickets are now on sale are now open and with a limited run early booking is strongly advised. Box office 0207 261 9872.

The Birkbeck Early Modern Society

AGM and ‘Restorations’ Conference
Saturday 3 July 2010, Room B20, Birkbeck, Malet St

10.00 Registration, tea and coffee in room B02

10.30 AGM

11.00 Robin Rowles: welcome to conference, introductions, opening comments

11. 10 Session 1:
Frank Ferrie, ‘ Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (The Expectant Virgin Mary): A History of Decline and Restoration’
Liam Haydon, ‘Christopher Wase and the Promise of Restoration in Royalist Translation 1649-60’
Discussion
12.40 Lunch Room B02

13.40 Session 2:

Marilyn Lewis, ‘Cambridge Platonist networks in Restoration London’

Harman Bhogal, 'The Idea of Restoration in Demonological Thought: Deacon and Walker and the Doctrine of the Cessation of Miracles.'

Discussion

15.10 Concluding remarks

15.20 Wine reception, room B02

An Elizabethan ballad opera

[this via the LRS]

THE BALLAD OF SALOMON PAVEY
An Elizabethan ballad opera by Jeremy James Taylor and David Drew-Smythe

Jeremy James Taylor, founder of the National Youth Music Theatre, has formed a new company of talented young actors and singers (aged 10 -16), who will stage the award-winning ballad opera, THE BALLAD OF SALOMON PAVEY as its first production: Performing at the Rose Theatre Kingston, during the INTERNATIONAL YOUTH ARTS FESTIVAL in July 2010.

The ballad opera was inspired by a poem by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, who wrote many plays for the boys of the Chapel Royal in the late 16th century. It tells the story of this extraordinary troupe of young players and of one boy in particular; Salomon Pavey. It uses music, songs and dances of the period and has been performed to much critical acclaim.

THE ROSE THEATRE,

Kingston upon Thames

Sunday July 4th at 6.30pm

Tickets range from £4.50 to £15.00

Director – Jeremy James Taylor;

Musical Director – Dominic Stichbury
Contact phone: 07768 778854
Website: www.theymt.org

‘The Useable Past in Seventeenth-Century England’

Saturday, 23 October 2010, University of Warwick, Wolfson Research Exchange

This interdisciplinary colloquium will showcase cutting-edge work in the field of early-modern historical culture, including the archaic, antiquity, the county and civic past, family history and the landscape.

Speakers include Ronald Hutton, Philip Baker, Jan Broadway, Fiona Youngman, Lucy Munro and Nicola Whyte.

For more information please contact the Organizer, Matthew Neufeld, at useablepast@gmail.com

THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR

AUTUMN MEETING, 2010
Saturday 16 October 2010

PRELIMINARY NOTICE

Venue: Birmingham Central Library
Date: Saturday 16 October 2010.

There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm, and from 2.00 pm
to 4.00 pm.

We currently intend that each session will have two papers, for which
proposals are invited.

Please send proposals to Thomas N. Corns no later than 15 August 2010.

Thomas N. Corns
Joint Convener
email: els009@bangor.ac.uk

Controversy, Protest, Ridicule, Laughter, 1500-1750 - 9-11 July 2010

Reading Early Modern Research Centre Conference

The annual Early Modern Conference will be held from 9 to 11 July at the University of Reading. The conference assembles an international group of scholars working in early modern studies, and this year particularly brings together scholars working on areas related to the themes of controversy, protest, ridicule, and laughter from 1500-1750.

Plenary speakers include Mary Ellen Lamb (Southern Illinois) and Ethan Shagan (Berkeley). For the conference programme and registration form, please see the EMRC website:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/english/News/deal-EMRC-Conference2010.aspx

For further information, please contact Chloe Houston, c.houston@reading.ac.uk. For accommodation and bookings, please contact Jan Cox (j.f.cox@reading.ac.uk).

'Despotism, Public Opinion and the Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy'

Prof. Julian Swann, 6.30 pm, Thursday 24 June, Malet St, Room B35, followed by Birkbeck Early Modern Society end of year party in B04

Details:

Stephen Brogan
President, Birkbeck Early Modern Society
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/current/societies/index_html/#earlymodern
http://www.emintelligencer.org.uk/

‘Use and Abuse of Public and Private Space in Medieval & Early Modern Towns’

The Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies’ Postgraduate Conference.

The conference is being held on Thursday 8th and Friday 9th July 2010, in the stunning venue of The Old Synagogue in King Street, Canterbury.

It will include a field trip, exploring the standing architecture by Dr Paul Bennett of The Canterbury Archaeological Trust, a workshop on archival documents directed by Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, and opening speech from Dr Catherine Richardson, Director of the Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies, University of Kent. The Keynote speaker will be Dr Chris King of the University of Leicester.

We will finish with a boat trip on the River Stour to look at the urban architecture from a different perspective. Postgraduate panel sessions include speakers from Europe, America and the UK covering a range of topics connected to space and transgression.

For further information please see our website http://www.kent.ac.uk/mems/research/conferences/useandabuse.html

Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge and Forms

A Conference to mark the 350th Anniversary of the Royal Society

Keynote Speakers:

Margaret Ezell (Texas A&M)

Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge)

Mark Greengrass (Sheffield)
Programme, abstracts and registration forms are available from the conference website: http://royalsociety.org/circulating-ideas/

Call for Papers – Thomas Killigrew

Contributions are invited towards the first collection of essays on Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683), with publication designed to coincide with the quarter-centenary of his birth. Despite his influence as a courtier, exile, playwright and Restoration theatre manager Killigrew remains a surprisingly understudied figure: the last book-length study was William Reich’s edition of Claricilla in 1980; and the sole biography, by Alfred Harbage, was published in 1930. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume will belatedly provide the sustained modern critical attention Killigrew’s life and work demand. Abstracts of 300 words on any historical, dramatic or artistic aspect of Killigrew should be emailed to the editor, Philip Major, by 1 October 2010. Critical appraisals of Killigrew’s lesser known plays would be particularly welcome.


Dr Philip Major
Birkbeck College, University of London
Email address: philip.major@bbk.ac.uk

Hoffman, or Hamlet without the Prince

Saturday 25 September 2010, Oxford

A day conference including a performance and a panel discussion of Henry Chettle’s play Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father. Participants include Elisabeth Dutton, Brian Gibbons, Andrew Gurr, John Jowett, George Oppitz-Trotman, Tom Rutter, and Emma Smith.

The conference will take place in the auditorium at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 10-5 on Saturday 25th September 2010. It is generously supported by the Malone Society, the Oxford English Faculty, and Magdalen College.

Registration, including lunch, is £25, with £15 registration for students. Register online at www.english.ox.ac.uk ( follow ‘Events’).

Further enquiries can be directed to Emma Smith (emma.smith@hertford.ox.ac.uk).

Civilizations in Contact

"Trade, Travellers, and Transport: Contacts Across Time and Space"
Seminar, 10-11 June 2010

The aim of this seminar is to present and discuss the ongoing research of the individual or group members of two research teams: The Civilizations in Contact project at Cambridge and the MARES project at Exeter. Both of these research projects are funded by the Golden Web Foundation.

Civilizations in Contact is a research project in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. The MARES Project is based at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.

Topics for the seminar will include: trade and movements of goods and people, the influence of trade on coastal communities, the development of ports and overland routes, pilgrims and places of pilgrimage, changes in religious identities, means of transport, trade and other objects of material culture, infrastructure and mechanisms of trade and other contact, cultural and scientific exchanges, or others of your choice.

The seminar will be held in the Fuchs House Reception Room at Wolfson College, Barton Road, University of Cambridge. Civilizations in Contact will provide lunch and dinner on the 10th and lunch on the 11th for members of the two research teams, as well as coffee and tea during the seminar.

For general inquiries, please contact Ms Anita Menon-Harding at aam47@cam.ac.uk.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Sally K Church & Dr Robert Harding
Organising Committee
Civilizations in Contact
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Cambridge
Funded by the Golden Web Foundation

Readings and Representations of the Seventeenth Century

An academic conference to be held in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, 28th-29th January, 2011

During the restoration and eighteenth century, the civil war period was
consistently represented as a traumatic break in the history of England and the
British Isles, separating the institutionally and culturally modern Augustans from
either the primitiveness or idealised simplicity of the earlier epoch. Today, much
academic practice silently repeats the period’s self-representation as a century divided
between pre and post civil war cultures, everywhere from its job descriptions to
undergraduate survey courses. Among the effects of this division of labour is a
tendency for the earlier ‘Renaissance’ decades to be privileged over the restoration,
which is now popularly regarded as a poor relation to the eighteenth century.
This conference provides a forum for researchers in all disciplines whose work
spans all or any part of the long seventeenth century. As our titular quotations
from Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Swift’s sermon ‘On the Martyrdom of
King Charles I’ suggest, we also encourage papers discussing subsequent
representations of the period in all areas of culture. Concerns include but are not
limited to:
• The comparative study of seventeenth-century writing, ideas, sciences, visual arts
and music before, during and after the civil war period; their material and
intellectual dissemination; their relationship to ideas of what constitutes the early
modern and the restoration.
• Constructions of the seventeenth century from the restoration to the present;
representations in literature, art, history and film; the cultural influence of the
seventeenth century on subsequent periods.
• The role critical theory plays in our reading of the period and/or narratives of the
long seventeenth century from within literary criticism and critical theory; e.g.
Leavis and Eliot on the Metaphysical poets, Walter Benjamin on the baroque,
Foucault on madness, Habermas on the public sphere.
• The study of non-canonical and marginalized texts and materials, and nationally
comparative readings of the period.
• The representation and reception of pre-seventeenth-century culture during the
seventeenth century; the place of the past in the period’s self representations.

Please send abstracts of 500 words by 15th October 2010 to James Smith
(Manchester) and Joel Swann (Keele): c17.conference@manchester.ac.uk. More
information will soon be available from www.chethams.org.uk.

Power and the State: Early Modern Perspectives

Birkbeck College, University of London
14 July 2010

Organisers: Dr Laura Stewart and Prof. Julian Swann

Keynote lecture: Prof. Jim Collins, Georgetown, USA

Speakers: Dr Catherine Casson (Newnham, Cambridge), Dr D’Maris Coffman (Newnham, Cambridge), Dr Daryl Dee (Wilfrid Laurier, Ontario, Canada), Prof. Joel Felix (Reading), Prof. Steve Hindle (Warwick), Prof. Marie-Laure Legay (Lille, France), Prof. Maarten Prak (Utrecht, Netherlands), Dr Hannah Smith (St Hilda’s, Oxford), Prof. Chris Storrs (Dundee).

State formation is a vibrant and contentious area of enquiry that has, in recent years, shown the merits of international and interdisciplinary collaboration. Yet the subject still has an image problem. It is often perceived by non-specialists to be an exclusive and inaccessible field that bears little relation to mainstream political, social or cultural history. Relatively abstracted concepts of fiscal, military and governmental development do not always relate easily to the specifically historical issues of political and social change. Theories of state formation based on the methodologies of the social sciences continue to be criticized for sustaining determinist narratives and imposing an anachronistic language of modernity onto past societies. The subject remains dominated by the study of a handful of large, powerful survivor states, which were unrepresentative of the several hundred diverse political entities in existence around 1600.

This conference brings together leading experts and younger researchers, who will explore how people thought about and experienced state power in early modern Europe. A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to negotiation, persuasion and legitimization – the state did not, as was once thought, simply roll over the local cultures and forms apparently blocking the path towards the modern nation-state. But have historians over-emphasised these processes of negotiation and forgotten about the essentially coercive nature of the state? The way in which historians have conceptualised the state has been heavily influenced by the putative dichotomy between two great powers, ‘constitutionalist’ England and ‘absolutist’ France. Pioneering work by historians on both sides of the Channel, some of whom are participating in this conference, have exposed this polarity as misleadingly simplistic. Specific aspects of the French and English state will be considered comparatively. However, contributions from those studying Europe’s smaller entities will provide opportunities for us to think more carefully about the way in which all states developed in relation to the existing social structures within their territorial boundaries.

All enquiries to Dr Laura Stewart: l.stewart@bbk.ac.uk

Cultures of Correspondence

A One–Day Colloquium at the Centre for Early Modern Studies

Early Modern Studies In Scotland Seminar

University of Aberdeen, 24th July 2010


Speakers:

Suzanne Trill on Women’s Letter-writing in Scotland

Alison Wiggins on Bess of Hardwick’s Correspondence

James Daybell on Early Modern Letter Books

Andrew Zurcher on Letters of the Elizabethan Secretariat

Andrew Gordon on Purloined Letters at the Elizabethan Court

Kenneth Austin on Theodore Beza’s Correspondence Networks


To reserve a place please contact a.gordon@abdn.ac.uk

Attendance £10

A limited number of postgraduate travel bursaries are available

For full programme go to www.abdn.ac.uk/emsis

‘The Blank Spaces of Early Modernity’

University of Sussex

Centre for Early Modern Studies and Society for Renaissance Studies Annual Lecture

8 June 2010

Professor Jonathan Sawday (Walter Ong Chair, Saint louis university)

Asa Briggs Lecture theatre A2

6pm

Professor Sawday will explore the curious history of gaps, absences, and lacunae in early modern writing and culture. Waste and scattered leaves of paper, blank sheets and empty space is not how we normally approach a culture so committed, rhetorically, to plenitude and copiousness but This lecture will examine the trope of emptiness – ‘the poetics of the blank’.

ALL WELCOME

Refreshments will be served