SHAKESPEARE: PUZZLES, MYSTERIES, INVESTIGATIONS 29 October 2010

Department of English, University of Chichester

1pm (Mitre Lecture Theatre) Welcome

1.15pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Somerville, Oxford), ‘Two Hobbies and a Purge: three Shakespearian puzzles'.

2.15pm Twenty Minute Papers

Panel A: Room E124

Nick de Somogyi ‘"Shakespeare and the Three Bears"

This paper seeks to correct a pervasive misunderstanding about the identity of one (or two) of Shakespeare's celebrity contemporaries.

Dr. Annaliese Connolly (Sheffield Hallam), ‘Guy of Warwick, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Elizabethan Repertory’. (20 mins)

This paper argues the play is a product of the 1590s and situates The Tragical History in the context of the repertorial strategies employed by companies such as the Admirals’ Men involving foreign wars and character types such as Turkish Sultans.

Patrick Ashby (Bristol) ‘Othello and the invisible Turk’ (20 mins)

The paper suggests that the Venetian sense of collective identity, as depicted in this play, is based largely upon oppositional values, and that this opposition is paradigmatically illustrated in the city-state’s antagonistic relationship with the Ottoman Levant.

Panel B: Cloisters Chamber

Dr. John Lyon (Bristol) ‘Fat Ladies Never Sing: Henry James and the endless Tempest’

There are Shakespearean puzzles and mysteries. Why do readers, critics and editors make fools of themselves in trying to solve them?

Dr. Edward Chaney (Southampton Solent) ‘Shakespeare and Egypt’

The French were far ahead of the English in their interest in obelisks, but their scale and emphasis in England seems to have been inspired by Sixtus V’s projects.

Dr. Ann Kaegi (Hull) ‘Nicks, Cuts, and Henry V’

In this paper I examine the extent to which landmark productions of Henry V, from the Vietnam War to the present day, have continued to cut the play in a manner that suppresses the alignment between sexual and martial discourses (nicks and cuts) within the long Folio version.

3.15pm Tea, coffee and biscuits

3.30pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Tiffany Stern (University College, Oxford)

‘A New Shakespeare Play? The Story of Cardenio’s Double Falsehood’.

Lewis Theobald's eighteenth-century play The Double Falsehood has recently been heralded as a Shakespeare play in disguise. Inside it are said to be fragments of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. But is this true? Did Theobald have any Shakespeare manuscripts? And was there a Shakespeare play called Cardenio in the first place?

4.30pm Buffet Tea

5.30pm Twenty Minute Papers

Panel C: Room E124

Prof. Simon Barker (Gloucestershire) Shakespeare at ‘HK’: 1939 – 1945

This paper will describe this wartime context for the short seasons of plays staged at the Memorial Theatre, in order to show how the war years irreversibly transformed the relationship between Stratford and Shakespeare.

Dr. Paul Quinn (Chichester/Sussex) ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’: How L. C. Knights asked the right question for the wrong reason.

By constructing a text that turns on the violent deaths of fathers and children, Shakespeare positions his play within the polemical matrix spawned by James I within days of the discovery of Fawkes in the cellars under Parliament.

Dr. Cathy Parsons (Sussex) ‘Gods and Monsters’: The search for religious and national identity in Cymbeline

The use of conventional early-modern anti-Papist tropes of Roman Catholic depravity and evil are set against the construction of innate but endangered Protestant virtue in such a way as to subtly manifest Shakespeare’s unease with James I’s political and religious policies, and the danger to national safety and wellbeing from his seemingly pro-Papist stance.

Panel D: Cloisters Chamber

Barbara Kennedy (Sussex) ‘The belching whale and humming water: efficacious music in Pericles’

As an emblematic symbol of the entire universe, the musical references in Pericles have a thaumaturgic value: music has the power to work marvels or miracles evident in the revival of Thaisa and the healing of Pericles.

Dr. Julie Sutherland (British Columbia/Durham University) Shakespeare’s “Bromance” – Hollywood and Homosociability in Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet.

This paper proposes to trace filmic representations of homosociability in Shakespearean drama in an effort to understand how far we have (or have not) come in our understanding of male-male love.

Dr. Duncan Salkeld (Chichester) Shakespeare, the Clerkenwell madam and Rose Flower

This paper elucidates details in the 1594 Gesta Grayorum entertainment that point towards Shakespeare’s acquaintance with a prostitute, Lucy Negro, alleged to have been the ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets.

6.45 pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondson [Title TBC]

8pm Close

Conference Fee: £25 (Concessions, £15)
To register, contact Lorna Sargent, Administrator,
Department of English, University of Chichester,
College Lane, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6PE,
email: l.sargent@chi.ac.uk, telephone 01243 816163
or Duncan Salkeld at d.salkeld@chi.ac.uk,
or 01243 816184