renaissance

Conference English Literature in the World: From Manuscript to Digital (May 7-10, Lisbon, Portugal)

English Literature has been able to reinvent itself along new pathways, from the age of the manuscript to the digital era. In the last decades, the digital technology has changed the paradigms involving both the reading strategies and the analysis of literary texts: among others, the relation between writer and reader; the publication in digital platforms; “distant reading”; the exploration of the image; the abundance of information; the access to the original texts. This enormous change has originated an interdisciplinary reevaluation of many of the previous paths, as well as the launching of new focuses of reflection.

author.net

a cross-divisional conference on distributed authorship

UCLA, October 5th-6th 2018

Organizers:

Sean Gurd, Professor of Classics, University of Missouri

Francesca Martelli, Assistant Professor of Classics, UCLA

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: January 15, 2018

While his most famous crossdressing characters are women posing as men––including Rosalind from As You Like It, Twelfth Night’s Viola, and The Merchant of Venice’s Portia––William Shakespeare also twice imagines male characters posing as women: Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the page playing Christopher Sly’s wife in The Taming of the Shrew. Male characters also pass (to varying degrees) as women in works by Sidney, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, and others. But while much has been made of the “squeaking” boy actors who played women’s parts on the early modern stage, very little critical attention has been paid to male characters wearing women’s weeds in early modern literature.

Every play imagines its own world—but the worlds they imagine must in some way connect with their audience, both past and present. This panel invites perspectives on early modern English drama that considers the balance between these two poles: the imagined world of the setting and its connection to the surrounding culture in early modern England. This balance is particularly important in early modern English drama for both historical reasons—an increased awareness of other worlds and their different reality within the expanding cultural purview of the early modern English—and literary ones—since so much criticism of these plays has focused on their relation to early modern England itself to the exclusion of their frequently quite disparate settings.

2019 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Richard Burbage, a member of the family who gave us the first purpose-built theatre in Shakespeare's London. By exploring his life, and those around him, historians have been able to unearth much valuable information about the early modern theatre industry. Scholarship about other theatre people – prompted by their work, the archive, or both – has similarly added to our knowledge of the theatre in Shakespeare's time. We have learnt about the period's theatre from Philip Henslowe's diary, Anthony Munday's pageants, Richard Brome's contract, and George Wilkins' lawsuits.